With the increasing use of smart devices and sensors, enormous amounts of data are being generated continuously. The data is commonly stored in centralized cloud platforms and consumed by different services. The data is indeed a valuable resource for many service providers who provide advanced features and utilities to their subscribers. However, user data include personal and sensitive information which can be misused in many ways. There is no way for a subscriber to confirm that their service provider is compliant with data privacy regulations. The existing privacy enhancing techniques such as anonymization and differential privacy substantially reduce data usability while ensuring privacy. Therefore, it remains essential to provide a feasible solution that allows service providers to take advantage of user data while guaranteeing their privacy. In this paper, we present PETchain: a novel privacy enhancing technology using blockchain and smartcontract. In PETchain, data is stored securely in a distributed manner and processed in a user-selected trusted execution environment. Users deploy the smartcontract that allows them to decide whether and how their data can be exploited by service providers. The feasibility and performance of PETchain are presented by implementing PETchain over a consortium Ethereum blockchain.
A large number of shipments are moved everyday domestically and internationally. A considerable number of items such as food, commodities, and pharmaceutical drugs are prone to damage in transit. This can be caused due to various reasons such as improper storage conditions and exposure to air or sunlight. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been used to enhance fundamental shipment tracking by improving transparency and visibility to such transport systems. This paper introduces a blockchain-powered smart container system (CryptoCargo) that monitors the conditions of the shipment and detects any violations that may damage its contents. These violations are recorded on the blockchain via smart contracts, which provides a secure and immutable storage thereby improving its trustworthiness in an inherently trustless environment comprising of multiple stakeholders. We present the design and implementation of CryptoCargo including architectural concerns and implementation details using a test Ethereum blockchain platform and cloud services. Moreover, we present details of thorough evaluation of the system to validate its function as well as to assess its effectiveness with respect to performance efficiency and real-time operation. We have made our smart contract code publicly available on Github.
This White Paper introduces and contributes the first implementation of the Decentralized Voting Algorithm. First, Part I provides an overview for the software structures relevant to this work. Second, Part II introduces a decentralized voting algorithm for transferring value on blockchain networks. Third, Part III explains the voting algorithm’s implementation in reach, including the backend architecture, web deployment, and quantum integration. Perhaps most significantly, this paper solves the Decentralized Voting Problem with a new quantum consensus system.
Fairness is an important trait of open, free markets. Ethereum is a platform meant to enable digital, decentralized markets. Though many researchers debate the market's fairness, there are few discussions around the fairness of automated markets, such as those hosted on Ethereum. In this paper, using pilot studies, we consider unfair factors caused by adding the program. Because CryptoKitties is one of the major blockchain-based games and has been in operation for an extended period of time, we focus on its market to examine fairness. As a result, we concluded that a gene determination algorithm in this game has little randomness, and a significant advantage to gain profit is given to players who know its bias over those who do not. We state incompleteness and impact of the algorithm and other factors. Besides, we suppose countermeasures to reduce CryptoKitties' unfairness as a market.
Yizhou Cao, Min Dai, Steven Kou, Lewei Li · 5 authors
Abstract Existing cryptocurrencies are too volatile to be used as currencies for daily payments. Stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to other stable financial assets such as the US dollar, are desirable for payments within blockchain networks, whereby being often called the “Holy Grail of cryptocurrency.” By using the option pricing theory and the Ethereum platform that allows running smart contracts, we design several dual‐class structures that are written on the ETH cryptocurrency and offer a fixed‐income crypto asset (Class A coin), a stablecoin (Class A′ coin) pegged to a traditional currency, and leveraged investment instruments (Class B and B′ coins). Our investigation of the values of stablecoins in the presence of jump risk and black swan‐type events shows the robustness of the design. The design has been implemented on the Ethereum platform.
In der Anfangszeit der Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) waren die hauptsächlichen Betrachtungswinkel die der Disruption des Bank- und Finanzwesens. Mit dem Aufkommen des Systems Ethereum im Jahr 2015, hat die Auseinandersetzung mit der Anwendung von Blockchain in weiteren Branchen, an Bedeutung gewonnen. Eine davon ist die Logistik und das Supply Chain Management (SCM). Gerade in Deutschland spielt der Logistiksektor eine große Rolle, nach der Beschäftigtenzahl ist er die drittgrößte Branche und erzielt einen Umsatz von rund 258 Milliarden Euro. Im Beitrag werden konkrete Anwendungsfelder identifiziert und gezeigt welche potentiellen Vorteile sich dort, durch den Einsatz von DLT, erzielen lassen. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Einschätzung der Technologie hinsichtlich ihrer Sicherheitseigenschaften. Im Beitrag wird den Fragen nachgegangen, ob Datensicherheit mithilfe von DLT verbessert werden kann und auf welchem Wege.
