As more investors adopt to enter the field of blockchain investment, the Ponzi scheme, a traditional investment scam, has emerged as a hidden fraud in smart contracts. Although some proposed solutions have paid attention to detecting Ponzi schemes in the blockchain, two problems remain: features for detecting Ponzi schemes are incomplete, and algorithms for detecting Ponzi schemes are not sufficiently efficient. Therefore, we innovatively extract the bytecode feature and combine it with user transaction and opcode frequencies to get more comprehensive features. With these features, we propose a smart contract Ponzi scheme identification method based on the improved LightGBM algorithm. Experiments conducted on the real data set of Ethereum prove that our proposed method has improved accuracy dramatically in terms of the$F$-score index and the AUC index compared with the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, model training speed is improved significantly. Therefore, our method more accurately identifies Ponzi schemes in smart contracts, thus reducing investment risk.
Forensic Science includes scientific methods to find out the actual cause of a crime and to bring justice to the victims. Forensic reports incorporate information regarding different crimes. These details are considered as extremely valuable and confidential as it helps the law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to ensure punishment to the blameworthy persons. These reports require security only to restrict access to the authorized persons. Blockchain stores every transaction occurring in the system and these transactions cannot be removed or modified because of their immutability. In this work, Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) and Hyperledger based private blockchain are assembled to implement a secure forensic information storing system. Our system enables the tracing of any illegitimate en-trance or data tempering by the intruders. Our proposed hybrid approach surpasses the classical public blockchain systems i.e. Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of transaction processing time achieving an average of 11.99 seconds per transaction. This system also facilitates the storing of heavyweight features which is not possible inside the existing blockchain frameworks.
T.S.Raja Rajeswari, Sk. Khaja Shareef, Sameer Khan, N Venkatesh · 6 authors
Every year a lot of students graduate from the universities due to which a huge number of certificates are generated. The problem arises when it comes to authenticate these certificates. At present there is no such mechanism to validate the certificates. Hence, a lot of certificates are forged every year and are being used to fulfill their job requirements. To overcome this problem a decentralized web application is built that registers the certificate on ethereum blockchain and a smart contract to validate the certificates on blockchain. Once the data is entered by the user the details of certificates are pushed on ethereum blockchain using hashing. Using this generated hash we can verify the authenticity of the user.
Echidna is a widely used fuzzer for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchain smart contracts that generates transaction sequences of calls to smart contracts. While Echidna is an essentially single-threaded tool, it is possible for multiple Echidna processes to communicate by use of a shared transaction sequence corpus. Echidna provides a very large variety of configuration options, since each smart contract may be best-tested by a non-default configuration, and different faults or coverage targets within a single contract may also have differing ideal configurations. This paper presents echidna-parade, a tool that provides pushbutton multicore fuzzing using Echidna as an underlying fuzzing engine, and automatically provides sophisticated diversification of configurations. Even without using multiple cores, echidna-parade can improve the effectiveness of fuzzing with Echidna, due to the advantages provided by multiple types of test configuration diversity. Using echidna-parade with multiple cores can produce significantly better results than Echidna, in less time.
This study examines the volatility of nine leading cryptocurrencies by market capitalizationâBitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Stellar, Litecoin, TRON, Cardano, and IOTA-by using a Bayesian Stochastic Volatility (SV) model and several GARCH models. We find that when we deal with extremely volatile financial data, such as cryptocurrencies, the SV model performs better than the GARCH family models. Moreover, the forecasting errors of the SV model, compared with the GARCH models, tend to be more accurate as forecast time horizons are longer. This deepens our insight into volatility forecast models in the complex market of cryptocurrencies.
ERC-20 is the most prominent Ethereum standard for fungible tokens. Tokens implementing the ERC-20 interface can interoperate with a large number of already deployed internet-based services and Ethereum-based smart contracts. In recent years, security vulnerabilities in ERC-20 have received special attention due to their widespread use and increased value. We systemize these vulnerabilities and their applicability to ERC-20 tokens, which has not been done before. Next, we use our domain expertise to provide a new implementation of the ERC-20 interface that is freely available in Vyper and Solidity, and has enhanced security properties and stronger compliance with best practices compared to the sole surviving reference implementation (from OpenZeppelin) in the ERC-20 specification. Finally, we use our implementation to study the effectiveness of seven static analysis tools, designed for general smart contracts, for identifying ERC-20 specific vulnerabilities. We find large inconsistencies across the tools and a high number of false positives which shows there is room for further improvement of these tools.
