Nitish Andola, Raghav, Sourabh Prakash, S. Venkatesan · 5 authors
Medical records need to be private. At the same time, it must be accessible for regular interaction authorized users. Ethereum-based blockchain allows privacy preserving sharing of decentralized databases with cryptographic data obfuscation and access control. In this work, we analyze the limitations of Ethereum-based blockchain with respect to electronic health record (EHR) sharing through a third party. A Ethereum framework for decentralized and transactional privacy preserving data sharing is proposed to address the needs of different stakeholders like patients, providers and other third involved in the generation and access of patient data records. A secure approach for healthcare management system using blockchain (SHEMB) obviates the need for a trusted third party for storing data. SHEMB uses symmetric searchable encryption technique to speedup the access to the records using the search query provided by the patient. The experimental results indicates the practical and secure nature of SHEMB.
The massive spread of harmful content on the internet is hard to filter. Meanwhile, blacklist content filtering cannot keep up with the rapid growth of content creations. As a result, an extra protection layer is required to provide a safe internet for children. However, implementing a network or application firewall requires an expert's knowledge and complicated maintenance. In this paper, we proposed a framework to automate internet protection by using whitelist packet filtering. We use the blockchain smart contract as the secure collaboration media to determine the filtering rules. Meanwhile, the SDN controller automates the packet filtering by installing the determined forwarding rules into the network switches. We evaluate the whitelist packet filtering by using Mininet for the network emulation and Ethereum Rinkeby networks for the smart contract implementation. The result shows that the proposed whitelist system can filter the packet without incurring significant latency. It supports fast content update with a maximum speed of ≈ 1200 valid contents per-minute by using a three-votes verification system.
Blockchain technology can be used to solve the problem of the management of the digital copyright. Though some related ideas have been proposed, few papers propose a complete digital copyright management system based on public chain and simulation. A system based on public chain enables copyright owners and users to trade directly without resorting to a centralized organization. In this paper, a secure digital copyright management system based on Ethereum is proposed. Firstly, a model is established based on smart contracts and InterPlanetary File System. Secondly, use the improved ELGamal encryption algorithm to encrypt session data and protect privacy and evaluate the efficiency of the improved algorithm. Lastly, a transaction watermark that is consistent with the transaction information on the chain is added to the image data, providing proof for the piracy.
QR Code Applications and Technologies
Digital Rights Management and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Distributed consensus mechanisms have been widely researched and made popular with a number of blockchain-based token applications, such as Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Although these general-purpose platforms have matured for scale and security, they are designed for human incentive and continue to require currency reward and contract functions that are not requisite in machine communications. Redes Chain is a custom designed blockchain, built to support fully decentralized self-organization in wireless networks-without a cryptocurrency or contract dependency.
A major yet trivial problem in the banking industry right now is how tedious and costly the traditional Know- Your-Customer(KYC) process is. The process is also tiresome for customers as they need to undergo the same process for each bank or financial institution with which they intend to work. Personal experiences of people dictate the cumbersome nature of the process, thereby demanding an efficacious alternative. Through this paper, we intend to do exactly that. We propose a new solution based on Distributed Ledger Technology or Blockchain technology, which will reduce the traditional KYC verification process cost for Institutions and cut short the general time line of the completion of the process while making it smoother for the customers. Major enhancement in our solution over the conventional methods is that the whole verification process is conducted only once for each customer, irrespective of number of institutions he or she wishes to be linked to. Also, since we are using the DLT, verification results can be securely shared with the customers thereby increasing transparency. Following this approach, we developed a Proof of Concept (POC) with the Ethereum API, websites as endpoints and an android app as front office; realising the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach. All in all, this approach improves customer experience, reduces cost overheads, and increases transparency in the process of onboarding a customer.
In the era of the fourth industrial revolution (In-dustry 4.0), many Management Information Systems (MIS) integrate real-time data collection and use technologies such as big data, machine learning, and cloud computing, to foster a wide range of creative innovations, business improvements, and new business models and processes. However, the integration of blockchain with MIS offers the blockchain trilemma of security, decentralisation and scalability. MIS are usually Web 2.0 client-server applications that include the front end web systems and back end databases; while blockchain systems are Web 3.0 decentralised applications. MIS are usually private systems that a single party controls and manages; while blockchain systems are usually public, and any party can join and participate. This paper clarifies the key concepts and illustrates with figures, the implementation of public, private and consortium blockchains on the Ethereum platform. Ultimately, the paper presents a framework for building a private blockchain system on the public Ethereum blockchain. Then, integrating the Web 2.0 client-server applications that are commonly used in MIS with Web 3.0 decentralised blockchain applications.
