Blockchain Papers

Vijay Kumar Chaurasia, Alhasha Yunus, Madhusudan Singh

No abstract is available for this record.

Eman Shaikh, Nazeeruddin Mohammad

The exponential growth of urbanization has impacted the living and working conditions of people in various sectors such as, education, health, and transport. Nevertheless, it also has a negative impact on citizens’ life as they encounter issues like pollution, traffic congestion, environmental resource limitations. Thus, the idea of a smart city was developed to enhance the services provided by transportation, health, energy, and education sectors. However, to provide such services, the smart city uses IoT devices to collect the data and draw conclusions from the data to manage resources effectively. But such a centralized network produces various challenges such as security, privacy, trust, and cost. Blockchain technology, because of its salient features such as transparency and decentralization, can be used to address these challenges. This paper presents a technical review of using blockchain as a solution for Internet of Things (IoT) based smart cities. It also presents the current challenges faced by blockchain technology.

M. Afshar Alam, Sapna Jain

No abstract is available for this record.

Wesam Al Amiri, Mohamed Baza, Karim Banawan, Mohamed Mahmoud · 6 authors

Over the last few years, finding vacant parking spaces has become a hassle for drivers especially in crowded cities. This problem leads to wasting drivers' time, traffic congestion, and air pollution. Recently, smart parking systems aim to address this problem by enabling drivers to have real-time parking information about vacant parking spaces. However, the existing parking systems rely on a central third party to organize the service, which makes them subject to a single point of failure and privacy breach concerns by both internal and external attackers. In this paper, we propose a secure smart parking system using blockchain technology. Specifically, a consortium blockchain is made of parking lots to ensure security, transparency, and availability of the parking system. Then, to protect the drivers' location privacy, we use cloaking technique to hide the drivers' locations. The blockchain validators return available parking offers with in the cloaked area. Finally, the driver selects the best offer and makes reservation directly with the parking lot. Evaluations are conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme, and results indicate practicality of our scheme.

Mahmoud M. Badr, Wesam Al Amiri, Mostafa M. Fouda, Mohamed Mahmoud · 6 authors

Most of the existing smart parking systems threaten the drivers' privacy by revealing information about their visited locations. Moreover, they are centralized making them vulnerable to a single point of failure and attack, which threatens the availability of the parking service. They also suffer from a lack of transparency, where the centralized service organizer may favor some parking lots by booking their parking slots first. To tackle these concerns, we propose a blockchain-based smart parking system with privacy preservation and reputation management. In our system, a consortium blockchain is created by different parking lots to run the parking system securely and transparently, where the parking offers are recorded on a shared and immutable ledger. We use a commitment technique during the submission of the offers to ensure fair parking rates. Then, we use a private information retrieval technique during the offers retrieval to preserve the drivers' location privacy. Furthermore, to anonymously and efficiently authenticate drivers during the reservation process, we use a short randomizable signature. We also use a time-locked anonymous payment technique to discourage drivers from not committing to their parking reservations and provide a secure and privacy-preserving payment method for parking service. Finally, we integrate a blockchain-based anonymous reputation management scheme into our system, where drivers can anonymously rate the parking service to ensure high quality of service. Our evaluations demonstrate that our smart parking system is secure and capable of preserving drivers' privacy with low communication, computation, and storage overheads.

Nikolay Buldakov, Timur Khalilev, Salvatore Distefano, Manuel Mazzara

No abstract is available for this record.

Junfang Zeng, Jing Zhang, Yu Liu

Based on a practical park planning project, this paper analyzes the requirements of cleaning management, puts forward a blockchain based scheme of smart park cleaning. It proposes the service model of cleaning blockchain, and designs the system framework, DAPP modules, smart contracts and process flow of the cleaning blockchain system. The approach is also applicable for the application of blockchain technology in smart park public services, housekeeping, device maintenance and other fields.

