Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez, Pol Valletbó-Montfort, Jordi Cucurull
The transmission and tabulation of results are critical steps in the election process. If election results are provided quickly and transparently, they may inspire trust and confidence in the overall management of the contest. On the contrary, the late and questionable delivery of results might raise concerns and suspicion. In some cases, improper counting and tabulation procedures have brought candidates to question election results and even spurred long periods of violence. In this paper, we explore the potential of blockchain technology to enhance the counting and tabulation procedures during elections. Blockchains are distributed ledgers technologies whose transactions are protected cryptographically. It means that their contents cannot be tampered with nor modified in the long term. We argue that blockchain technology meets the requirements for electronic transmission and consolidation of election results. To prove so, we have implemented a proof of concept with a smart contract running on an Ethereum blockchain that registers the address of several polling stations and records the tally sheets that these submit at the end of the election. We also resort to the smart contract for the automatic and accurate consolidation of the election results once they have been submitted.
As of today, web-based social communication platforms, such as WhatsApp, Twitter, or Facebook, are almost exclusively realized via centralized platforms, based on proprietary interfaces, protocols, and data formats. In consequence, even though social communication being a decentralized, peer-to-peer phenomenon, web-based communication today is implemented via closed, proprietary data silos, which not only lock-in users into their service platforms, but also control and own exchange information and data, including personal and sensitive data such as photos, messages, or contact information. In this paper we present Tawki, a decentralized service architecture for social communication. Using Tawki, users remain in full control of their personal data, which is stored and managed by personal data storages. Each data storage is accessible via a unified Tawki API, which allows users to send and request data to and from other users' personal data storages. Following this approach, social communication is again peer-to-peer without involving a third party controlling and monitoring the process. Tawki uses the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) for both the management of user identities and resolving identifiers to the respective user's personal storage location. Leveraging the immutability of the Ethereum Blockchain, identity management and discovery of personal data storages is secured against censorship and control through any third party.
Security and Privacy are some of the important aspects to be considered in the large-scale deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Due to the large number of IoT devices and the different administrative domains in which they operate, traditional approaches involving a Centralized server for managing Authorizations will not be scalable or efficient. In this paper, we propose a Decentralized Capability-Based Access Control framework using IOTA (DCACI); IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger that enables fee-less micro transactions for the IoT. The DCACI framework enables complete privacy and integrity of the Capability tokens using IOTA's Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) technology. It enables device owners and users to Grant, Update, Delegate and Revoke the capability tokens. The proposed DCACI framework has been implemented as a proof-of-concept on a resource constrained machine; the results indicate that it is capable of scaling up to large-scale infrastructure such as a Smart City, having millions of IoT devices.
As we have seen, one of the major advantages of distributed ledger technology that is touted by promoters is the enhanced level of privacy that accompanies the product. In its earliest application as envisaged by Nakamoto, one of the features behind the technology was its use of public key cryptography that would help to conceal the identity of a sender of Bitcoin. 1 Under this regime, only an individual’s public key is available for viewing by third parties who can see that funds have been sent from one party to another on the Blockchain but without any identifying information that would allow a third party to discover the identities of the participants. Moreover, this is seen as a means of safeguarding the personal privacy of users who will have personal details made increasingly available on the Blockchain as the technology increases in prominence.