Jian Liu, Peilun Li, Raymond Cheng, N. Asokan · 5 authors
Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It distinguishes between consensus nodes and execution nodes: different groups of execution nodes can execute transactions in parallel; meanwhile, consensus nodes can asynchronously order transactions and process execution results. Moreover, it requires no coordination among execution nodes and can effectively prevent livelocks. We show two ways of applying this paradigm to blockchains. First, we show how we can make Ethereum support parallel and asynchronous contract execution \emph{without hard-forks}. Then, we propose a new public, permissionless blockchain. Our benchmark shows that, with a fast consensus layer, it can provide a high throughput even for complex transactions like Cryptokitties gene mixing. It can also protect simple transactions from being starved by complex transactions.
V Valko, Sergii Stirenko, Ihor Babarykin, Yuri Gordienko
In this article we provide a general framework using Ethereum smart contracts to track back the provenance and evolution of deep learning content (DLC) to its original source even if the DLC was edited (e.g. DL models were retrained or/and datasets were updated) by anonymous authors. The main principle behind the solution is that if the DLC can be credibly traced to a trusted or reputable source, the DLC can then be real and authentic. The solution is proposed in the healthcare context and for medical DLC, especially for federated machine learning, but it can be applied to any other form of DLC.
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
The traditional way of selling and buying land has lots of problems exists as its takes time, the verification process is lengthy and final processing is also time-consuming. With the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the records are converted from file to digital. Still, there are several challenges are there to make the land management system effective and trustworthy. During the buying or selling process, different middlemen exist at various levels which makes the process complex and risky. There is a chance of duplication or forge of digital documents by the fraudulent person. To eliminate the above challenges in this paper Blockchain-based approach is applied to make the land record management system secure. The paper initially described the overall challenges that exist in the land record system in the India scenario. The authors in this paper proposed a Secure distributed architecture for land record management. Ethereum platform is used for the implementation of the land record digitization. The results analysis show that the system becomes faster, transparent, records are immutable by the use of Blockchain technology.
The past few years have seen a spate of cyber attacks targeting multinational companies, governments, institutions and even individuals' data. Most of these attacks target the vulnerabilities of the centralized system of data storage, emphasizing that a novel approach to data storage must be developed to tackle long-standing issues with centralized systems. Blockchain technology - a decentralized ledger based system provides a viable alternative to many of these issues. The objective of this paper was to develop and test a decentralized document storage system using a private Blockchain network, Ethereum coins and the InterPlanetary File System(IPFS). Interim results suggested that the proposed solution can be implemented at scale for certain use cases including confidential documents of both private and public entities.
IoT devices do not possess the potential to protect themselves from risk of the attackers as they are resource-constrained. Blockchain is arising as a decentralized and distributed technology with proficiency in delivering secure management, access control and user authentication for protecting data and services of IoT devices, guaranteeing integrity, confidentiality and availability. IoT-based healthcare applications has many benefits like reduced cost of healthcare, improved quality, remote monitoring of patients etc. Ensuring a robust and secure interactions between patient and healthcare providers is very important to protect sensitive medical data. A distributed and reliable user authentication and access control scheme to be used in IoT based Healthcare is designed and implemented here with the help of local gateways directly interfaced to smart contract based Ethereum Blockchain. The local gateways can manage multiple local IoT devices and improve scalability. This reduces the overhead of performing resource-consuming authentication tasks and blockchain-communication at the IoT devices. To exhibit the working of the framework, a case study is presented with two laptops and a Raspberry Pi.
Educational certificate verification is the process of checking and verifying the certificate legitimacy of graduate students. It is a costly, lengthy, and time-consuming procedure as university authorities invest millions of dollars in maintaining the entire process each year. The employer also takes plenty of time to verify the authenticity of the applicant's certificate. The current certification system provides traditional certificates to the candidates. That's why certificates can be tampered with and lost at any time. Moreover, counterfeiting the certificates by scammers and issued by many illegal institutions makes the process hazardous. People frequently lie about their degrees and qualifications by counterfeiting certificates. A fake certificate generated by skillful scammers is always tough to identify and address as the original one. Therefore, there is a crucial need to upgrade the certification and verification process. This paper introduced a Blockchain-based decentralized DIUcerts platform that offers an easy way to issue, check, and verify educational certificates. Additionally, in DIUcerts, data doesn't have to be stored in one place as each certificate's information is kept in an individual file; entire issuance and verifications are done through the Ethereum platform. With this infrastructure, the cost of maintaining a Blockchain-based certificate verification system could be highly minimized as compared to building a similar application on a centralized database. As a result, DIUcerts can lead to better security, cost savings, and a time-saving platform for educational certificate verification.
