In this paper, the importance of blockchain technology have been discussed and the generations of blockchain (Bitcoin and Ethereum) have been compared provided different aspects. The blockchain is a technology which allows direct transaction without involving third party. Also, it offers many facilities like high translucency, high safety and security, improved trace-ability, greater proficient and transactions' speed, and reduced costs. Moreover, the cryptocurrencies provide advance security level. The basic purpose of this study is to highlight different aspects of Blockchain, Bitcoin and Ethereum and to show which cryptocurrency is better approach. The research contributes to show the impact of this technology in different fields and a comparison of bitcoin and ethereum is presented to analyze and furnish a decision regarding the best among them.
Ethereum has become a widely used platform to enable secure, Blockchain-based financial and business transactions. However, many identified bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts have led to serious financial losses, which raises serious concerns about smart contract security. Thus, there is a significant need to better maintain smart contract code and ensure its high reliability. In this research: (1) Firstly, we propose an automated deep learning based approach to learn structural code embeddings of smart contracts in Solidity, which is useful for clone detection, bug detection and contract validation on smart contracts. We apply our approach to more than 22K solidity contracts collected from the Ethereum blockchain, results show that the clone ratio of solidity code is at around 90%, much higher than traditional software. We collect a list of 52 known buggy smart contracts belonging to 10 kinds of common vulnerabilities as our bug database. Our approach can identify more than 1000 clone related bugs based on our bug databases efficiently and accurately. (2) Secondly, according to developers' feedback, we have implemented the approach in a web-based tool, named SmartEmbed, to facilitate Solidity developers for using our approach. Our tool can assist Solidity developers to efficiently identify repetitive smart contracts in the existing Ethereum blockchain, as well as checking their contract against a known set of bugs, which can help to improve the users' confidence in the reliability of the contract. We optimize the implementations of SmartEmbed which is sufficient in supporting developers in real-time for practical uses. The Ethereum ecosystem as well as the individual Solidity developer can both benefit from our research.
Ethereum is a virtual currency that emerged in the aftermath of the ïŹnancial crisis. It allows people to bypass banks and traditional payment processes to pay for goods and services. The technology on which ethereum works is of great interest to us. It is called the Blockchain. Blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, which are linked and secured using cryptographic methods. It allows its users the ïŹexibility to transact with lower costs involved and at higher speeds. Blockchain ledgers are also decentralized and a ledger is maintained at each node of the network. The technology eliminates the need of any intermediaries in transactions while still solving the double spending problem. In this project, we highlight the tools and technologies that run on the Blockchain network and focus deeply on decentralized application. Keywords: Blockchain, decentralized, ethereum, ledger, technology Cite this Article: Sayali Karande, Ajay Matkar, Shruti Mirajkar, Pragati Pejlekar. Decentralized Voting System using Blockchain Technology. Research & Reviews: A Journal of Embedded System & Applications. 2020; 8(2): 15â20p.
Money is clearly a primary need of every human being that cannot be avoided, human needs can be realized by using money. Seeing from the lack of systematic literature review papers discussing cryptocurrency, this is a challenge as well as the main purpose of this paper. Along with the development of modernization and globalization which has now entered the industrial era 4.0 revolution there is a blockchain based technology, Cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is one of the developments of the blockchain that is often used as a decentralized digital currency. The word Cryptocurrency means a virtual currency that has no physical form, and Cryptocurrency also means that the transaction currency cannot be seen and is safe. This digital currency has many types such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, and many other types. Although it has no physical form, this currency functions the same as conventional currencies in general and has an exchange rate. Exchange rates on Cryptocurrency fluctuate which means unexpected, this is often exploited by traders. Cryptocurrency transactions in the form of forwarding from one individual to another individual online, therefore they deal directly without a third party. Every technology has advantages and disadvantages aside from efficiency and convenience, Cryptocurrency has the disadvantage of not having the authority responsible for dealing with all problems that occur in all transactions, and money laundering crimes also often occur, this is a challenge for how to utilize Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in the current era of globalization.