Modern day entertainment and music streaming has largely been dependent on digital technologies. People prefer subscription based online services to buying physical copies of the music albums. Online streaming services like Spotify, Apple iTunes, Google Music offer great services to the listener with ease. However, drawbacks to these systems includes long delays in payouts for the artists, lack of transparency, confusing payments and licensing terms. In this paper we propose an application that solves all these three drawbacks by making use of Ethereum blockchain and IPFS protocol. The Ethereum blockchain is used for recording transactions and payment management using smart contracts. As storing large files on the Ethereum network costs a lot, the IPFS protocol is used for storing music files, which is a peer to peer protocol. The frontend is built using Web3.js and both listener and artist interact on the blockchain through browser. A PPP(Pay-Per-Play) model with fixed price or as per artist will be defined in the smart contract. The artist can also add other benefactors and share the pay with them. Streaming will be a free service; however, the listeners can tip the artists for supporting. PPP is a smart contract that will be running on the Ethereum blockchain that will be used to set and reward artists with a fixed set of tokens, native currency of platform, per play. Miners will mine new blocks to be added to the blockchain, for which they will be incentivized with tokens. 25 percent of tokens mined per block will go towards a pool for paying artists for streams of their music. The IPFS nodes for storing and distribution of music will be controlled by the artists. Thus, a complete autonomous system for music streaming can be built with least involvement of third parties, and a direct relationship between artist and listener.
As the Internet of Vehicle (IOV) being widely applied throughout our daily life, how to secure data privacy of each vehicle is nowadays a hot topic. Taking an aim of solving this problem, a privacy protection system on double-layered chain basis is designed to eliminate the said security risk during vehicle data communication. At the same time, the nontampering nature of the block chain is used to realize reasonable arbitration in traffic accident disputes, vehicle insurance claims, and other states of affairs. Specifically, an IOV double-layered chain model is constructed to simulate a semicentralized system that is convenient for government to supervise; also, a RSA protocol based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is designed to bring safety and zero-knowledge property to the system; finally, we give the application scenario of this IOV privacy protection system based on double-layered chain that it can be widely used in vehicle-sharing industry. The communication costs, respectively, under double-layered chain and single-layered chain frameworks, are compared to prove that the double-layered structure does save cost. Thus an IOV privacy scheme that is safer and more cost-efficient is given.
This paper highlights certain aspects of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are incompatible or sometimes counter-productive with certain Blockchain technologies. These topics are discussed based on an example of multiple organisations working together while employing private/permissioned Blockchain technology. The goal of this paper is to show the reader that making Blockchain technology compliant with the GDPR has both benefits and disadvantages.
Trust in a smart city is fundamental to its transparency, the participation of its people in governance, entrepreneurial initiatives, trade, commerce and hence the growth of its economy. A city gets smart by transforming itself to a digital city, and a digital city runs on data, analytics, internet of things, artificial intelligence and machine learning. This inevitable transformation creates the fundamental need for trust. How does data remain sacrosanct and verifiable? How do people trust institutions? How do institutions trust each other? How do devices trust each other? This article explores blockchain as an essential layer of trust in a smart city. It explains the technology by drawing real-life examples to the ‘memory game’ that operates in an ecosystem of ‘trust and consensus.’ The article provides further insight into institutions that can be governed on blockchain through ‘smart contracts’ in a sovereign and human independent manner. The use cases of blockchain have been corroborated with examples of successful blockchain implementation. The value for blockchain, in general, and smart cities, in particular, has been presented across four categories: (a) the network effect on trust on society, governments and industries; (b) empowering the individual and strengthening the economy; (c) the liquid economy and (d) the shareable economy. Given the current topology of technology innovations, there is no solution better than blockchain that embodies trust. It is a hope and expectation that this article will help smart city planners, developers, architects and thinkers implement blockchain as the embodiment of trust in smart cities that are increasingly becoming digital.
Due to emerging disruptive technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) play a vital role for smart living domains, for examples, elderly and disabilities healthcare services and home safety and security monitoring and automation control services. These systems will send automatically an emergency call with home user information and location as a privacy data to public services like hospitals, police offices, or fire departments. This paper introduces emergency service for a Smart Home System (SHS) based on Ethereum blockchain with smart contract for decentralized handling access control among untrusted public services so called Home Service Providers (HSPs) and smart home IoT devices. Our SHS testbed consists of (1) smart home sensor manger equipped with Raspberry Pi (RPi) represented as an edge IoT gateway for gathering environmental sensor data, (2) HSP miners deployed Meteor and Ethereum platform, and (3) web-based applications for home users and HSP staffs. Furthermore, our contribution includes the integration of digital signature for the IoT device authentication, the One Time Passcode with QR code for HSP staff access control, and IPFS for manipulating emergency call from SHS in peers. Our implementation results focusing on HSP miners will be presented and analysed.