Abdul Wahab, Phil Maguire

Distributed ledger technology and IoT has revolutionized the world by finding its application in all the domains. It promises to transform the digital infrastructure which powers extensive evolutions and impacts a lot of areas. Vehicle parking is a major problem in major cities around the world in both developed and developing countries. The common problems are unavailability or shortage of parking spaces, no information about tariff and no mean of searching availability of parking space online. The struggle doesn't end even if an individual finds a spot, he is required to pay in cash. This traditional and manual process takes a lot of time and causes a lot of hassle. In this paper, we provide a novel solution to the parking problem using IoT and distributed ledger technology. This system is based on pervasive computing and provides auto check-in and check-out. The user can control the system and their profile using the app on their smartphone. The major advantage of the system is an easy and online payment method. Users can pay for their parking tickets using their credit cards from their smartphone app. This decreases their hassle of carrying cash and coins for purchasing parking tickets. Smart Parking will optimize the parking mechanism, save time, reduce traffic and pollution, and provide an enhanced user experience. It is robust, secure, scalable and automated using the combination of cutting-edge technologies.

H. S. Jennath, S. Adarsh, Nikhil V. Chandran, R. Ananthan · 6 authors

With the advances happening in the area of urbanization, with increased demand for dwellings and ever growing number of vehicles on road, finding a parking spot has become one of the major pain points for the citizens. This is mainly due to the limited parking spaces in the urban areas. To overcome this limitation, one solution is to create more parking spaces. In this work we propose a Blockchain based solution, where parking pools can be created by developing a transparent platform where individuals can rent out their unused land for a stipulated amount of time with little or no legal hassles. A non-fungible token system representing unique parking lots will be created for transparency of the entire system. This also has the added advantage of generating revenue from their otherwise unused property. Smart contracts over Blockchain enforces the contractual agreement between the participants ensuring financial transparency in the proposed system.

Jiaxi Hu, Debiao He, Qinglan Zhao, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo

In a smart city, smart parking systems generally strive to facilitate the renting of available private parking spaces to vehicle users (just like timesharing). Existing technologies can authenticate and manage parking spaces and vehicles, but they do not address the need to preserve users' privacy. This article presents the framework for a blockchainbased parking-management system designed to preserve the privacy of its users, without relying on a reliable third-party entity. The proposed system integrates BlockChainOpenSource (BCOS) and smart contract technology to share parking spaces.

Z. Zinonos, Panayiotis Christodoulou, Andreas S. Andreou, Savvas A. Chatzichristofis

The IoT ecosystem is evolving quickly, developing several applications in different sectors. The majority of these applications use centralized infrastructures something that poses several challenges especially related to trust and data security. Recently, blockchain has been introduced as an effective solution to IoT applications trying to provide solutions to these challenges. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized IoT application using blockchain technology, namely, ParkChain. The ParkChain application operates in a way that no one can delete, revert, hack or question the time a registered vehicle securely entered a parking area. In order to evaluate ParkChain, we have implemented the smart contract on top of Ethereum Blockchain along with a traditional Image Processing / Computer Vision approach for License Plate Recognition, and using a Raspberry Pi we control the access on a parking place. We report on several experiments that assess the performance of ParkChain application.

Wesam Al Amiri, Mohamed Baza, Karim Banawan, Mohamed Mahmoud · 6 authors

Searching for available parking spaces is a major problem for drivers especially in big crowded cities, causing traffic congestion and air pollution, and wasting drivers' time. Smart parking systems are a novel solution to enable drivers to have real-time parking information for pre-booking. However, current smart parking requires drivers to disclose their private information, such as desired destinations. Moreover, the existing schemes are centralized and vulnerable to the bottleneck of the single point of failure and data breaches. In this paper, we propose a distributed privacy-preserving smart parking system using blockchain. A consortium blockchain created by different parking lot owners to ensure security, transparency, and availability is proposed to store their parking offers on the blockchain. To preserve drivers' location privacy, we adopt a private information retrieval (PIR) technique to enable drivers to retrieve parking offers from blockchain nodes privately, without revealing which parking offers are retrieved. Furthermore, a short randomizable signature is used to enable drivers to reserve available parking slots in an anonymous manner. Besides, we introduce an anonymous payment system that cannot link drivers' to specific parking locations. Finally, our performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can preserve drivers' privacy with low communication and computation overhead.