With the advancements in blockchain technology, it is possible to do business, manage supply chains, and do voting on it. Blockchain uses smart contracts for maintaining the rules and agreements between two parties. These smart contracts can be easily programmed using the Solidity programming language. Solidity is a statically typed, contract-oriented, high-level language employed for coding smart contracts. Using this, the developers can write robust, self-executing, and authoritative contracts. Solidity generates a byte code that executes on an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The solidity language is similar to other advanced languages such as C, JavaScript, and Python. It supports various libraries, complex user-defined data types, and OOP concepts like inheritance, among several other features. Some use cases of Solidity-coded smart contracts are systematic voting, auctions, and lottery. This chapterâs central focus is on clearly understanding the Solidity programming language. The need for Solidity is discussed. Its use case and implementation are addressed. Details regarding its environment setup and compilation are shown. Its important components are explained along with examples for a better understanding of syntax. By the end of this chapter, one will be familiar with Solidity and will be able to write smart contracts on it.
Smart contracts can be considered as a way to automate some of the conditions and obligations described in the contract. In this chapter, we cover the smart contract programming with a special emphasis on Solidity, properties associated with a smart contract account, fetching accounts from Ganache module, deployment of smart contracts with Web3 and Infura, testing smart contracts with open-source tools such as Remix and Mocha framework for asynchronous testing, test coverage reports, and use of any assertion library. Hence, this chapter highlights methods for writing smart contracts using various authoring tools. There are multiple smart contract authoring tools including Visual Studio. However, the easiest and fastest way for developing and testing the smart contracts is to use a browser-based tool known as Remix. Next, we start writing few smart contract applications with Solidity language and explaining all the common function types used in it. The concepts of gas and transactions are thoroughly discussed. Lastly, this chapter is laid out in a manner that it helps the reader to get the comprehensive idea of writing smart contracts.
The proliferation of IoT in various technological realms has resulted in the massive spurt of unsecured data. The use of complex security mechanisms for securing these data is highly restricted owing to the low-power and low-resource nature of most of the IoT devices, especially at the Edge. In this article, we propose to use blockchains for extending security to such IoT implementations. We deploy a Ethereum blockchain consisting of both regular and constrained devices connecting to the blockchain through wired and wireless heterogeneous networks. We additionally implement a secure and encrypted networked clock mechanism to synchronize the non-real-time IoT Edge nodes within the blockchain. Further, we experimentally study the feasibility of such a deployment and the bottlenecks associated with it by running necessary cryptographic operations for blockchains in IoT devices. We study the effects of network latency, increase in constrained blockchain nodes, data size, Ether, and blockchain node mobility during transaction and mining of data within our deployed blockchain. This study serves as a guideline for designing secured solutions for IoT implementations under various operating conditions such as those encountered for static IoT nodes and mobile IoT devices.
Summary Blockchain users are identified by addresses (public keys), which cannot be easily linked back to them without outâofânetwork information. This provides pseudoâanonymity, which is amplified when the user generates a new address for each transaction. Since all transaction history is visible to all users in public blockchains, finding affiliation between related addresses undermines pseudoâanonymity. Such affiliation information can be used to discriminate against addresses linked with undesired activities or can lead to deâanonymization if outâofânetwork information becomes available. In this work, we propose an approach to undermine pseudoâanonymity of blockchain transactions by linking together addresses that were used to deploy smart contracts, which were produced by the same authors. In our approach, we leverage stylometry techniques, widely used in the social science field for attribution of literary texts to their corresponding authors. The assumption underlying authorship attribution is the existence of a distinctive writing style, unique to an author and easily distinguishable from others. Drawing an analogy between literary text and smart contracts' source code, we explore the extent to which unique features of source code and byte code of Ethereum smart contracts can represent the coding style of smart contract developers. We show that even a small number of representative features leads to a sufficiently high accuracy in attributing smart contracts' code to its deployer's address. We further validate our approach on realâworld scammers' data and Ponzi schemeârelated contracts. Additionally, we provide an algorithm to extract distinctly contributing features per an entire dataset or per specific authors. We use this algorithm to extract and explore such features in our dataset and in the Ponzi schemeârelated dataset.
