Fernando Richter Vidal, Naghmeh Ivaki, Nuno Laranjeiro
Nowadays, blockchain has been adopted by applications that are beyond cryptocurrencies. In such applications, the data generated or transactions executed are likely to be altered (revoked) due to several reasons, including business requests, legislation, or the existence of bugs. In addition, most of the data are being created by smart contracts, which, in many cases, are built by developers with non-sophisticated development tools or lacking expertise, leading to code holding residual bugs. In blockchain systems, in which immutability is one of the most critical characteristics, implementing reliable, secure, and efficient (i.e., in terms of time) revocation is a difficult challenge. This paper reviews 8 revocation mechanisms identified in current literature and discusses the applicability of each solution and associated challenges. We expect that our analysis contributes to the definition of new or improved mechanisms for transaction and data revocation in blockchain systems.
The charity management system is a vital information management system. the information must be entirely open for society, and anyone has the right to supervise. Therefore, we use the characteristics of the blockchain to be tamper-proof, decentralized, autonomous, observable, verifiable, and information-sharing to develop a secure and robust charity information management system. Use the ring signature mechanism to protect the privacy of supervisors. A charity contract system was developed based on the Ethereum experimental environment, code the traditional charity text contract, storage and execution of contracts both are on the blockchain, which ensures the autonomy and reliability of the charity project and the trustworthiness and credibility. Our system is a novel innovation that can succeed the traditional public platform for charity.
Lin Jin, Shuai Hao, Yan Huang, Haining Wang · 5 authors
Domain Name System (DNS) is known to present privacy concerns. To this end, decentralized blockchains have been used to host DNS records, so that users can synchronize with the blockchain to maintain a local DNS database and resolve domain names locally. However, existing blockchain-based solutions either do not guarantee a domain name is controlled by its "true" owner; or have to resort to DNSSEC, a not yet widely adopted protocol, for verifying ownership. In this paper, we present DNSonChain, a new blockchain-based naming service compatible with DNS. It allows domain owners to claim their domain ownership on the blockchain where DNS records are hosted. The core function of DNSonChain is to validate the domain ownership in a decentralized manner. We propose a majority vote mechanism that randomly selects multiple participants (i.e., voters) in the system to vote for the authority of domain ownership. To provide resistance to attacks from fraudulent voters, DNSonChain requires two rounds of voting processes. Our security analysis shows that DNSonChain is robust against several types of security failures, able to recover from various attacks. We implemented a prototype of DNSonChain as an Ethereum decentralized application and evaluate it on an Ethereum Testnet.
Energy storage provides an effective way of shifting temporal energy demands and supplies, which enables significant cost reduction under time-of-use energy pricing plans. Despite its promising benefits, the cost of present energy storage remains expensive, presenting a major obstacle to practical deployment. A more viable solution to improve the cost-effectiveness is by sharing energy storage, such as community sharing, cloud energy storage and peer-to-peer sharing. However, revealing private energy demand data to an external energy storage operator may compromise user privacy, and is susceptible to data misuses and breaches. In this paper, we explore a novel approach to support energy storage sharing with privacy protection, based on privacy-preserving blockchain and secure multi-party computation. We present an integrated solution to enable privacy-preserving energy storage sharing, such that energy storage service scheduling and cost-sharing can be attained without the knowledge of individual users' demands. It also supports auditing and verification by the grid operator via blockchain. Furthermore, our privacy-preserving solution can safeguard against a majority of dishonest users, who may collude in cheating, without requiring a trusted third-party. We implemented our solution as a smart contract on real-world Ethereum blockchain platform, and provided empirical evaluation in this paper 1 .
In this paper, we focus on the video streaming as a concrete application of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology, and consider the problem of properly recording contributions made by each peer to make a fair differentiation of provided services. More specifically, we propose a simple implementation of distributed reward system for P2P video streaming by combining WebTorrent API and Ethereum-based smart contracts. We also conduct experiments to confirm that the prototype system certainly realizes a service differentiation.