V. Vijayalakshmi, S. Vimal

The revolution in the system of records has reached a great extent and paves a way for a powerful technology known as blockchain for storing data and performing transactional operations in a decentralized network. Blockchain was first developed to serve as a public transaction ledger for the cryptocurrency named “Bitcoin”. Later, One such application is the online balloting scheme. A ballot is a device that is used to cast the votes in an election. In ballot based voting, still there is no system to avoid proxy casting and recasting. We do not have any technology to view our casted votes. In the electronic voting system based on Blockchain, addresses some of the limitations in the existing systems and labels some of the issues of e-voting. The idea in blockchain enabled balloting scheme is to integrate Aadhaar card and Mobile number of the people using which the OTP is generated and then the voter is allowed to cast their vote. Ethereum is an open source blockchain based technology that uses both private blockchain and remix platform and it acts as a tool in storing the data. The user can cast their votes from anywhere (nearby booth) and the corresponding contestant are notified to the users based on their constituency and candidate promises. If NOTA votes crossed above 50%, then all the candidates are disqualified and are permitted to contest for the next election. If any of the citizen do not poll their vote, then a warning message will be sent to the respective person. They should provide a valid reason for not voting within a period of 6 months, if the reason is invalid then necessary action will be taken by the government. If a member of citizen wants to view his/her voting status then they can view it by entering their aadhar number and the block number that is sent to them through the mobile app. The implementation of this system addresses most of the issues faced in the balloting scheme and is used to avoid proxy casting and recasting and is also used to achieve above 95% of the vote.

Sabbir Ahmed, Soaibuzzaman, Mohammad Saidur Rahman, Mohammad Saiedur Rahaman

In this paper, we introduce an integrated smart parking system. The proposed integrated smart parking system brings multiple parking service providers together under a unified platform aiming to provide one-stop parking information services to the commuters in a smart city. However, the adaptation of such a system is prone to tempering while a massive amount of data is shared among different parties which raise concerns related to trust and performance. To address this challenge, we propose a blockchain-based architecture specific to the integrated smart parking systems. Finally, we present a set of design principles which shows the applicability of our proposed blockchain-based integrated parking system.

Siddharth Dekhane, Kaushal Mhalgi, Kaushik Vishwanath, Shivani Singh · 5 authors

The work presented in this paper aims to propose a novel idea to use blockchain technology and IoT devices or solar devices that generate solar power for smart power distribution within the ecosystem for optimal and secured transactions for the demands of many smart cities. The blockchain 2.0 provides a consensus-based mechanism for programmable transactions. The paper presents a blockchain based power distribution ecosystem for smart cities by incorporating a wallet-based currency, called “Green Coin”, for power transactions of buying, selling and lending. It integrates negotiation model for monopoly avoidance and a transparent and fair system to every Power Service Provider (PSP) in the system.

João C. Ferreira, Ana Martins, Frederica Gonçalves, Rui Leandro Maia

No abstract is available for this record.

Yousuke Watanabe

No abstract is available for this record.

Patrick Shi, June Tay

Facilities management encompasses assets management, space management, IoT management, regulatory/compliance adherence and purchasing and billing issuance. Assets management requires monitoring, fault detection and the use of IoT for detecting conditions and triggering events. Facilities management involves tracking work orders, schedule maintenance, doing preventive management, and also tracking assets status through equipment warranties, life cycle assessments, contracts and agreements. Data management of facilities can now be done using a blockchain instead of a database. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed digital ledger that records data which is accessible and shared by multiple qualifying parties with security enabled. The beauty of blockchain is it provides transparency in data handling, traceability of all transactions and ease of collaboration between qualifying parties. Since facilities management involves issuance of contracts and agreements, smart contracts can be deployed to provides a transparent and faster way to make transactions since they can be automated in blockchain network. In this paper, we have implemented a simple facilities management model using Hyperledger Composer Playground. To quickly develop and test the blockchain business networks, we have chosen to use Playground. In our model, we have built in employee information, vendor information, equipment tracking, fault report and maintenance report information. A token asset is employed to incentivize work completed to satisfaction. We will discuss how parameters like lifecycle, discount factor and depreciation information of equipment and facilities can be built into the model to present a more holistic view of the overall worth of assets at a snapshot.