René Riedl, Max Neuhofer, Bernhard Stockinger, Florian Grillenberger · 7 authors
Eine Analyse von 1498 Artikeln aus sechs Tageszeitungen zeigt, dass im deutschsprachigen Raum vorwiegend negativ über den Bitcoin berichtet wird. Eine Analyse von 1498 Artikeln aus sechs Tageszeitungen zeigt, dass im deutschsprachigen Raum vorwiegend negativ über den Bitcoin berichtet wird. Zwischen den untersuchten Tageszeitungen bestehen nur geringe Unterschiede. Zwischen den untersuchten Tageszeitungen bestehen nur geringe Unterschiede. Zwischen der Berichterstattung zum Bitcoin und dem Kursverlauf gibt es einen Zusammenhang. Zwischen der Berichterstattung zum Bitcoin und dem Kursverlauf gibt es einen Zusammenhang.
Day to day revolutionizing technology is coming up with their positive impacts on our social life. And this all-time globally connected network enables us to access variety of resources easily. One such revolution is Blockchain. With its special characteristics of immutability and decentralized architecture, many services are shifting towards it. One potential application of blockchain can be found in e-voting schemes. It has been a challenge since a long time for building an e-voting system which satisfies all legal requirements of legislators. Distributed ledger technologies can offer infinite range of applications. This paper discusses various e-voting system frameworks conceptualized by different teams. Blockchain will bring its benefits on e-voting systems including immutability of votes, security of system, real-time validation and updation of count of votes in global ledger with not depending upon number of nodes in the network.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Long Finance's Distributed Futures research programme has produced a report entitled “To Be, To Have, To Know: Smart Ledgers & Identity Authentication”, the latest in a series of exciting projects in the programme. The event offered the opportunity to join the discussion on the findings of the report, which showed how identity management and authentication systems can make use of leading technology, such as smart ledgers, as well as to explore the social, economic, and political implications of their use.
The research provides alternative models for practical identity management and authentication, and suggests considerations for policy makers, regulators, businesses, and individuals, both for the present and looking forward.
With the increasing popularity of online shopping, privacy concerns in E-commerce are attracting more and more attention. Existing E-commerce models are trapped in a dilemma between the proof of ownership and privacy protection. To address this issue, in this paper we design a privacy-preserving business protocol by employing private smart contracts in the negotiation phase. The protocol allows counterparties make deals without the disclosure of private information such as identities, addresses, and phone numbers. Moreover, we employ the zero-knowledge proof to guarantee the ownership. To understand the feasibility for implementing the proposed model, we also conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of existing blockchain development platforms, Ethereum Quorum and SERO.
Emergency service call for public service providers has become an important role for smart home applications in order to support safety and security in the household building. Blockchain has been a promising solution with cryptography and incentive distributed mechanisms to support the verification, execution and recording of transactions between untrusted parties. In this paper, we present a Smart Home System (SHS) based on Ethereum with smart contract infrastructure for handling an emergency service sending from SHS to Home Service Providers (HSP) when there are unusual environmental conditions. Our SHS testbed consists of three domains: (1) Smart Home Sensor Manager (SM) or IoT devices to gather environmental sensor data and send an emergency call to HSP, (2) Home Service Provider (HSP) system deployed with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and smart contract, and (3) decentralize Meteor framework to interface between Ethereum and web based applications for homeowners (HO) and HSP staffs. To achieve homeowner privacy and security, we enable digital signature coupling with InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for handling the emergency call from SM to HSP and One Time Passcode (OTP) produced by HSP for HSP staffs to verify themselves for further access control when they go to service homeowner's house. Each smart contract transaction in solidity is described. Finally, security and privacy issues for our proposed work are discussed.