Gaganjeet Singh Reen, Manasi Mohandas, S. Venkatesan
Electronic Health Records(EHR) are gaining a lot of popularity all over the world. The current EHR systems however have their fair share of problems related to privacy and security. We have proposed a mechanism which provides a solution to most of these problems. Using a permissioned Ethereum blockchain allows the hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Our mechanism uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to ensure the secure storage and selective access of records. It gives patients full control over their health records and also allows them to grant or revoke a hospital's access to his/her records. We have used IPFS(inter planetary file system) to store records which has the advantage of being distributed and ensures immutability of records. The proposed model also maintains the statistics of diseases without violating the privacy of any patient.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Stephen Wooley, Andrew N. Edmonds, Arunkumar Bagavathi, Siddharth Krishnan
Explosive growth in the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in recent years has attracted the attention of many speculators. Unlike traditional currencies, cryptocurrencies are not backed by any government agencies resulting in prices being strongly influenced by public opinion. Understanding the relationship between cryptocurrency prices and the public sentiment can lead to improved predictions of price movement. In this paper, we give an exploratory analysis of a network of 24 Reddit communities related to Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrencies to analyze Bitcoin and Ethereum price movements. We engineer a set of 112 time series features from submissions and comments made on the selected subreddits, run Granger causality tests on engineered time series against cryptocurrency price movements, and use these time series to forecast the cryptocurrency price movements using classification models. Results from these models support the Granger causality test results showing that with only lagged price values and lagged values from a single Reddit data derived feature, the direction of Bitcoin and Ethereum price movements can be predicted with 74.2% and 73.1% accuracy respectively.
Zakaria Abou El Houda, Abdelhakim Hafid, Lyes Khoukhi
The recent proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for the emergence of smart cities, where billions of IoT devices are interconnected to provide novel pervasive services and automate our daily lives tasks (e.g., smart healthcare, smart home). However, as the number of insecure IoT devices continues to grow at a rapid rate, the impact of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks is growing rapidly. With the advent of IoT botnets such as Mirai, the view towards IoT has changed from enabler of smart cities into a powerful amplifying tool for cyberattacks. This motivates the development of new techniques to provide flexibility and efficiency of decision making on the attack collaboration in a software defined networks (SDN) context. The new emerging technologies, such as SDN and blockchain, introduce new opportunities for low-cost, efficient and flexible DDoS attacks collaboration for the IoT based environment. In this paper, we propose Co-IoT, a blockchain-based framework for collaborative DDoS mitigation; it uses the concept of smart contracts (i.e., Ethereum's smart contracts) to facilitate the collaboration among SDN-based domains and transfer attacks information in a decentralized manner. The implementation of Co-IoT is deployed on Ethereum official test network Ropsten [1]. The experimental results confirm that Co-IoT achieves flexibility, efficiency, security and cost effectiveness making it a promising approach to mitigate large scale DDoS attacks.
Omaji Samuel, Nadeem Javaid, Muhammad Awais, Zeeshan Ahmed · 6 authors
The emergence of smart home appliances has generated a high volume of data on smart meters belonging to different customers. However, customers can not share their data in deregulated smart grids due to privacy concern. Although, these data are important for the service provider in order to provide an efficient service. To encourage the customers' participation, this paper proposes an access control mechanism by fairly compensating customers for their participation in data sharing via blockchain using the concept of differential privacy. We addressed the computational issues of existing ethereum blockchain by proposing a proof of authority consensus protocol through the Pagerank mechanism in order to derive the reputation scores. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed model to minimize privacy risk, and maximize aggregator's profit. In addition, gas consumption, as well as the cost of the computational resources, is reduced.