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.
With the advancing technologies become tools for illicit activities and avoid detection, digital forensics is necessary for law enforcement in modern criminal investigations. In order to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the evidence, a chain of custody is essential for the successful prosecution of criminals in court. However, it is a great challenge to manage the preservation and collection of digital evidence because of its fragile and volatile in nature. Blockchain has been proposed as a promising and reliable technology to provide immutability and traceability of digital content, however, the applications of blockchain to the law enforcement agencies (LEAs) requires special attention to the security issue. In this research, we proposed a blockchain of custody framework to facilitate the security and transparency of digital evidence in criminal investigation process. The framework is implement on Ethereum smart contract to support authenticity and integrity of digital evidence in preliminary investigation, case management and court phases. We also propose the role of investigator to leverage access control in evidence creation, transferring and modification. The corresponding actions with judicial process is simulated using private ethereum blockchain. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework can prevent digital evidence been tampered or contaminated and assure its legal defensibility with rigorous privilege management. Moreover, by successfully synchronizing digital evidence transactions to multiple nodes ensures the accountability of evidence data for every involved law enforcement agency.
Mazin Debe, Haya R. Hasan, Khaled Salah, Ibrar Yaqoob · 5 authors
The massive adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has caused an increasing demand for electric energy to charge the vehicles. Efficiently managing energy trading between energy providers and energy consumers can lead to meet the high demand for charging EVs while reducing its cost compared to traditional power provided by the utility company. However, a large portion of the existing systems leveraged for trading energy between EVs are centralized and fall short in providing transparency, reliability, audit, security, and trustworthy features. In this paper, we propose blockchain-based energy trading using an auctioning and reputation scheme. We develop Ethereum smart contracts which enable owners of EVs to automatically request electricity to charge their vehicles in a reliable, cost-effective, secure, and trustworthy manner. The proposed approach ensures the lowest rate available by implementing a reverse auctioning scheme for fair competition between providers to provide the requested service at the lowest cost. The proposed solution enforces high quality of service through a reputation-based approach that quantifies the performance of the service providers and gives an advantage to more reputable providers. We present the implementation details of the deployed system on a test Ethereum blockchain platform. We perform system testing and evaluation to validate and assess the functionality and performance of the proposed solution. Furthermore, we present security and cost analyses to show the affordability, robustness, and practicality of the proposed approach.
Diabetes is a metabolic disorder caused by high blood sugar levels, which can harm the kidneys, the heart, the eyes, and blood vessels. During the Covid-19 pandemic, diabetes patients were most affected. In the existing healthcare system, medical data is available in paper form or through a central server. Accessing the data from the central system and sharing it with all stakeholders would be a critical task during the pandemic. This research work deals with the design and implementation of a diabetes blockchain consortium. It can help all healthcare stakeholders to efficiently prioritize the needs of diabetes patients during a pandemic, such as oxygen beds, vaccinations, diabetes compensation, telemedicine, 5G-integrated remote location support, and other related records. The Ethereum sandbox simulation design is utilized to secure diabetes patients’ healthcare records. The Interplanetary file system (IPFS) encrypts health data and sends it to the blockchain to ensure the privacy of personal healthcare information. The NEM symbol blockchain is used to develop this consortium as a proof-of-concept (PoC) model. Each stakeholder in a consortium is assigned NEM generated QR code to track records as a distributed ledger. A smart contract designed to run the diabetes blockchain application. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) authenticates users and restricts malicious nodes. Certainly, this research suggests aggregation of transactions and blocks in the blockchain, which would increase transaction speed, minimize transaction fees, and consume less power in a future blockchain design.
