Blockchain Papers

Elisabetta Basilico, Tommi Johnsen

No abstract is available for this record.

Stephan Haarmann, Kimon Batoulis, Adriatik Nikaj, Mathias Weske

No abstract is available for this record.

A.A. Kozlov, Andrey Vlasov, DeMontroyal, Penza 440015, Russian Federation

In the field of cryptoeconomics the Ethereum (Ethereum Foundation) project gave opportunity to create “own” cryptocurrency – new token based on its smart-contract platform to everyone without lowlevel programming skills. Then it became obvious that tokens could be used for crowdfunding as the Ethereum did in 2014. Unregulated and easy to access such scheme became popular among related to the blockchain tech startups. It was named Initial Coin Offering (ICO/or ITO). Despite its name, which is similar to IPO, this scheme is usually used for venture funding of a new project instead of expanding already well-established working business. The authors use machine-learning algorithms to classify ICOs and estimate ROI based on public digital data and web-sources. The goal of the research is to develop sustainable and efficient model, which will predict target profit ROI (profit trends) of ICO startup. Data collection and analysis period: Feb-Mar 2018. The prediction model and the application (service) of ICO startups’ selection are developed as the result of the study. Results. There were over 3000 samples of ICO-startups in the research dataset. After cleaning and elimination of outliers, it contained only 518. The number of samples with positive ROI (which means that these ICOs were profitable) was 234. Cross validation metric was confirmed to be accurate. The model achieved 79 % accuracy (average value). To prove this score separated prediction was executed the metrics: for test dataset AUC is 0.78; for profitable samples Precision: 0.76; Recall: 0.9 for profitable; F1-score: 0.82. Discussions. In order to achieve the objectives of this study, various IT components of the service architecture (applications) were developed to monitor, analyze and predict the risks of ICO startups. An artificial neural network was developed to solve the problem of ROI classification and prediction. The average ROI among profitable ICOS was 47 %. Taking into consideration that the crypto market is highly volatile and that there is a possibility that such investments will not bring any profit, this model of monitoring, analysis and prediction can be very valuable for the purposes of critical selection (exclusion) of a number of ICO projects from potential investment. Conclusion. The developed components can be used as a basis of monitoring service of ICO startups. The risk-forecasting model can be improved, foremost, by using the most complete (and wider) set of data. In this case, individual data collection and processing tasks can be performed manually, which will require additional resources. It should be noted that other types of neural networks can be developed for both text analysis and trading data analysis. This may lead to the logic of using a combination of models, which will potentially help to provide the most accurate predictions.

Giovanni Meroni, Pierluigi Plebani, Francesco Vona

No abstract is available for this record.

Efe Çağlar Çağlı

No abstract is available for this record.

Yuzhe Tang, Zihao Xing, Cheng Xu, Chen Ju · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Katerina Doka, Tasos Bakogiannis, Ioannis Mytilinis, Georgios Goumas

No abstract is available for this record.

José Joaquín Mendoza Lopetegui, Felipe Núñez

The feedback control loop is the atomic unit in a control system. Typically, feedback control loops are rigid objects that involve a dynamical system, or plant, which has a set of its output states measured by dedicated sensors, which in turn feed a processing unit, known as controller, that calculates actions to be applied as inputs to the plant, via elements known as actuators, in order to drive the outputs to a desired value or trajectory. The appearance of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, where a large number of sensors and processing units interact over a communication network, offers an underlying infrastructure to operate and configure control loops using a different logic: an on-demand strategy. This work introduces the concept of on-demand control loop, and proposes the use of blockchain technology as the enabling infrastructure for generating on-demand control loops over large-scale IoT environments. General design guidelines are given and a simple implementation example over the Ethereum blockchain is presented, which shows the feasibility of the proposed technique.

Andrei Tara, Kirill Ivkushkin, Alex Butean, Hjalmar Turesson

No abstract is available for this record.

Nida Khan, Tabrez Ahmad, Radu State

No abstract is available for this record.

Filip Adamik, Sokol Kosta

No abstract is available for this record.

G.G. Rocco

The purpose of this research is to demonstrate how public blockchains offer a greater degree of censorship resistance over traditional web-based information broadcasting mechanisms, and a comparison of existing options. Public blockchains present a means to mitigate censorship from nation states through both a broadcasting and data storage mechanism. They are costly to attack and difficult to remove from the public due to their distributed and accessible nature. A recent incident in China proved the worth of public blockchains by forcing the distribution of a censored letter describing harassment by Peking University into an Ethereum transaction by an anonymous individual or party. The Chinese government censored the letter on popular centralized services such as WeChat, but was unable to censor it once posted to the Ethereum blockchain. Through the demonstration of the letter’s presence on Ethereum as well as the act of placing it on other public blockchains, this research highlights the importance of how public blockchains will continue to be a vessel for the protection of information well into the future.

Jiwon Bang, Mi-Jung Choi

No abstract is available for this record.