The blockchain is a distributed, decentralized, and immutable database system built on top of peer-to-peer (P2P) network through which digital assets can be transferred securely from all over the world. After the successful implementation of blockchain in Bitcoin, many applications and platforms evolved for the development of blockchain technology. Ethereum is one of the most widely used blockchain platforms for developing the Dapps. This chapter presents the specifics of functioning, drawbacks, and problems in the current crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter. Using Ethereum and the concept of smart contracts, the crowdfunding platforms can be implemented in a secure and profound way without being afraid of the fraudulent spending of the money raised through the funding. In this chapter, all the details and the technicalities in the implementation of the crowdfunding platform through Ethereum blockchain network are elucidated in a scholarly manner.
Abubakar Sadiq Sani, Dong Yuan, Ke Meng, Zhao Yang Dong
As supply chain attacks such as forged certificates and modified software updates to smart grid remain a major challenge, blockchain has emerged as an attractive solution for enabling supply chain security due to its transparent, immutability, and decentralisation characteristics. These attacks, which focus on compromising smart grid components and services, can have a cascading effect on smart grid operations. A large number of interdependencies between the components and services and reliance on trusted third parties hinders the ability to safely and securely identify and authenticate the components and services. We propose Idenx, a blockchain-based identity management system for mitigating supply chain attacks. Idenx uses the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to construct the identity of every component or service and further uses a Secure Pseudo-Random Function (PRF) with the identity to derive an attribute identifier for the component or service. Our approach for identifying and authenticating a component is based on Idenx smart contracts that facilitate supply chain security agreements without trusted third parties. We presented the security analysis of Idenx and the results show that it is resilient to supply chain attacks. Furthermore, we implemented a prototype of Idenx on Ethereum blockchain and evaluated it with respect to two real-world smart grid supply chain attacks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
OlaOluwa S. Yaya, Xuan Vinh Vo, Ahamuefula E. Ogbonna, Adeolu O. Adewuyi
Abstract This paper empirically provides support for fractional cointegration of high and low cryptocurrency price series, using particularly, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple; synchronized at different high time frequencies. The difference of high and low price gives the price range, and the rangeâbased estimator of volatility is more efficient than the returnâbased estimator of realized volatility. A more general fractional cointegration technique applied is the Fractional Cointegrating Vector Autoregressive framework. The results show that high and low cryptocurrency prices are actually cointegrated in both stationary and nonâstationary levels; that is, the range of highâlow price. It is therefore quite interesting to note that the fractional cointegration approach presents a lower measure of the persistence for the range compared to the fractional integration approach, and the results are insensitive to different time frequencies. The main finding in this work serves as an alternative volatility estimation method in cryptocurrency and other assets' price modelling and forecasting.
Neutral host SCPs represent a key element of the 5G vision of ultra-dense mobile networks. However, current business models mostly focus on multi-year agreements for large venues, such as stadiums and hotel chains. These business agreements are regulated through binding SLAs, which tend to be too cumbersome and costly for smaller-scale SCPs. As a result, the neutral host model does not scale up to its full potential. In this article, we propose a framework to enable the participation of small- to medium-sized players in the cellular market as providers offering network resources to MNOs. To this purpose, we review the current and emerging spectrum and technology opportunities that SCPs can use for neutral host deployments. We also propose the use of blockchain-enabled smart contracts as a simple and cost-efficient alternative to traditional SLAs for small-scale SCPs. To demonstrate this, we describe a proof of concept implementation of an Ethereum-based smart contract platform for best effort service between an SCP and an MNO. Our simulations on potential smart contract-based deployments in city center Dublin show that the received signal strength in the considered area will increase by an average of 10 percent.