S. Umamaheswari, Sruthi Sreeram, N. Kritika, D. R. Jyothi Prasanth
Blockchain's most basic promise for the agriculture industry is that it removes the need for third parties otherwise required to ensure trust within buyer-seller relationships, or for that matter any source-destination relationship. In an environment enabled by blockchain technology, transactions become peer-to-peer with no use for intermediaries.Apart from providing the means to transact peer-to-peer, blockchain can create `smart contracts' that execute the terms of any agreement when specified conditions are met. Every time value changes hands, whether physical products, services or money, the transaction can be documented, creating a permanent history of the product or transaction, from source to ultimate destination. Blockchain can be of great help in this sector. A transparent and trusted system can be built by putting all the information about agricultural events on a blockchain. Farmers can also get instant data related to the seed quality, climate environment related data, payments, soil moisture, demand and sale price, etc. all on a single platform.The intent of this project is to store the sensor data in a blockchain and build a smart contract deployed in the Ethereum blockchain to facilitate buying and selling of crops and land.
Subject of Research. The paper considers the process of generating reports in electronic learning systems. The aim is to optimize learning process management in generating reports using blockchain technologies. The paper analyzes existing learning management systems and their tools for generating and analyzing reports. Blockchain technology is reviewed in terms of educational opportunities. Method. The process of generating reports in the learning management system is presented as a mathematical model. It has been proven that the use of blockchain technology simplifies this process, since blockchain tools automatically register network events. A model for generating reports in the learning system using blockchain transactions has been developed. The model is implemented in a test version of the Ethereum blockchain using the smart contract mechanism. A smart contract records heterogeneous data of learning events to the blockchain without using special data structures. The blockchain stores data in a unified registry and registers event timestamp and event author’s address by itself. Event data is available through the geth console oriented for the Ethereum blockchain. Main Results. A method of learning process documenting using blockchain technology has been developed. The method does not require any special data model for storing learning events data, as well as special mechanism for recording event timestamp and event author’s address. Practical Relevance. Research results show that blockchain application provides for optimization of the learning process management.
Blockchain technology and, in particular, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies offer us information that has never been seen before in the financial world. In contrast to fiat currencies, all transactions of crypto-currencies and crypto-tokens are permanently recorded on distributed ledgers and are publicly available. As a result, this allows us to construct a transaction graph and to assess not only its organization but to glean relationships between transaction graph properties and crypto price dynamics. The ultimate goal of this paper is to facilitate our understanding on horizons and limitations of what can be learned on crypto-tokens from local topology and geometry of the Ethereum transaction network whose even global network properties remain scarcely explored. By introducing novel tools based on topological data analysis and functional data depth into Blockchain Data Analytics, we show that Ethereum network (one of the most popular blockchains for creating new crypto-tokens) can provide critical insights on price strikes of crypto-tokens that are otherwise largely inaccessible with conventional data sources and traditional analytic methods.
Yusuf Muhammad Tukur, Dhavalkumar Thakker, Irfan‐Ullah Awan
The Internet of Things (IoT) has allured so much interest since inception thanks to the amazing capabilities it offers. Consequently, it has found tremendous applications and has been employed to meet increasing automation and computerization demands of public and private organizations where it handles enormous critical information. However, the major issue surrounding the IoT is, it is exposed to various physical and cyber threats including the significantly harmful insider threat. In this work, we approach the insider threat problem to IoT from the viewpoint of examining the influence of tampering with state of the sensing environment on the overall IoT system. Our aim is to investigate how altering the environment state in perception layer of the IoT affects the integrity of the data read by sensors; and provide mechanism to preserve the integrity of the system data to ensure accurate analytics and processing. We focused on threat models where insiders compromise physical properties about which data are collected and transmitted, deceiving the sensors into reading inaccurate data. As initial solution to the problem, we developed a framework that integrates Ethereum blockchain with edge computing to perform checks and preserve integrity of incoming sensor data before being analyzed, processed and stored.
Amr M. Khalifa, Ayman M. Bahaa-Eldin, Mohamed Sobh
Blockchain as a distributed data structure or ledger is perceived to provide solutions in manifold areas beyond their prominent form of digital currency; they also showed several challenges. As enhancements to the existing blockchain systems are being proposed and developed, alternative underlying data structures were driven to solve some of the challenges facing them whilst maintaining their key ideas. We start by explaining the key concepts of the blockchain as implemented in Bitcoin and Ethereum. From there, we explain the challenges and survey on the alternative data structures along with their consensus mechanisms. We find a generalization in using hash pointers in the alternative data structures and unfold the current research and implementation directions for solutions to the challenges.