Rahul Ganpatrao Sonkamble, Shraddha Phansalkar, Vidyasagar Potdar, Anupkumar M. Bongale
Interoperability in Electronic Health Records (EHR) is significant for the seamless sharing of information amongst different healthcare stakeholders. Interoperability in EHR aims to devise agreements in its interpretation, access, and storage with security, privacy, and trust. A study and survey of state-of-the-art literature, prototypes, and projects in standardization of the EHR structure, privacy-preservation, and EHR sharing are very essential. The presented work conducts a systematic literature review to address four research questions. 1) What are the different standards for common interpretation, representation, and modeling of EHR to achieve semantic interoperability? 2) What are the different privacy-preservation techniques and security standards for EHR data storage? 3) How mature is blockchain technology for building interoperable, privacy-preserving solutions for EHR storage and sharing? 4) What is the state-of-the-art for cross-chain interoperability for EHR sharing? An exhaustive study of these questions establishes the potential of a blockchain-based EHR management framework in privacy preservation, access control and efficient storage. The study also unveils challenges in the adoption of blockchain in EHR management with the state-of-the-art maturity of cross-chain interoperable solutions for sharing EHR amongst stakeholders on different blockchain platforms. The research gaps culminate in proposing a blockchain-based EHR framework with privacy preservation and access control design. The proposed framework employs partitioning of EHR to on-chain and off-chain storages for performance guarantees with the retrieval of valid off-chain data. The framework is deployed on the Ethereum test network with Solidity smart contracts. It is observed that different test cases on the partitioning of the EHR data, yielded better read-write throughput and effective gas price than fully on-chain storage.
In this article, we establish a method to detect and formulate price bubbles in the cryptocurrency markets. This method identifies abnormal crashes through violations of the exponential decaying property. Confirmations of bubble bursts within these anomalies are obtained through wavelet analysis. By decomposing the cryptocurrency price into the high-frequency and low-frequency factors, we distinguish the price regimes versus the periods with bubbles and crashes in both time and frequency domains. In addition, we apply the log-periodic power law model to fit the bubble formation. In the analysis of eight cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Antshares, Ethereum Classic, Dash, Monero, and OmiseGO—from 15 May 2018 to 28 November 2022, we identify 24 bubbles. Some of them exhibit a significant and strong exponential growth pattern.
Blockchain based decentralized Cloud Manufacturing-as-a-Service (CMaaS) platforms enable customers to gain access to a large capacity of manufacturing nodes over cryptographically secure networks. In recent times, the Ethereum network has emerged as a popular blockchain framework for providing provenance and traceability of proprietary manufacturing data in decentralized CMaaS. However, the Ethereum ecosystem was only designed to store and transmit low volume financial transaction data and little has been done to make it an efficient repository of large manufacturing data streams in CMaaS systems. In this paper, the authors build on their previous work and report the design, implementation, and validation of middleware software architectures that allow Ethereum based distributed CMaaS platforms to harness the benefits of the secure asset models of the Ethereum ecosystem and the immutable big data storage capabilities of the decentralized BigchainDB database platform. A novel hybrid blockchain architecture enabled by efficient communication protocols and blockchain oracles is proposed. This architecture allows the transfer and immutable storage of large manufacturing data streams onto global BigchainDB nodes allowing data rich manufacturing transactions to bypass the transaction fees of the Ethereum ecosystem. Additionally, a machine learning based time series inference model is proposed which enables the forecast of Ethereum gas price into the future. This allows the CMaaS platform smart contracts to judiciously assign gas price limits and hence save on transactions ensuing from transfer or creation of assets. The outcomes of this research show that the designed hybrid architecture can lead to the reduction of significant number of computational steps and hence transaction fees on Ethereum by offloading large volume data onto BigchainDB nodes. A Random Forest regressor based time series inference model has been shown to exhibit superior performance in the prediction of Ethereum gas price, that allows the CMaaS to avoid executing transactions in periods of high gas prices within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Anokye Acheampong Amponsah, Adebayo Felix, Benjamin Asubam
Ever since the first generation of blockchain technology became very successful and the FinTech enormously benefited from it with the advent of cryptocurrency, the second and third generations championed by Ethereum and Hyperledger have explored the extension of blockchain in other domains like IoT, supply chain management, healthcare, business, privacy, and data management. A field as huge as the insurance industry has been underrepresented in literature. Therefore, this paper presents how investments in blockchain technology can profit the insurance industry. We discuss the basics of blockchain technology, popular platforms in use today, and provide a simple theoretical explanation of the insurance sub-processes which blockchain can mutate positively. We also discuss hurdles to be crossed to fully implement blockchain solutions in the insurance domain.