IoT devices are widely used in the smart home, automobile, and aerospace areas. Note, however, that recent information on thefts and hacking have given rise to many problems. The aim of this study is to overcome the security weaknesses of existing Internet of Things (IoT) devices using Blockchain technology, which is a recent issue. This technology is used in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) access payment—KYD (Know Your Device)—based on the reliability of existing IoT devices. Thus, this paper proposes a BoT (Blockchain of Things) ecosystem to overcome problems related to the hacking risk of IoT devices to be introduced, such as logistics management and history management. There are also many security vulnerabilities in the sensor multi-platform from the IoT point of view. In this paper, we propose a model that solves the security vulnerability in the sensor multi-platform by using blockchain technology on an empirical model. The color spectrum chain mentioned in this paper suggests a blockchain technique completed by using the multiple-agreement algorithm to enhance Thin-Plate Spline (TPS) performance and measure various security strengths. In conclusion, we propose a radix of the blockchain’s core algorithm to overcome the weaknesses of sensor devices such as automobile, airplane, and close-circuit television (CCTV) using blockchain technology. Because all IoT devices use wireless technology, they have a fundamental weakness over wired networks. Sensors are exposed to hacking and sensor multi-platforms are vulnerable to security by multiple channels. In addition, since IoT devices have a lot of security weaknesses we intend to show the authentication strength of security through the color spectrum chain and apply it to sensor and multi-platform using Blockchain in the future.
Nikos Fotiou, Vasilios A. Siris, George C. Polyzos
Despite technological advances, most smart objects in the Internet of Things\n(IoT) cannot be accessed using technologies designed and developed for\ninteracting with powerful Internet servers. IoT use cases involve devices that\nnot only have limited resources, but also they are not always connected to the\nInternet and are physically exposed to tampering. In this paper, we describe\nthe design, development, and evaluation of a smart contract-based solution that\nallows end-users to securely interact with smart devices. Our approach enables\naccess control, Thing authentication, and payments in a fully decentralized\nsetting, taking at the same time into consideration the limitations and\nconstraints imposed by both blockchain technologies and the IoT paradigm. Our\nprototype implementation is based on existing technologies, i.e., Ethereum\nsmart contracts, which makes it realistic and fundamentally secure.\n
Medical care has become one of the most indispensable parts of human lives, leading to a dramatic increase in medical big data. To streamline the diagnosis and treatment process, healthcare professionals are now adopting Internet of Things (IoT)-based wearable technology. Recent years have witnessed billions of sensors, devices, and vehicles being connected through the Internet. One such technology-remote patient monitoring-is common nowadays for the treatment and care of patients. However, these technologies also pose grave privacy risks and security concerns about the data transfer and the logging of data transactions. These security and privacy problems of medical data could result from a delay in treatment progress, even endangering the patient's life. We propose the use of a blockchain to provide secure management and analysis of healthcare big data. However, blockchains are computationally expensive, demand high bandwidth and extra computational power, and are therefore not completely suitable for most resource-constrained IoT devices meant for smart cities. In this work, we try to resolve the above-mentioned issues of using blockchain with IoT devices. We propose a novel framework of modified blockchain models suitable for IoT devices that rely on their distributed nature and other additional privacy and security properties of the network. These additional privacy and security properties in our model are based on advanced cryptographic primitives. The solutions given here make IoT application data and transactions more secure and anonymous over a blockchain-based network.
The concept of virtual currencies is an emerging, and perhaps unexpected development in the modern financial world. Bitcoin can be regarded as the first successful virtual currency, followed by many other implementations. Analogous to paper currencies, it is apparent that privacy and anonymity are two pivotal considerations that affect the adoption of virtual currencies by users. However, many studies have identified several problems associated with the privacy and anonymity of Bitcoin. Consequently, a large number of attempts have been made to address these issues, yet it has been proven that many such solutions do not provide an acceptable level of anonymity. This survey presents an account of the level of anonymity achieved through those and attempts to provide a comparative evaluation across different constructions.