Due to the cheap price and decent performance of used cars, the second‐hand vehicle market is quite active in Taiwan. However, the vehicle information in the market of second‐hand vehicles is centralized at present. In other words, the vehicle information is still provided by the second‐hand vehicle dealers, which are not transparent and have no tampering cost. As the result, the authenticity, accuracy, and fairness of these second‐hand vehicle data are worth discussing. To solve the above problems, this paper proposed a trusted vehicle data source system based on blockchain technology. The system is built on the Ethereum platform with the private chain structure. With the help of our platform, a trusted third party (e.g., maintenance plant and government branch) can record vehicle information into Blockchain so the integrity of vehicle information can be maintained. Customers can easily query the relevant vehicle information through our system interface and avoid receiving fake vehicle information. This system is a Proof of Concept (PoC), and the feasibility is examined by evaluating transactions per second (TPS) of the proposed system.
Tobias Guggenberger, Vincent Schlatt, Jonathan Schmid, Nils Urbach
Blockchain systems become increasingly attractive targets for cybercrime due to the rising amount of value transacted in respective systems. However, researchers and practitioners alike lack a comprehensive overview of existing attacks and a directive discussion of resulting implications. Employing a structured literature review, we an-alyze academic research concerning malicious attacks on blockchain systems. We ex-tract 87 relevant attacks and structure those using the attack tree notation. Our re-sults show that the academic discourse revolves mainly around the analysis of a few individual attacks, and most publications deal with attacks on either Bitcoin or Ethereum. We further find that most attacks target the on-chain application logic component (smart contracts) of the blockchain technology stack as well as consensus mechanisms. A majority of attacks are mitigable, and socio-technical components play an important role in both attacks and applying effective countermeasures.
Blockchain is a decentralised, trust-free distributed ledger technology that has been applied in various fields such as finance, supply chain, and asset management. However, the network isolation between blockchains has limited their interoperability in asset exchange and business collaboration since it forms blockchain islands. Cross-blockchain is an important technology aiming to realise the interoperability between blockchains, and has become one of the hottest research topics in this area. This paper proposes a multi-hop cross-blockchain transaction model based on an improved hash-locking consulted by the notary and users. It can solve the security problems in the traditional hash-locking, and prevent malicious participants from creating a large number of transactions to block cross-blockchain system. Moreover, a notary multi-signature scheme is designed to solve the problem of lack of trust in the traditional model. A multi-hop cross-blockchain transaction loop is designed based on the loop detection method of directed graphs. The transaction process of key agreement, asset locking, lock releasing and security analysis based on the model is discussed in detail. Experiments of cross-blockchain transactions are carried out in Ethereum private chain, and prove that the proposed model has good applicability.
In this paper, we explore access control area as one of the most crucial aspect of security and privacy in IoT. Actually, conventional security and privacy solutions tend to be less tailored for IoT. Then, designing a distributed access control with user-driven approach and privacy-preserving awareness in an IoT environment is of paramount importance. In this direction, we have investigated in our previous work a new way to build a distributed access control framework based on the blockchain technology through our proposed framework, FairAccess. The first version of FairAccess was based on the Bitcoin's UTXO model. However, this version presented limitations in expressing more granular access control policies. To tackle this issue, this paper upgrades the proposed framework to FairAccess2.0 that uses SmartContract concept instead of the locking/unlocking scripts. Thus, we show a possible working implementation based on ABAC policies, deployed on the ethereum blockchain. The obtained results show the efficiency of FairAccess2.0 and its compatibility with a wide range of existing access control models mainly the ABAC model. Finally, a performance and cost evaluation, discussion and future work are elaborated.
Sending bulk e-mail is commercially cheap and technically easy, making it profitable for spammers, even if a tiny percentage of recipients falls for the attacks or turn into customers. Some researchers have proposed making e-mail paid so that sending bulk e-mail becomes expensive, making spamming unprofitable and a futile exercise unless many victims respond to spam. On the other hand, the small sending fee is negligible for legitimate e-mail users. Making e-mail paid is a challenging task if implemented using a conventional payment system or developing new cryptocurrencies. Traditional payment systems are challenging to integrate with e-mail systems, and new cryptocurrencies will have challenges in adoption by users on the required scale. This work proposes using cryptocurrency payments to make e-mail senders pay for sending an e-mail without creating a new cryptocurrency or a new blockchain. In the proposed system, the recipients of the e-mail can collect the payments and use the collected revenues to send e-mail messages or even sell them on an exchange. The proposed solution has been implemented using Ropsten, an Ethereum Test Network and tested using enhanced E-mail Client and Server software.