Hamid Raza Malik, Ahsan Manzoor, Mika Ylianttila, Madhusanka Liyanage
Smart grids lay the foundation for future communities. Smart homes, smart buildings, smart streets, and smart offices are built when intelligent devices piles on intelligent devices. To reach the maximum capacity, they all must be supported by an intelligent power supply. For optimal and real-time electricity consumption, monitoring and trading, blockchain posses several potential benefits in its application to electricity infrastructure. To analyze the performance of the blockchain-based smart grid, this paper presents a virtual smart grid. A smart grid equipped with smart contracts, capable of executing virtual activities is evaluated and possible strengths and weaknesses are discussed. The paper draws a performance analysis of the blockchain-based smart grid by using the Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric-based implementations.
Access control has been recognized as a critical issue for preventing unauthorized access to the resources in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. This paper proposes an Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) framework for IoT systems by using the emerging Ethereum smart contract technology. The framework consists of one Policy Management Contract (PMC), one Subject Attribute Management Contract (SAMC), one Object Attribute Management Contract (OAMC) and one Access Control Contract (ACC). The PMC, SAMC and OAMC are responsible for storing and managing the ABAC policies, the attributes of subjects (i.e., entities accessing resources) and the attributes of objects (i.e., resources being accessed), respectively. When receiving access requests, the ACC retrieves the subject attributes and object attributes as well as the corresponding policy from the SAMC, OAMC and PMC to perform the access control. Combining the ABAC model and the blockchain technology, this framework is expected to achieve distributed, trustworthy and fine-grained access control for IoT systems. To show the feasibility of the proposed framework, we construct a local private Ethereum blockchain system to implement the four smart contracts and also conduct experiments to test the monetary and time cost.
Yuta Nakamura, Yuanyu Zhang, Masahiro Sasabe, Shoji Kasahara
The large-scale and trustless nature of the Internet of Things (IoT) calls for distributed and trustworthy access control schemes to prevent unauthorized resource access. This paper proposes a Capability-Based Access Control (CapBAC) scheme by applying the emerging Ethereum blockchain technology. This scheme uses Ethereum smart contracts, i.e., executable codes residing in the blockchain, to store and manage the capability tokens, i.e., special data structures that maintain the allowed actions of a user (i.e., subject) on a certain resource (i.e., object). To provide more fine-grained access control and more flexible token management, this scheme defines capability tokens in units of actions, i.e., by dividing a conventional capability token containing multiple actions into multiple ones with each being associated with a certain action. In addition, this scheme uses a delegation graph instead of the delegation tree in existing smart contract-based CapBAC schemes to store the token delegation relationship among the subjects. By storing the tokens and the delegation graph in smart contracts, this scheme allows object owners to verify the ownership and validity of the capability tokens of the subjects. To demonstrate the feasibility of the scheme, we constructed a local Ethereum blockchain network and conducted extensive experiments.
Alok Jaiswal, Sheetal Chandel, Ajit Muzumdar, G. M. Madhu · 6 authors
Blockchain has transformed business processes from centralized to decentralized. It can better help in making food grain supply chain fully decentralized with peer to peer (P2P) business by removing intermediaries, and thus reducing the overall cost at end user side with better returns to farmers. In this paper, we explore a blockchain technology and the required smart contracts for trustworthy and incentivized P2P trading of food grains. We propose different smart contracts such as food grain supply, bidding, trading and utilization, which are deployed on ethereum blockchain for the decentralized trading of food grains. We use Vickrey-Clarkegrove (Vickrey auction) method for achieving the incentivized trading for both farmers and end users. The proposed framework offers P2P trading, security of food grain data, data transparency, user's anonymity and incentives in the trading process. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated and analyzed in terms of fulfilling the requirements of food grain supply management.
