Blockchain Papers

Barbara Guidi

No abstract is available for this record.

Partha Pratim Ray, Dinesh Dash, Khaled Salah, Neeraj Kumar

Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies are being heavily exploited and used in may domains, especially for e-healthcare. In healthcare, IoT devices have the ability to provide real-time sensory data from patients to be processed and analyzed. Collected IoT data are subjected to centralized computation, processing, and storage. Such centralization can be problematic, as it can be a single point of failure, mistrust, data manipulation and tampering, and privacy evasion. Blockchain can solve such serious problems by providing decentralized computation and storage for IoT data. Therefore, the integration IoT and blockchain technologies can become a reasonable choice for the design of a decentralized IoT-based e-healthcare systems. In this article, first, we give a brief background on blockchain. Second, popular consensus algorithms used in blockchain are discussed in the context of e-health. Third, blockchain platforms are reviewed for their appropriateness in IoT-based e-healthcare. Finally, few use cases are methodologically given to show how key features of the IoT and blockchain can be leveraged to support healthcare services and ecosystems. We also propose a data-flow architecture that combines the IoT with blockchain, called IoBHealth, that can be used for storing, accessing, and managing of e-healthcare data.

Jiejun Hu, Kun Yang, Kezhi Wang, Kai Zhang

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a novel sensing scenario of cyber-physical-social systems. MCS has been widely adopted in smart cities, personal health care, and environment monitor areas. MCS applications recruit participants to obtain sensory data from the target area by allocating reward to them. Reward mechanisms are crucial in stimulating participants to join and provide sensory data. However, while the MCS applications execute the reward mechanisms, sensory data and personal private information can be in great danger because of malicious task initiators/participants and hackers. This article proposes a novel blockchain-based MCS framework that preserves privacy and secures both the sensing process and the incentive mechanism by leveraging the emergent blockchain technology. Moreover, to provide a fair incentive mechanism, this article has considered an MCS scenario as a sensory data market, where the market separates the participants into two categories: monthly-pay participants and instant-pay participants. By analyzing two different kinds of participants and the task initiator, this article proposes an incentive mechanism aided by a three-stage Stackelberg game. Through theoretical analysis and simulation, the evaluation addresses two aspects: the reward mechanism and the performance of the blockchain-based MCS. The proposed reward mechanism achieves up to a 10% improvement of the task initiator's utility compared with a traditional Stackelberg game. It can also maintain the required market share for monthly-pay participants while achieving sustainable sensory data provision. The evaluation of the blockchain-based MCS shows that the latency increases in a tolerable manner as the number of participants grows. Finally, this article discusses the future challenges of blockchain-based MCS.

Venkata Marella, Bikesh Raj Upreti, Jani Merikivi, Virpi Kristiina Tuunainen

Abstract Contemporary cryptocurrencies lack legal, monetary, and institutional backing that traditional financial services employ. Instead, cryptocurrencies provide trust through technology. Despite the plethora of research in both trust and cryptocurrencies, the underlying attributes of the technologies that drive trust in cryptocurrencies are not well understood. To uncover these attributes, we analyze the corpus of 1.97 million discussion posts related to Bitcoin, the oldest and most widely used cryptocurrency. Based on earlier research, we identified functionality, reliability, and helpfulness as the focal constructs with which to evaluate users’ trust in technology. In our analysis, we discovered 11 different attributes related to three technology constructs that are significant in creating and maintaining users’ trust in Bitcoin. The findings are discussed in detail in the article.

Ali Shahaab

Transgender community face serious socio-economic predicaments due to the discrepancy between their current gender expression and assigned gender identity at birth. Even though, a considerable amount work have been done to protect their basic human rights such as security, equality and social acceptance; trans people are still large victims of hate related crimes. With GDPR and other data protection laws and policies in place, now it is ever more important to protect the confidentiality of gender change information as well as to establish technical solutions that can prevent from inferring any sense of gender change from historical data. In this context, distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain present great opportunities for information integrity, security, privacy and access. However, at the same time provenance information extracted from immutable blockchain can be exploited to infer gender change. Addressing this paradox here we propose recommendations for managing gender change information in the blockchain environment in context of present sociopolitical, legislative and technical challenges associated with gender change.

Robert Herian

Like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the broader, mainstream emergence of blockchain technology in the present moment of, what I call, data dysphoria is no accident. It is in part reaction to data dysphoria, and in part exploitation of it, a duality underpinned by the tantalising promise of the prosumer ‘taking control’ of their data and establishing sovereignty over it. Blockchain and GDPR alike aim to resolve ‘problem’/’solution’ matrices with deep roots in a wide variety of global economic, political, social, legal and cultural contexts. This article explores the problem of achieving resolution based on innovation and technology by offering an account of the rise of blockchain and implementation of GDPR within a psycho-political framework, one in which fantasies of taking control are predominant yet highly contestable actualities in the lives of technology users.

Trevor Clohessy, Saima Clohessy

No abstract is available for this record.

Radu Prodan, Nishant Saurabh, Zhiming Zhao, Kate Orton‐Johnson · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

He Min-Hua, Xu Han, Frank Jiang, Rongbai Zhang · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Syeda Mariam Muzammal, Raja Kumar Murugesan

No abstract is available for this record.