Though Blockchain technologies make traditional authoritarianism less likely, they make a new kind of authoritarianism, born of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), more likely. Created to liberate computational systems from any and all human interference, DAOs have quietly been growing, thriving, and evolving in their natural environment - decentralized networks like the Internet or Ethereum. By design and accident, DAOs will tend to develop into the computational equivalents of eusocial colony animals such as ants, bees, and termites. Once formed into such superorganisms, DAOs will exhibit emergent behaviors like swarming and collective intelligence. Humans venturing into the DAOsâ native habitat would then find themselves forced to live under the arbitrary will of not another human, but instead of a vast, mysterious hoard of nonhuman, and perhaps inhuman, entities. This is not an outcome that traditional sources of public law - treaties, statutes, regulations, and court rulings - have the tools to prevent. The distributed nature of DAOs makes them inherently resistant to centrally planned attacks. To prevent DAO's from running wild will instead require correspondingly distributed defenses, taken by many various parties alone and coordination, that together render the Blockchain environment less susceptible to infection by programs that threaten to evolve into digital autonomous authoritarians.
Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a promising paradigm of large-scale sensing. A group of mobile users is recruited with their smart devices to accomplish various sensing tasks in specific areas. The mobility and intelligence of mobile users enable MCS to achieve a sufficient coverage ratio of sensing tasks or areas. Currently, MCS is generally proposed and implemented in a centralized way under a platformâs control. However, this centralized structure is vulnerable to a single point of failure. The platformâs failure leads to a shutdown of the entire system. In addition, there is a trust issue between the platform and mobile users because of computational transparency and financial security. It is possible that the platform manipulates the working process of MCS to obtain an improper gain. To overcome these problems, we propose a decentralized MCS framework, named ChainSensing, by leveraging blockchain. In ChainSensing, mobile users interact with blockchain via smart contracts to complete their operations, e.g., publishing sensing tasks and submitting collected data. Since there are computationally intensive problems in ChainSensing, e.g., path planning, path selection, and reward determination, it is significantly expensive to solve such problems in blockchain. Therefore, we propose to leverage smart devices and computing oracles to solve these problems. Specifically, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the path planning problem in smart devices of mobile users; we employ computing oracles to solve the path selection and reward determination problems. Finally, we conduct numerical simulations based on Ethereum to evaluate the performance of ChainSensing.
Mohd Anuar Mat Isa, Muzaffar Hamzah, Daimler Benz Alebaba
A variety of mobile devices and applications have spread the usability of blockchain solutions to over 5.27 billion unique mobile phone users. The rising of Bitcoin price up to USD 50,000 in March 2021 has made many blockchain mobile wallets and smart contracts DApps popular for current and future investment of cryptocurrency and digital-asset managements. To understand the trend, this chapter will present the design and implementation of mobile blockchain DApps using Android Studio together with Ethereum smart contract as the digital-asset management tool. Java Android and Ethereum Web3-Java APIs will be demonstrated as a practical deployment of the mobile DApps. The logic and decision-making of the mobile DApps will be demonstrated and coded as a smart contract. The source codes of the mobile DApps and smart-contract were published in Github as open-source codes for those who are interested to build and run the project.
The days, the usage of E-commerce applications in the distributed network has been increasing progressively. These applications bring many advantages such as online shopping from different places. For the sake of simplicity, offloading data of applications from user devices to servers lead to many research challenges. This paper devises a novel blockchain-enabled system for E-commerce applications. The network consists of ethereum nodes that can implement symmetric security to provide valid and secure hashing of data in distributed computing. The simulation results show that the proposed blockchain-enabled system outperforms all existing systems in terms of security
Summary Ethereum is arguably the second most popular cryptocurrencyâbased network after Bitcoin. Both use the distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain, which is considered secure. However, the provided security level is proportional to the number of connected nodes, the number of influential nodes, and the supported amount of hash power. Thus, the knowledge of the network properties and nodes' behavior is helpful to protect the network from possible attacks such as doubleâspending attacks, DDoS attacks, 51% attacks, and Sybil attacks. This paper proposes a node discovery mechanism, which performs a P2P link discovery on the Ethereum main network. For that, we develop Searchânode, a modified version of Ethereum client that searches for all participating nodes in the blockchain network, stores the node information in the Bucket, and then processes the peer discovery method. Based on the collected data, we first visualize the Ethereum network topology and analyze the attributes of the network such as node degree, path length, diameter, and clustering coefficient. We then analyze the node properties and provide analytical results regarding the relationship between nodes, heavily connected nodes, node geoâdistribution, security issues, and possible attacks over the influential nodes. As a result, we have identified 68,406 nodes with a total of 642,034 edges. By analyzing the collected data, we have found that the diameter in the Ethereum network is equal to 8. The node degree is over 19, which is two times higher than the default configuration.