Ahmad Musamih, Raja Jayaraman, Khaled Salah, Haya R. Hasan · 6 authors
Controlled drugs are open to abuse, misuse, and diversion. Therefore, they are regulated and tracked across the healthcare sector to protect the health of the general public which is a highly prioritized rule in the health professional’s code of ethics. Healthcare centers that provide controlled medication to patients are still using manual papers to record controlled drugs production, delivery, prescription, administration, and disposal which causes delays in the system. Moreover, instances of controlled drugs misuse, abuse, and diversion still exist, which shows how the currently used system is inefficient in detecting such activities. Therefore, to ensure that the public health is safe and secure, an end-to-end system that tracks the whole healthcare supply chain is necessary. In this paper, we introduce a private Ethereum blockchain-based solution for the management of controlled medication.We ensure transparency, accountability, security, and data provenance by developing smart contracts that record all actions on an immutable ledger. We utilize off-chain storage, which is represented in the IPFS to store content that is large in size such as images. We present algorithms of the different phases in the proposed solution to illustrate how each phase will be carried out. We showcase the functionality of the proposed solution by performing tests and validating the smart contracts. We assess the performance of the proposed solution by conducting privacy, security, and confidentiality analysis. Performance evaluation shows that our solution is secure against common attacks and vulnerabilities and preserves the privacy and confidentiality of the patients. The smart contracts code is made publicly available along with the testing scripts.
Carlos Núñez‐Gómez, Blanca Caminero, Carmen Carrión
Nowadays, the fog computing paradigm is being consolidated as a solution for processing the explosion of data generated by lots of common IoT devices connected to the Internet. In contrast to cloud computing, fog computing achieves efficient data processing without incurring large latencies or data transfers to/from the cloud. The distributed nature of fog computing makes the resource orchestration a challenge. Commonly used centralized solutions are of limited utility in this context. Moreover, fog nodes are usually resource constrained, so the implementation of the management modules should be carefully designed in order not to cause excessive overheads. On the other hand, blockchain has proven its utility beyond cryptocurrencies, to support distributed and reliable information storage. When combined with smart contracts it can provide a distributed computer where all the nodes independently and equally contribute to a common global system state, which must be agreed by consensus. This also provides inherent desirable features, such as immutability and transparency. In this work, a novel architecture called HIDRA is presented, aimed at resource orchestration in fog computing environments based on a Ethereum blockchain implementation. A prototype implementation on a testbed composed of single-board computers has been carried out. Results show the low overhead introduced into the system and its ability to perform a coordinated action among fog nodes without the intervention of any central authority.
With the rapid development of the Internet, online music has become a new trend. The low cost of access and fast spread speed greatly enriches people’s spiritual life, but it also poses great challenges to the protection of intellectual property rights. Nowadays, although the intellectual property rights of music works have been better valued and protected, there are still some problems that limit the development of the music industry and affect the users’ experience. For example, the copyrights of different music works may be exclusively represented by different companies, resulting in limited choices for users and vicious competition among music operating companies, which affects the users’ experience and is not conducive to the long-term development of the music industry. In order to solve the above problems, we present a decentralized music copyright operation management system based on Blockchain technology. By using the Blockchain’s shared ledger mechanism and smart contracts as the basic framework of the Ethereum platform, we realize decentralized music copyright management. The system not only protects copyright better, but also coordinates the interests of creators, copyright owners, operators and users, which is beneficial to the further development of the music industry, and creates more value and better experience for users.