Election is a significant job in our Elective Government. As technology progress with upcoming days, its impact becomes more optimistic. One such outcome is the Blockchain. It is possible to transform the process of voting system due to its decentralized property of immutability. Voting in most places are non-transparent and common with the corruption. In this paper we proposed the technology, is Blockchain technology. The concept of this paper is to develop a decentralized application for voting system. From there, the transaction votes are stored in the blockchain could be illustrated by the examining the block hashes. The outcome of the project shows the transaction of tokens from voter’s wallet into the candidate’s wallet. This application can deploy on a test platform using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) it provides the network to test the application. From there, the integrity of the blockchain technology is illustrated.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt. of India., Om Pal, Surendra Singh, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt. of India.
Blockchain Technology is one of the most popular technologies of present days. This technology has the capability to eliminate the requirement of third party to validate the transactions over the Peer-to-Peer network. Due to various features of Blockchain like smart contract, consensus mechanism, network transactions are completed securely, efficiently and timely. This technology is very useful in many areas including medical, IoT, e-Governance services, smart cities, taxation, supply chain, banking etc. In this paper, we discuss the Blockchain Technology in detail, its data structure, open source platform like Ethereum and Hyperledger, technical aspects of this technology, possible applications of this technology, challenges and limitations in adaptation of this technology.
The booming Internet of Things (IoT) market has drawn tremendous interest from cyber attackers. The centralized cloud-based IoT service architecture has serious limitations in terms of security, availability, and scalability, and is subject to single points of failure (SPOF). Recently, accommodating IoT services on blockchains has become a trend for better security, privacy, and reliability. However, blockchain's shortcomings of high cost, low throughput, and long latency make it unsuitable for IoT applications. In this paper, we take a retrospection of existing blockchain-based IoT solutions and propose a framework for efficient blockchain and IoT integration. Following the framework, we design a novel blockchain-assisted decentralized IoT remote accessing system, RS-IoT, which has the advantage of defending IoT devices against zero-day attacks without relying on any trusted third-party. By introducing incentives and penalties enforced by smart contracts, our work enables "an economic approach" to thwarting the majority of attackers who aim to achieve monetary gains. Our work presents an example of how blockchain can be used to ensure the fairness of service trading in a decentralized environment and punish misbehaviors objectively. We show the security of RS-IoT via detailed security analyses. Finally, we demonstrate its scalability, efficiency, and usability through a proof-of-concept implementation on the Ethereum testnet blockchain.
Yongjie Ye, Jingjing Zhang, Weigang Wu, Xiapu Luo · 5 authors
The payment channel, which allows two parties to perform micropayments without involving the blockchain, has become a promising proposal to improve the scalability of decentralized ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Payment channels have been extended to the payment network, through which users can utilize existing channels as intermediary links to route coins to others. However, routing payments through multiple channels bears nontrivial overheads. It requires every intermediary channel to lock a portion of its available capacity until the payment is settled. This may lead to deadlock in a concurrent situation. The intermediary nodes in a payment path may also charge fees for routing a payment. The longer the routing path, the more serious the above problems. In this paper, we design and develop a novel off-chain system to shorten the routing path for the payment network. In particular, we propose the channel hub, which is an extension of the payment hub, to allows transferring coins directly from one payment channel to another within the same hub. That is, the channel hub can be viewed as a shortcut device for the underlying payment network. We design a new protocol named Boros to perform secure off-chain cross-channel transfers through the channel hub. We not only present the security definition of the Boros protocol formally but also prove its security using the UC-framework. To demonstrate the feasibility of the Boros protocol, we develop a proof-of-concept prototype running on the Ethereum. Our evaluation shows that our system can effectively shorten the off-chain routing path.
We present Solythesis, a source to source Solidity compiler which takes a smart contract code and a user specified invariant as the input and produces an instrumented contract that rejects all transactions that violate the invariant. The design of Solythesis is driven by our observation that the consensus protocol and the storage layer are the primary and the secondary performance bottlenecks of Ethereum, respectively. Solythesis operates with our novel delta update and delta check techniques to minimize the overhead caused by the instrumented storage access statements. Our experimental results validate our hypothesis that the overhead of runtime validation, which is often too expensive for other domains, is in fact negligible for smart contracts. The CPU overhead of Solythesis is only 0.12% on average for our 23 benchmark contracts.