Oliver Stengele, Markus Raiber, Jörn MĂŒllerâQuade, Hannes Hartenstein
We address the Threshold Information Disclosure (TID) problem on Ethereum: An arbitrary number of users commit to the scheduled disclosure of their individual messages recorded on the Ethereum blockchain if and only if all such messages are disclosed. Before a disclosure, only the original sender of each message should know its contents. To accomplish this, we task a small council with executing a distributed generation and threshold sharing of an asymmetric key pair. The public key can be used to encrypt messages which only become readable once the threshold-shared decryption key is reconstructed at a predefined point in time and recorded on-chain. With blockchains like Ethereum, it is possible to coordinate such procedures and attach economic stakes to the actions of participating individuals. In this paper, we present ETHTID, an Ethereum smart contract application to coordinate Threshold Information Disclosure. We base our implementation on ETHDKG [1], a smart contract application for distributed key generation and threshold sharing, and adapt it to fit our differing use case as well as add functionality to oversee a scheduled reconstruction of the decryption key. For our main cost saving optimisation, we show that the security of the underlying cryptographic scheme is maintained. We evaluate how the execution costs depend on the size of the council and the threshold and show that the presented protocol is deployable on Ethereum with a council of more than 200 members with gas savings of 20-40% compared to ETHDKG.
R. Shashidhara, Nisha Ahuja, M. Lajuvanthi, S. Akhila · 6 authors
Abstract Softwareâdefined networking (SDN) is a programmable architecture for networking domain in which the security is provided by devising the network policies with the help of the network administrator. This is very cumbersome for the administrator to handle different attacks at various planes in SDN architecture. Blockchain can be used to prevent various attacks in SDN by providing a decentralization authentication environment. In this article, a secure Blockchainâbased privacyâpreserving protocol is proposed to thwart various security vulnerabilities in the SDN architecture. The proposed approach uses ModifiedâDelegated Proof of Stake as the consensus protocol to ensure safety and reliability in the network. Besides, a security protocol is designed using cryptographic primitives and analyzed using a detailed security analysis. Initially, the consensus protocols are implemented using solidity smart contracts and deployed to the public Blockchain using Ethereum. Consequently, the proposed approach is simulated on OMNet++ using INET framework. The experimental results show that the proposed SDNâChain is secure, efficient, less incentive to centralize, and practically implementable in resourceâlimited wireless and mobile environments.
The global financial market is influenced by relatively new technologies such as cryptocurrencies; namely Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and others. Cryptocurrencies are a challenging area in finance that requires additional attention from the academic community as they can have a potentially large impact on society and the economy.
The context of revenue generation streams in the music industry has been intermittently discussed since the transition from sales to streaming started when Spotify launched in 2008. Although revenues in the industry have reached new heights, musicians express dissatisfaction with lower royalty payouts. Moreover, it has become increasingly more difficult and convoluted to understand the royalty calculations in the music industry. With todayâs complicated licensing agreements, money flows through a complex chain of third parties before it reaches the hand of musicians. The industry struggles with transparency and efficiency, and the musicians are paying the price. Meanwhile, the rise of blockchain technology has developed since its first application with Bitcoin in 2008. Today, more and more advanced blockchains can run decentralized transparent applications that utilize the technologyâs efficient transaction system. With the industry issues and the promises of blockchain in mind, this paper demonstrates how blockchain technology can be applied to solve value chain problems within the music space. This paper identifies core issues in the music industry, proposes a decentralized application (dApp) that attempts to solve these issues and implements the proposed solution. This paper exhibits the business logic by developing smart contracts on the
Ethereum blockchain and uses IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) for decentralised file storage to make an associated web application choosing a JavaScript framework. The dApp works as a global copyrights database where musicians can register and license musical works. Author exploits Ethereumâs efficient transactional system to manage license purchases.