Nan Jiang, Weiqi Wang, Jinchao Wu, Jian Wang

When a user registers a digital service, the service provider often asks for the user's personal information, such as name, phone number and so on. With the digital services gradually becoming an indispensable part of our lives, the abuse and misappropriation of personal information have caused people's attention to the protection of it. At present, The technical schemes for personal information protection mainly focus on preventing information leakage. We provide protection in a different way: propose a traceable method for personal information registration based on blockchain, which can distinguish the service provider obtained the information legally or illegally, by storing the personal information transaction records on the blockchain. The proposed method includes both direct and third-party personal information transaction scenarios. In different scenarios, the user will send the encrypted personal information data or authorization file to the service provider. After the transaction record is confirmed to be on the blockchain, the certification center will assist the service provider to decrypt the personal information. With this method, users can clearly understand which personal information has been delivered to which service providers. Moreover, the user's personal information data involving privacy are not stored on or transmitted through the blockchain. Hence, there is no additional risk of information disclosure, so as to achieve the purpose of personal information protection. Additionally, we analyze the proposed method using Kailar logic, and conduct a transaction performance simulation using NS-3. It shows that our method has properties of privacy, reliability, and accountability, and can meet the transaction performance requirements under the practical application scene.

Chengzu Dong, Ziyuan Wang, Shiping Chen, Yang Xiang

No abstract is available for this record.

Aneta Poniszewska-Marańda, Michał Pawlak, Jakub Guziur

There exist many different electronic voting solutions and each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Most of the existing systems suffer from inadequate transparency and auditability. However, recently introduced blockchain technology may provide a solution to these problems. In this paper, auditable blockchain voting system (ABVS) is presented. It combines existing voting approach and combines it with blockchain technology to create a supervised and remote internet voting system, which is transparent and audit capable. The paper describes the system's processes, components, model and results of initial testing.

Jaspreet Kaur, Vinayak Singla, Sumit Kalra

No abstract is available for this record.

Md Nazmul Islam, Sandip Kundu

No abstract is available for this record.

Ali Salaheddine

In recent years, cryptocurrencies implemented on top of Blockchains became very popular, with Bitcoin as the most prominent example. However, novel Blockchain-based platforms such as Ethereum also support distributed applications beyond cryptocurrencies through so-called smart contracts. Technically, smart contracts are programs, whose code and execution state is stored in the Blockchain, inherently featuring the ability to transfer (electronic) money during their execution. In this Bachelor thesis, we investigate how smart contracts can be used to implement a distributed crowdsensing application for tracking mobile objects by a crowd of privately owned mobile devices. Such a system could be used, for instance, to nd lost or stolen objects, such as keys, vehicles (cars, bicycles, . . . ), or pets tagged with short-range radio transmitters implemented using readily available Bluetooth or RFID technology. These objects can then be detected by smartphones of private users in the vicinity of the object, effectively implementing a huge sensor network covering many parts of the world without any upfront investments by a central entity. Although highly attractive, implementing a crowdsensing application on top of a Blockchain platform such as Ethereum comes with several challenges. First of all, users need incentives to participate in searching for mobile objects. A natural incentive is a monetary reward that participants automatically receive through the smart contract when reporting sightings (timestamped positions) of wanted objects. However, this directly brings up the problem of malicious participants (attackers) who try to get the reward without actually executing the work of searching for the object by simply reporting fake positions. Therefore, one major goal of this Bachelor thesis is to counter such attacks by proposing effective counter-measures, and implementing and evaluating them for the Ethereum platform. In detail, we propose a basic reputation-based approach for detecting fake positions which judges each sighting made by a mobile devices according to the reputation of that device, implemented by a smart contract. Furthermore, advanced attacks are identified compromising the basic reputation-based approach and effective counter-measures to these advanced attacks are proposed. Identified advanced attacks include reputation farming, where the attacker tries to aggregate reputation first before launching the attack, and the so-called copycat attack, where the attacker simply copies already submitted valid sightings form honest participants, making his fake positions indistinguishable from valid positions. Our evaluations analyses the monetary cost of executing smart contracts with and without our security mechanisms. The results show that the overhead included by our reputation-based approach is at maximum 45% of the cost of a smart contract without implemented security mechanisms.

Temidayo Abayomi-Zannu, Isaac Odun-Ayo, Barka Fori Tatama, Sanjay Misra

No abstract is available for this record.

Christoph Meinel, Tatiana Gayvoronskaya

No abstract is available for this record.

Faiza Loukil, Chirine Ghédira, Benharkat Aïcha-Nabila

No abstract is available for this record.

Adam Mihai Gergely, Bogdan Crainicu

Blockchain is an innovative technology which is used by cryptocurrencies as a public, immutable ledger for recording transactions, while more recent versions of Blockchain can also record smart contracts and other assets. Blockchain can be viewed as a distributed platform that holds transactional records without the involvement of a central authority, and where ensuring decentralization, transparency and security is of paramount importance. But the transparency requirement, absolutely necessary for improving trust among the blockchain’s users, came with a price: lack of privacy. In most of the blockchains which are based on Bitcoin’s Blockchain, anyone can query the blockchain and see all the transactions. This introduces a privacy issue which needs to be addressed. Although there are a few solutions for mitigating the privacy concern, we consider that true anonymity must be built-in, not added on trough extensions to the base protocol. We propose a novel solution, called RandAdminSuite, that addresses the blockchain privacy problem through a comprehensive approach that covers the blockchain architecture itself, transaction mechanism and cryptocurrency as well. RandAdminSuite offers some improvements over the concept of currency rewards for transaction processing nodes.

Kumaramangalam Muni Venkateswarlu, Sepideh Avizheh, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini

No abstract is available for this record.

Md Abdullah Al Mamun, S. M. Maksudul Alam, Md. Shohrab Hossain, M. Samiruzzaman

No abstract is available for this record.

Nerenda N. Atako

No abstract is available for this record.

Raja Lavanya, K. Sundarakantham, S. Mercy Shalinie, R. Divya · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.