Bruno Alves, Gleifer Vaz Alves, André Pinz Borges, Paulo Leitão

No abstract is available for this record.

Borja Bordel, Diego R. Martín, Ramón Alcarria, Tomás Robles

Irrigation communities, especially in rural areas whose economy depends on agriculture, face a critical problem with the increasing water crisis. In this paper it is proposed a water control system to efficiently manage and coordinate the use of water in these communities. Blockchain technologies are employed to support trust among community members and commercial resource constrained devices communicating with the Blockchain network compose the hardware platform. A first implementation of this system and an evaluation of the system's performance are also presented.

Pranav Kumar Singh, Roshan Singh, Sunit Kumar Nandi, Sukumar Nandi

No abstract is available for this record.

Friedhelm Victor, Sebastian Zickau

A decentralized ride-or carsharing application is among the early proposals of what smart contracts on blockchains may enable in the future. To facilitate use cases in the field of location-based services (LBS), smart contracts need to receive trustworthy positioning information, and be able to process them. We propose an approach on how geofences can be defined in smart contracts, and how supplied positions can be evaluated on whether they are contained in the geofence or not. The approach relies on existing location encoding systems like Geohashes and S2 cells that can transform polygons into a grid of cells. These can be stored in a smart contract to represent a geofence. An oracle run by a mobile network provider can submit network-based positioning information to the contract, that compares it with the geofence. We evaluate the location encoding systems on their ability to model city geofences and mobile network cell position estimates and analyze the costs associated with storing and evaluating received oracle-positions in an Ethereum-based smart contract implementation. Our results show that S2 encodings perform better than Geohashes, that the one-time cost of geofence definition corresponds linearly with the number of grid cells used, and that the evaluation of oracle-submitted locations does not incur high costs.

Cheng Huang, Rongxing Lu, Xiaodong Lin, Xuemin Shen

It is believed that automated valet parking (AVP) system has great potential to mitigate the parking headache for the future smart city, as it can provide on-demand parking services, bringing immense benefits from energy saving for vehicles to time saving for drivers. For an AVP system, parking reservation is an indispensable part so that vehicles can accomplish automated parking in accordance with the reserved parking information. However, the reservation requests may not only reveal the driver identity, but also disclose his/her sensitive locations, e.g., the most visited places, which are of great concerns to users. To deal with this challenge, the anonymous techniques can be naturally applied during parking reservation, but directly applying the anonymous techniques in AVP will introduce a new security issue, i.e., the anonymous user may maliciously crash the AVP system by repetitively sending the reservation requests, which is called “double-reservation attack.” In this paper, we propose a new privacy-preserving reservation scheme for securing AVP system. Specifically, each anonymous user must have only one valid reservation token at any moment, and the token can only be used for booking one vacant parking space once. The proposed scheme does not only preserve the user's identity privacy and location privacy but also prevents the “double-reservation attack” based on several elegant building blocks, i.e., zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge and proxy resignature. Detailed security analysis confirms the security properties of our proposed scheme. In addition, extensive simulations are conducted to compare our proposed scheme with three previous schemes, and the experiment results demonstrate that our scheme is also much efficient in a WiFi-based testbed.

Akshat Minesh Doshi

Block Chain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin crypto-currency system. Blockchain helps Build Trusted, Powerful and Transparent Process with the potential to disrupt Intermediaries, Third parties & Expensive processes. Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Authority (PoA), consensus algorithm plays a vital role in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which is considered to be incorruptible. Firstly, we explore top crypto currencies after that we will explore blockchain and mining concept. In further we will be exploring Ethereum blockchain solidity programming more and make DAPPs on Ethereum blockchain network.