The frequent electricity transactions of multienergy complementary Energy Internet Cluster result in higher operating costs and increased risks of information security by traditional transaction mode. Therefore, based on the blockchain technology, this paper proposes an electricity trading architecture suitable for Community Energy Internet Cluster. Firstly, the article elaborates the basic structure of Energy Internet and blockchain, and analyzes the adaptability of blockchain applied to Energy Internet Cluster electricity transaction. Secondly, the process of establishing electricity trading platform and deploying smart contract based on Ethereum network is described in detail. Thirdly, the power transaction framework of Community Energy Internet Cluster is constructed, and the double auction mechanism is applied to complete matchmaking tradeoff, and the smart contract is designed. Finally, a practical energy trading platform is built through the Ganache client of Ethereum network. Case studies demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the trading operation framework.
Zeeshan Raza, Irfan Ul Haq, Muhammad Muneeb, Omair Shafiq
Blockchain as a decentralized distributed ledger is revolutionizing the world with a secure design data storage mechanism. In the case of Bitcoin, mining involves a process of packing transactions in a block by calculating a random number termed as a nonce. The nonce calculation is done by special nodes called miners, and all the miners follow the Proof of Work (PoW) mining mechanism to perform the mining task. The transaction verification time in PoW-based blockchain systems, i.e., Bitcoin, is much slower than other digital transaction systems such as PayPal. It needs to be quicker if a system adapts PoW-based blockchain solutions, where there are thousands of transactions being computed at a time. Besides this, PoW mining also consumes a lot of energy to calculate the nonce of a block. Mining pools resulting into aggregated hashpower have been a popular solution to speed up the PoW mining, but they can be attacked by using different types of attacks. Parallel computing can be used to speed up the solo mining methods by utilizing the multiple processes of the contributing processors. In this research, we analyze various consensus mechanisms and see that the PoW-based blockchain systems have the limitations of low transaction confirmation time and high energy consumption. We also analyze various types of consensus layer attacks and their effects on miners and mining pools. To tackle these issues, we propose parallel PoW nonce calculation methods to accelerate the transaction verification process especially in solo mining. We have tested our techniques on different difficulty levels, and our proposed techniques yield better results than the traditional nonce computation mechanisms.
The 6G wireless network aims to forge a new spectrum, high technical standards of high time and phase synchronization accuracy, and 100% geographic coverage to connect trillions of devices flexibly and efficiently in the future. However, as connectivity increases and applications become novel, it is a challenge to ensure the privacy and security of networks and applications. Blockchain is seen as a promising technology that can improve efficiency, reduce costs, mitigate security, and privacy threats, and establish a trusted data-sharing environment. This article presents a trusted framework based on blockchain technology from the perspective of how to build a trusted software-defined content delivery network. As the peer node of the blockchain, the software-defined network (SDN) controller establishes trust between different regions and a wide range of participants, realizing peer autonomy and flexible business orchestration. The two main purposes of the architecture are to enhance the security of network communications and establish trust relationships between entities in different domains. It includes trusted communication based on routing sandbox, service choreography based on blockchain, proxy server selection strategy based on model predictive control (MPC), and optimization consensus based on practical Byzantine fault tolerance. Some simulation experiments verify the effectiveness of the theoretical method.
With the development of blockchain and digital currencies, central banks all over the world are accelerating the process of CBDC development. However, it is still controversial on adoption of blockchain in CBDC design. In the paper, we analyze both functional and non-functional requirements of CBDC design, and make a literature review on blockchain based CBDC schemes. Analysis findings show that permissioned blockchain is more suitable for CBDC than permissionless blockchain. Besides, there are some challenges in blockchain based CBDC, such as performance, scalability, and cross-chain interoperability. Our analysis is timely and can provide guidelines for blockchain based CBDC design.