The recent spurt of incidents related to copyrights and security breaches has led to the monetary loss of several digital content creators and publishers. These incidents conclude that the existing system lacks the ability to uphold the integrity of their published content. Moreover, some of the digital content owners rely on third parties, results in lack of ability to provide provenance of digital media. The question that needs to be addressed today is whether modern technologies can be leveraged to suppress such incidents and regain the confidence of creators and the audience. Fortunately, this paper presents a unique framework that empowers digital content creators to have complete control over the place of its origin, accessibility and impose restrictions on unauthorized alteration of their content. This framework harnesses the power of the Ethereum platform, a part of Blockchain technology, and uses S mart Contracts as a key component empowering the creators with enhanced control of their content and the corresponding audience.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Time synchronization among IoT devices is a fundamental requirement for efficient and reliable communication on a global scale. Common synchronization schemes such as NTP operate on a trust-based client-server model, which does not scale well in a decentralized network because single server failures can lead to a severe downtime before re-establishing synchronization. Public blockchains such as Ethereum provide a trustless network and tamper-proof time-stamped data that is freely available. In this paper, we leverage the availability of time information in the block headers, which are very small (several hundreds of bytes) compared to the full blocks and can be validated without participation in the mining process. Our approach uses two estimators that are fed with the timestamps from block headers as well as the elapsed time between consecutive block receptions to estimate the true time to an accuracy of one second. We evaluate our approach by extensive validation on blockchain data from different geographical locations across the globe and show that global synchronization can be established despite the non-deterministic behavior of blockchains such as mining difficulty, network latencies and forks.
Network resource management relies on trusted infrastructures. However, current trusted infrastructures have centralized or hierarchical structures where root nodes often have privileges over subtrees. Hacked or malicious roots may affect subtrees by modifying IP ownership, routing and so on. Therefore, a trusted and decentralized network resource management becomes crucial. The emergence of blockchain such as Ethereum becomes a leading candidate for achieving trusted and decentralized network resource management. In this paper, based on Ethereum, we design a trusted authentication scheme that includes voting policy, endorsement, credibility model and rebinding mechanism to ensure the credibility of entities. Our scheme can allocate, delegate and transfer network resources in a trusted and decentralized style. The experimental results verify the feasibility and security of our scheme. When an entity is hacked or malicious, its endorsement authentication is revoked and the entity does not have the right to manage the network resources. In addition, the overhead increased by the trusted authentication scheme is within a reasonable range.
Emanuele Di Pascale, Hamed Ahmadi, Linda Doyle, Irene Macaluso
Neutral host SCPs represent a key element of the 5G vision of ultra-dense mobile networks. However, current business models mostly focus on multi-year agreements for large venues, such as stadiums and hotel chains. These business agreements are regulated through binding SLAs, which tend to be too cumbersome and costly for smaller-scale SCPs. As a result, the neutral host model does not scale up to its full potential. In this article, we propose a framework to enable the participation of small- to medium-sized players in the cellular market as providers offering network resources to MNOs. To this purpose, we review the current and emerging spectrum and technology opportunities that SCPs can use for neutral host deployments. We also propose the use of blockchain-enabled smart contracts as a simple and cost-efficient alternative to traditional SLAs for small-scale SCPs. To demonstrate this, we describe a proof of concept implementation of an Ethereum-based smart contract platform for best effort service between an SCP and an MNO. Our simulations on potential smart contract-based deployments in city center Dublin show that the received signal strength in the considered area will increase by an average of 10 percent.
Distributed banking platforms and services forgo centralized banks to process financial transactions. For example, M-Pesa provides distributed banking service in the developing regions so that the people without a bank account can deposit, withdraw, or transfer money. The current distributed banking systems lack the transparency in monitoring and tracking of distributed banking transactions and thus do not support auditing of distributed banking transactions for accountability. To address this issue, this paper proposes a blockchain-based distributed banking (BDB) scheme, which uses blockchain technology to leverage its built-in properties to record and track immutable transactions. BDB supports distributed financial transaction processing but is significantly different from cryptocurrencies in its design properties, simplicity, and computational efficiency. We implement a prototype of BDB using smart contract and conduct experiments to show BDBâs effectiveness and performance. We further compare our prototype with the Ethereum cryptocurrency to highlight the fundamental differences and demonstrate the BDBâs superior computational efficiency.
