The advancements in information and communications technology have connected the disconnected, and changed the daily lives of everybody. The automobile industry is comparatively a laggard to connect its disconnected mobility, but new efforts are introduced to put the car on the network as so called connected cars. A single vehicle contains numerous parts to be assembled just as the numerous types of data which can be collected. Like all the connected things being exposed to a cybersecurity concern, the connected cars are also being exposed to cyber-attacks which can exploit your physical safety from privacy. This research proposes security-assured vehicle data platform through closed blockchain for the service provider who facilitates the data for business. The paper is composed of following. First, the paper identifies the type of data which contains the privacy concerns that can be collected from the vehicle. Second, the authors present how the data collected from the vehicle is valuable to multiple parties. Third, the study reviews why the blockchain is an appropriate technology to collect and redistribute the vehicle collected data. Last, the research proposes a vehicle data platform with a blockchain application which assures confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of the data. The expected contributions of this research are following: First, the research identifies and proposes the value of the vehicle collected data. Second, the study determines and tackles the potential exploits from cyber-attacks to the vehicle data platform. Third, the technical extensions from blockchain to the related industries and potential participants of the platform. The study also expects to extend the technical applications with actual vehicle collected data to closed blockchain.
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.
This chapter addresses the myth of decentralized governance of public blockchains, arguing that certain people who create, operate, or reshape them function much like fiduciaries of those who rely on these powerful data structures. Explicating the crucial functions that leading software developers perform, the chapter compares the role to Tamar Frankel’s conception of a fiduciary, and finds much in common, as users of these technologies place extreme trust in the leading developers to be both competent and loyal (ie, to be free of conflicts of interest). The chapter then frames the cost-benefit analysis necessary to evaluate whether, on balance, it is a good idea to treat these parties as fiduciaries, and outlines key questions needed to flesh out the fiduciary categorization. For example, which software developers are influential enough to resemble fiduciaries? Are all users of a blockchain ‘entrustors’ of the fiduciaries who operate the blockchain, or only a subset of those who rely on the blockchain? Finally, the chapter concludes with reflections on the broader implications of treating software developers as fiduciaries, given the existing accountability paradigm that largely shields software developers from liability for the code they create.
The current legal and economic infrastructure facilitating data collection practices and data analysis has led to extreme over-collection of data and the overall loss of personal privacy. Data over-collection has led to a secondary market for consumer data that is invisible to the consumer and results in a person's data being distributed far beyond their knowledge or control. In this paper, we propose a Data Market framework and design for personal data management and privacy protection in which the individual controls and profits from the dissemination of their data. Our proposed Data Market uses a market-based approach utilizing blockchain distributed ledgers for data distribution transparency and control and digital rights management technologies to provide for data confidentiality and secure distribution of the data. Our market framework and design provides an economic, legal, and advanced technology infrastructure that protects an individuals' right to privacy while nurturing a flourishing information economy.
Data protection is about protecting information about per-sons, which is currently flowing without much control –individuals can-not easily exercise the rights granted by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Individuals benefit from “free” services offered by companies in exchange of their data, but these companies keep their users’ data in “silos” that impede transparency on their use and possibilities of easy interactions. The introduction of the GDPR warrants control rights to individuals and the free portability of personal data from one entity to another. However it is still beyond the individual’s capability to perceive whether their data is managed in compliance with GDPR. To this regard, in this work the proposed approach consists in using decentralized mechanisms to provide transparency through distributed ledgers, data flow governance by using smart contracts and interoperability relying on semantic web technologies.
The abundance of data available on public blockchain environments might expose users to privacy breaching. Ethereum as the largest host of blockchain-based project currently has no robust protection against such threats. In this paper, a proof-of-concept decentralized application is implemented demonstrating privacy preserving transaction flow in Ethereum environment using zero-knowledge cryptography (zk-SNARK ). The design of the application utilized an experimental package, EY Nightfall and focuses on a blind auction scenario where personal informations needs to be protected. The proof-of-concept is then analysed to weigh the financial and temporal costs of the implementations against the security advantages and was found to be feasible for non fast-paced settings and significantly large transactions.
While the Internet provides enormous opportunities within development of communications and database systems it also endangers the processing of personal data unlawfully. With traditional database structure in focus the responsibility and accountability of said processed personal data was somewhat clear as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) entered the legal framework of the European Union’s member states in May 2018. Blockchain technology being the latest innovation in database structure challenges the applicability of the new regulation by introducing cryptography and a peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology. This thesis is the result of an attempt to analyze the personal data processed in public blockchains, i.e. Bitcoin, and its compliance with certain fundamental data protection rights stipulated in the GDPR such as the right to erasure of personal data. Furthermore, in relation to fundamental data protection rights violations are also subjects of accountability. While the new distributed ledger technology vastly increases the difficulty to determine a target for accountability the thesis also considers the traditional view on databases on which the GDPR was built upon. Thus, the thesis aims to further explore the relation between participants on the innovative blockchain and fundamental personal data protection rights in the GDPR.