Sri Nikhil Gupta Gourisetti, Ümit Cali, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo, Elizabeth Escobar · 12 authors
The global trend toward integration of distributed energy resources is opening doors to advanced, complex, and distributed marketplaces. Such advanced ecosystems, where utility-owned and non utility-owned assets can contribute toward grid operations, generally require distributed communication and grid architectures. We posit the potential of using Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) in supporting such applications, although their full potential has not been fully used, for example in designing long-term scalable solutions in operational technology applications. This is partly due to the lack of standardization across and between different DLTs, as well as other supporting building blocks (e.g., communication protocols). This paper attempts to address this gap by proposing a DLT cybersecurity stack specifically designed for researchers, DLT technology developers, and end users (such as utilities). The DLT cybersecurity stack has been notionally mapped to related cybersecurity components, namely the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, and existing Smart Grid architecture frameworks. In addition, the paper discusses several cybersecurity implications, and demonstrates the potential uses of the DLT cybersecurity stack through multiple power and energy use cases. It is important to note that the stack can be also applied to the DLT use cases that are outside the power and energy domain. This work was performed by the Cybersecurity Task Force under the IEEE P2418.5 Blockchain for Energy Standard working group that part of the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Smart Buildings, Loads, and Customer Systems (SBLC) technical committee.
Roman-Valentyn Tkachuk, Dragos Ilie, Kurt Tutschku, Remi Robert
Digital marketplaces were created recently to accelerate the delivery of applications and services to customers. Their appealing feature is to activate and dynamize the demand, supply, and development of digital goods, applications, or services. By being an intermediary between producer and consumer, the primary business model for a marketplace is to charge the producer with a commission on the amount paid by the consumer. However, most of the time, the commission is dictated by the marketplace facilitator itself and creates an imbalance in value distribution, where producer and consumer sides suffer monetarily. In order to eliminate the need for a centralized entity between the producer and consumer, a blockchain-based decentralized digital marketplace concept was introduced. It provides marketplace actors with the tools to perform business transactions in a trusted manner and without the need for an intermediary. In this work, we provide a survey on Telecommunication Services Marketplaces (TSMs) which employ blockchain technology as the main trust enabling entity in order to avoid any intermediaries. We provide an overview of scientific and industrial proposals on the blockchain-based online digital marketplaces at large, and TSMs in particular. We consider in this study the notion oftelecommunication servicesas any service enabling the capability for information transfer and, increasingly, information processing provided to a group of users by a telecommunications system. We discuss the main standardization activities around the concepts of TSMs and provide particular use-cases for the TSM business transactions such as SLA settlement. Also, we provide insights into the main foundational services provided by the TSM, as well as a survey of the scientific and industrial proposals for such services. Finally, a prospect for future developments is given.
While many researchers adopt a sharding approach to design scaling blockchains, few works have studied the transaction placement problem incurred by sharding protocols. The widely-used hashing placement algorithm renders an overwhelming portion of transactions as cross-shard. In this paper, we analyze the high cost of cross-shard transactions and reveal that most Bitcoin transactions have simple dependencies and can become single-shard under a placement algorithm taking transaction dependencies into account. In addition, we perform a case study of OptChain, which is the state-of-the-art transaction placement algorithm for sharded blockchains, and find a shortcoming of it. A fix is proposed, and our evaluation results demonstrate that the fix helps OptChain improve the system throughput by 4x.
Blockchain eliminates the need for trusted third-party intermediaries in business by enabling decentralised architecture design in software applications. However, the vulnerabilities in on-chain autonomous decision-makings and cumbersome off-chain coordination lead to serious concerns about blockchain's ability to behave in a trustworthy and efficient way. Blockchain governance has received considerable attention to support the decision-making process during the use and evolution of blockchain. Nevertheless, the conventional governance frameworks do not apply to blockchain due to its distributed architecture and decentralised decision process. These inherent features lead to the absence of a clear source of authority in blockchain ecosystem. Currently, there is a lack of systematic guidance on the governance of blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we present a comprehensive blockchain governance framework, which elucidates an integrated view of the degree of decentralisation, decision rights, incentives, accountability, ecosystem, and legal and ethical responsibilities. The above aspects are formulated as six high-level principles for blockchain governance. We demonstrate a qualitative analysis of the proposed framework, including case studies on five extant blockchain platforms, and comparison with existing blockchain governance frameworks. The results show that our proposed framework is feasible and applicable in a real-world context.