Dingjie Sheng, Mingjun Xiao, An Liu, Xiang Zou · 6 authors
Crowdsourcing data trading is a novel paradigm in which the crowdsourcing technology is adopted to collect big data for trading. At present, existing crowdsourcing data trading systems usually depend on a trusted broker and haven't considered the truthfulness and the quality of data (QoD) simultaneously. Besides, copyright protection is the another issue that has not been properly addressed. To tackle these problems, we propose a Copyright-Preserving crowdsourcing data trading framework based on Blockchain, named CPchain, which mainly includes a smart contract. We design an auction algorithm based on semantic similarity to guarantee the truthfulness and individual rationality while ensuring QoD. Moreover, we combine digital fingerprint technology with blockchain to protect data copyright without a third-party certification authority. Furthermore, we develop a simple prototype of our proposed trading framework on the Ethereum test network. We have carried out a lot of experiments to demonstrate the significant performances of our framework.
Given the exploding number of the elderly and patients with chronic diseases and the uneven distribution of clinicians, it is economically impossible to continue traditional medicine. Hence, the healthcare sector has been gradually gravitating towards telemedicine, which applies intelligent systems for more comprehensive medical services with minimum costs. The criticality of data and process involved in telemedicine raise various concerns in terms of reliability and security. To this end, in this paper, we propose HapiChain, a blockchain-based framework for patient-centric telemedicine. HapiChain exploits blockchain technology to improve security, scalability, and reliability of medical workflows. Although HapiChain is patient-centric, it also helps the clinicians to save time and prevent unnecessary trips without improvising the level of treatment. In HapiChain, we embed two primary telemedicine services, namely telemonitoring and teleconsultation. For the former service, Hapicare, an existing healthcare monitoring system with self-adaptive coaching using probabilistic reasoning, is used. HapiChain then completes this service by adding teleconsultation services exploiting blockchain technology. The HapiChain framework includes three main layers: (i) interface layer, (ii) DApp layer, and (iii) blockchain layer. In the first layer, Hapicare is used to communicates with the users, i.e., patients and doctors. DApp layer includes the required procedures for security and scalability of HapiChain, namely smart contracts and distributed storage. The latter is achieved using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In the blockchain layer, Ethereum blockchain is used as a platform of DApps. We evaluate the HapiChain framework and the proposed teleconsultation services in a use-case.
Recently, smart-parking systems were proposed employing blockchain technology to ensure security, transparency, and availability of services. Building on a principle of complete system decentralization, we present the concept and implementation of a privacy-preserving solution for renting parking spaces. The anonymity of users is ensured by a combination of zero knowledge proofs, commitment schemes, differential privacy and fungible tokens. We compare implementations on three different public blockchain networks: Ethereum, EOS, and Tron. We analyze security and privacy of the proposed system and evaluate how ensuring anonymity affects user experience. We conduct user-oriented test to explore the performance (transaction time and cost) of the system in realistic situations. Results indicate that the proposed concept is feasible while employing current blockchain technology. EOS and Tron implementations currently provide performance that matches existing centralized systems. The performance of Ethereum implementation would probably not meet user expectations.
This study examines the information flow between prices and transaction volumes in the cryptocurrency market, where transfer entropy is used for measurement. We selected four cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and XRP) with large market values, and Bitcoin and BCH (Bitcoin Cash) for hard fork analysis; a hard fork is when a single cryptocurrency splits in two. By examining the real price data, we show that the long-term time series includes too much noise obscuring the local information flow; thus, a dynamic calculation is needed. The long-term and short-term sliding transfer entropy (TE) values and the corresponding [Formula: see text]-values, based on daily data, indicate that there is a dynamic information flow. The dominant direction of which is [Formula: see text]. In addition, the example based on minute Bitcoin data also shows a dynamic flow of information between price and transaction volume. The priceâvolume dynamics of multiple time scales helps to analyze the price mechanism in the cryptocurrency market.