Few years after the development of Bitcoin (BTC), there was need to develop another blockchain that could support many applications, and consequently, the Ethereum Blockchain (EB) was developed. One of the key initiatives that was enabled by the development of the EB is that of Decentralised Finance (DeFi). Understanding the massive potential of DeFi, particularly in developing markets, many other developers are embarking on projects to develop their DeFi supporting blockchains. The Universal Money Instrument (UMI) team is one of the groups that embarked on this journey. Approximately 1.5 years after the launch of the UMI Blockchain (UMI B) and the UMI coin, the team recently released their DeFi manifest. Considering that Africa stands to benefit more from DeFi, it is expected that these two blockchains will compete for dominance in Africa. Hence, the main objective of this study was to determine the most suitable blockchain for the African continent. To achieve the above objective, a non-empirical, exploratory research was conducted in the form of an online desktop review. It was found that the UMI DeFi is ideal for Africa because the UMI B; is highly scalable, supports nearinstant transactions, offers free transactions, uses a superior consensus algorithm, took longer to develop, and safe from attacks like the 51% attacks.
Karishma Chaudhary, Prasanna Padmanabhan, Deepak Verma, Prashant Dev Yadav
In 2016, 44.7 million metric tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) was generated across the globe out of which only 20% was recycled through formal channels. India is the fifth largest generator of e-waste where 95% of e-waste is channelised to unorganised units. There are substantial environment and health risks associated with unsafe e-waste management practices. The study highlights various blockchain-based applications in the waste management domain. The study deals with the development of Ethereum-based smart contract blockchain architectural platform 'e-waste lens' for effective e-waste management in India. The specific novelty of the blockchain architectural framework lies in the real-time tracking and monitoring of e-waste movement by the concerned stakeholders in the e-waste management chain and thereby bringing out the non-compliance of the prevailing regulations for effective e-waste management.
A family health management system deals with a safe and secure way of managing family member health details such as illness diagnosis, treatment, medical prescriptions, medical reports, and life insurance policies. All health records are encrypted and stored in chronological order utilizing blockchain technology so that authenticity, integrity, security, and privacy of the records are safeguarded. All stages of medical treatment are documented and stored for ease of future reference by the family. This becomes very handy if a person changes doctors and/or relocates to some other place/country for varied reasons. All the necessary health reports are shared with the life insurance company so that insurance claims become hassle free, if applicable. Medicine details are cross-verified with the manufactures to avoid fake drugs. This chapter explores the compatibility of using ethereum with the interactive MyEtherWallet to implement the proposed model.
Haya R. Hasan, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Ibrar Yaqoob · 6 authors
Contact tracing has widely been adopted to control the spread of Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19). It enables to identify, assess, and manage people who have been exposed to COVID-19, thereby preventing from its further transmission. Today's most of the contact tracing approaches, tools, and solutions fall short in providing decentralized, transparent, traceable, immutable, auditable, secure, and trustworthy features. In this paper, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based COVID-19 contact tracing solution. Contact tracing can greatly suffice the need for a speedy response to a pandemic. We leverage the immutable and tamper-proof features of blockchain to enforce trust, accountability, and transparency. Trusted and registered oracles are used to bridge the gap between on-chain and off-chain data. With no third parties involved or centralized servers, the users' medical information is not prone to invasion, hacking, or abuse. Each user is registered using their digital medical passports. To respect the privacy of the users, their locations are updated with a time delay of 20 minutes. Using Ethereum smart contracts, transactions are executed on-chain with emitted events and immutable logs. We present details of the implemented algorithms and their testing analysis. We evaluate the proposed approach using security, cost, and privacy parameters to show its effectiveness. The smart contracts code is publicly made available on GitHub.
We look at the association between the price of a cryptocurrency and the secondary market prices of the hardware used to mine it. We find the prices of the most efficient Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) for Ethereum mining are significantly positively correlated with the daily price returns to that cryptocurrency.
The smart grid is emerging as a future paradigm for power networks. While it has many successful applications, peer-to-peer trading in the local energy market (LEM) is still challenging due to the lack of security and trading mechanisms. In this paper, we design a data-driven, secure, and smart solution DS2to address this problem. We first propose a five-layer design of LEM based on blockchain. We then model peer-to-peer trading in LEM as a cost minimization problem and derive an efficient online solution leveraging matrix factorization and integer linear programming. DS2is implemented and evaluated on a private Ethereum blockchain. We show that DS2achieves a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 12.8% compared with the offline optimal method through extensive simulations on the real-world dataset.