Blockchain technology introduces a new approach to storing information, implementing tasks and functions, and building trust between participating nodes. Although blockchain technology has received extensive attention in various application contexts in recent years, the issue of privacy and security remains the primary focus of discussions of the blockchain. The use of hash algorithms can provide secure blockchain integration, and many hash algorithms offer solutions to data integrity and security problems within the context of blockchain technology. However, they are also subject to problems related to time, lack of resources, and memory usage. In this research, an algorithm is proposed to generate a hash based on chaos theory (1D and 2D) logistic maps and the new Merkle-Damgård construction. Hash outputs are tested in terms of time, complexity, and collision. The proposed algorithm is evaluated according to Jaccard similarity and various coefficient measurements, and it was found that the similarity between the inputs and the outputs does not exceed 0.1932 percent. All outcomes indicated successful performance. The proposed algorithm was implemented on a blockchain-based transaction flow system, consumed fewer resources than other hash algorithms (such as SHA1, SHA2, and MD5), and requires mere milliseconds to implement.
Social media is becoming one of the dominant ways to communicate. Before social media, people were extremely limited in their means to interact with others, and they were limited largely to the people that they knew in person. However, this impact on people in real life has damaged privacy. Alternative solutions have been proposed in order to overcome current social media issues. In this direction, blockchain is one of the most promising, and several blockchain-based social media have been proposed. In this paper, we analyze blockchain online social media from the technical point of view in order to understand the current trend of social DApps and to describe which characteristics are important in a blockchain-based social media scenario. We analyze real data by exploiting one of the most well-known DApps sites, and we compare current technologies in order to highlight which ones can be better applied to a real social scenario, such as Facebook.
Martin Djonov, Miroslav Galabov, Tsvetanka Georgieva‐Trifonova
Internet of Things (IoT) is one relatively new technology, which aims to make our lives easier by automating our daily processes. This article would aim to deliver an idea how to prevent the IoT technology, delivering maliciously and bad things and how to scale. The intention of this research is to explain how a specific implementation of a Blockchain network, enterprise-grade permissioned distributed ledger framework called Hyperledger Fabric, can be used to resolve the security and scalability issues in an IoT network.
Xuan Chen, Ryota Nakada, Kien Nguyen, Hiroo Sekiya
There is an increasing interest in adopting distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) to IoT applications that enable secured interaction between IoT devices without third-party involvement. Among recent advanced DLTs, Ethereum blockchain and IOTA Tangle are emerging as promising candidates for various IoT use cases. Both offer various IoT-friendly features such as lightweight crypto, open-source implementations, energy-efficient operations, etc. So far, the two technologies have only been qualitatively evaluated together in the literature. There has not yet been a performance comparison between IOTA and Ethereum in an IoT application. To address the issue, we build an IoT environment that can run both DLTs and compare their performance. We thoroughly investigate the DLTs' three layers (i.e., Consensus, Network, and Storage layers). In the first layer, we evaluate the CPU utilization and number of transaction; in the second one, the DLTs' network performance is compared. Meanwhile, disk and memory usage are derived in the third layer. The results show that IOTA performs better with most performance metrics.
This paper tackles the problem of using and paying a network service with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) at a fine granularity in the future wireless network. We propose the IOTA-based QoS guaranteed Flow system (IQF), where a user and service provider can exchange the IOTA cryptocurrency for the guaranteed network resources, such as latency and bandwidth. First, IQF uses the IOTA Tangle, a lightweight, efficient distributed ledger technology, for its payment and transaction record. Second, IQF adopts Software Defined Networking to realize the guaranteed delay and bandwidth provision. We have implemented the IQF systems using the mininet-wifi emulator, an SDN controller (i.e., POX), and IOTA clients. Moreover, we have evaluated the service provisioning algorithms with a micropayment of IQF with the test Tangle (i.e., comnet). The evaluation results show that IQF has successfully achieved the delay and bandwidth provision with all the transactions stored in comnet.
Distributed storage can store data in multiple devices or servers to improve data security. However, in today's explosive growth of network data, traditional distributed storage scheme is faced with some severe challenges such as insufficient performance, data tampering, and data lose. A distributed storage scheme based on blockchain has been proposed to improve security and efficiency of traditional distributed storage. Under this scheme, the following improvements have been made in this paper. This paper first analyzes the problems faced by distributed storage. Then proposed to build a new distributed storage blockchain scheme with sharding blockchain. The proposed scheme realizes the partitioning of the network and nodes by means of blockchain sharding technology, which can improve the efficiency of data verification between nodes. In addition, this paper uses polynomial commitment to construct a new verifiable secret share scheme called PolyVSS. This new scheme is one of the foundations for building our improved distributed storage blockchain scheme. Compared with the previous scheme, our new scheme does not require a trusted third party and has some new features such as homomorphic and batch opening. The security of VSS can be further improved. Experimental comparisons show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces storage and communication costs.
Blockchain technology is fast becoming the most transformative technology of recent times and has created hype and optimism, gaining much attention from the public and private sectors. It has been widely deployed in decentralized crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the success story of a public blockchain application that propelled intense research and development into blockchain technology. However, scalability remains a crucial challenge. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are encountering low-efficiency issues with low throughput, high transaction latency, and huge energy consumption. The scalability issue in public Blockchains is hindering the provision of optimal solutions to businesses and industries. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on the public blockchain scalability issue and challenges. The scope of this SLR includes an in-depth investigation into the scalability problem of public blockchain, associated fundamental factors, and state-of-art solutions. This project managed to extract 121 primary papers from major scientific databases such as Scopus, IEEE explores, Science Direct, and Web of Science. The synthesis of these 121 articles revealed that scalability in public blockchain is not a singular term. A variety of factors are allied to it, with transaction throughput being the most discussed factor. In addition, other interdependent vita factors include storages, block size, number of nodes, energy consumption, latency, and cost. Generally, each term is somehow directly or indirectly reliant on the consensus model embraced by the blockchain nodes. It is also noticed that the contemporary available consensus models are not efficient in scalability and thus often fail to provide good QoS (throughput and latency) for practical industrial applications. Our findings exemplify that the Internet of Things (IoT) would be the leading application of blockchain in industries such as energy, finance, resource management, healthcare, education, and agriculture. These applications are, however, yet to achieve much-desired outcomes due to scalability issues. Moreover, Onchain and offchain are the two major categories of scalability solutions. Sagwit, block size expansion, sharding, and consensus mechanisms are examples of onchain solutions. Offchain, on the other hand, is a lighting network.
Shailesh Khapre, Shraddha P. Satpathy, Chandramohan Dhasarathan
The essence of blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger system; the IoT is formed by accessing and interconnecting a large number of heterogeneous terminals and has a natural distributed feature. Therefore, the combination of the two IoT blockchains is widely optimistic. At the same time, due to the heterogeneity of IoT sensing terminals, limited computing storage, and data transmission capabilities, the IoT blockchain is facing greater challenges, among which cryptographic consensus technology has become a key issue. In this chapter, based on the summary of the current blockchain consensus algorithm, applicability to the IoT-blockchain has been analyzed, the application status of several major IoT-blockchain platforms and consensus mechanisms have been introduced, and also the IoT-blockchain research progress on optimization of consensus mechanism has been expounded. Looking forward to the optimization techniques of the IoT blockchain, potential research directions have been summarized.