Mona Taghavi, Jamal Bentahar, Hadi Otrok, Kaveh Bakhtiyari

This paper introduces a novel blockchain-based decentralized federation model that embodies quality verification for cloud providers who lease computing resources from each other. The blockchain structure removes the barriers of a traditional centralized federation and offers a fully distributed and transparent administration by enforcing the involved agents to maintain consensus on the data. For a blockchain-based federation, it is vital to avoid blind-trust on the claimed SLA guarantees and monitor the quality of service which is highly desirable considering the multi-tenancy characteristic of cloud services. Due to the fact that the blockchain network is unable to access the outside world, it cannot handle, by its own, providers misbehavior in terms of SLA violations. Thus, we introduce oracle as a verifier agent to monitor the quality of the service and report to the smart contract agents deployed on the blockchain. Oracle is a trusted third-party agent who can communicate with the outside world of the blockchain network. The interaction between cloud service providers (either providing a service or requesting it from another provider) and the oracle through smart contracts comprises a system of autonomous and utility maximizer agents. Cloud requesters seek to receive high quality services with constant monitoring at cheap prices or even with no charge, while cloud providers aim to have a balanced work-load with less preserved capacity, and the oracle tends to charge higher for their monitoring services. Therefore, to model this conflicting situation, we formulate a dynamic Stackelberg differential game to optimize the cost of using the oracle and maximize the profit of the agents with the role of provider agent as a leader, and the requester and verifier agents as followers. Our designed Stackelberg differential game can seize the dynamicity of users' demand and resource provisioning in a competitive cloud market. We implemented our proposed decentralized model using the Solidity language in the remix IDE on the Ethereum network. We further evaluated the optimal controls and agents' profit with real-world data simulated for three concrete cloud providers. The results revealed that the requester agent initiates most of the quality verification requests at the beginning to the middle time of the contract. Thus, the provider agent could reserve less computing resources considering the fact that it could share the workload among other customers' computing resources during the peak-time. Moreover, imposing a higher penalty on the provider agent increased the capacity and decreased the number of requests for quality verification at the equilibrium. The evaluation also disclosed that the impact of timing in the dynamic pricing strategy of the verifier agent is very minimal, and the provisioning capacity of the provider is strongly correlated with the monitoring price.

Yijun Yu, Danny Barthaud, Blaine Price, Arosha K. Bandara · 6 authors

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are increasingly expected to operate in spaces populated by humans while avoiding injury to people or damaging property. However, incidents and accidents can, and increasingly do, happen. Traditional investigations of aircraft incidents require on-board flight data recorders (FDRs); however, these physical FDRs only work if the drone can be recovered. A further complication is that physical FDRs are too heavy to mount on light drones, hence not suitable for forensic digital investigations of drone flights. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptive software architecture, LiveBox, to make drones both forensic-ready and regulation compliant. We studied the feasibility of using distributed technologies for implementing the LiveBox reference architecture. In particular, we found that updates and queries of drone flight data and constraints can be treated as transactions using decentralised ledger technology (DLT), rather than a generic time-series database, to satisfy forensic tamper-proof requirements. However, DLTs such as Ethereum, have limits on throughput (i.e. transactions-per-second), making it harder to achieve regulation-compliance at runtime. To overcome this limitation, we present a self-adaptive reporting algorithm to dynamically reduce the precision of flight data without sacrificing the accuracy of runtime verification. Using a real-life scenario of drone delivery, we show that our proposed algorithm achieves a 46% reduction in bandwidth without losing accuracy in satisfying both tamper-proof and regulation-compliant requirements.

Danning Sui, Gëzim Sejdiu, Damien Graux, Jens Lehmann

With the recent trend on blockchain, many users want to know more about the important players of the chain. In this study, we investigate and analyze the Ethereum blockchain network in order to identify the major entities across the transaction network. By leveraging the rich data available through Alethio's platform in the form of RDF triples we learn about the Hubs and Authorities of the Ethereum transaction network. Alethio uses SANSA for effcient reading and processing of such large-scale RDF data (transactions on Ethereum blockchain) in order to perform analytics e.g. finding top accounts, or typical behavior patterns of exchanges' deposit wallets and more.

Gianna Figà‐Talamanca, Sergio M. Focardi, Marco Patacca

No abstract is available for this record.

Kelechi G. Eze, Cajetan M. Akujuobi, Matthew N. O. Sadiku, Mohamed Chouikha · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Linh Thi Xuan Phan, Suhong Li, Kevin Mentzer

Blockchain has received increased attention from both the academic and practitioner worlds. Numerous papers have been written on how blockchain works and its potential applications. However, few studies have focused on fraudulent activities on blockchain. The purpose of this study is to understand common issues and scams related to blockchain. A literature review was conducted to identify top security issues on blockchain. In addition, we collected tweets on blockchain fraud discussion from November 6, 2018 to December 31, 2008. The results of tweets analysis show that the most frequently mentioned words in tweets include scams, crypto/cryptocurrency, ICO, Bitcoin, Ethereum, combat/fight, Asia, Japan, and Germany. The top mentioned sentiment words include scam, combat, guilty, prevent, solution, tired, and fake. In addition, a sentiment analysis shows that the majority of the tweets (69%) on the discussion on blockchain fraud are negative. The findings also shows the majority of top influencers of the topic are the companies that have developed blockchain-based platforms/applications.

Katharina Zeuch, Kai Hendrik Wöhnert, Volker Skwarek

Due to increasing security requirements e. g. for transaction based smart-x-technologies in distributed systems, blockchain technologies are predestined for secure data exchange and keeping in distributed systems. Although the underlying principle of almost every blockchain is the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), its implementation differs significantly between the technologies so that migration or interoperability between systems is nearly impossible. Additionally, this missing interoperability also reduces the chance for scalability between different extents of implementation as there is usually not a one-size-fits-all-blockchain: Different technologies have their advantages for different systems. Therefore scalability and interoperability are tightly coupled. As a basis for further research on and the derivation of generally scalable and interoperable architectures of blockchains, current technologies have to be made comparable and interoperability criteria have to be developed. This paper analyses current literature and introduces technical criteria for the comparison of blockchainand distributed ledger technologies (BC/DLT).With a list of eleven criteria popular BC/DLTs such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Ripple and Corda are compared regarding general features.

Adrien Ghosn, James R. Larus, Edouard Bugnion

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX enclaves, use hardware to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of operations on sensitive data. While the technology is available on many processors, the complexity of its programming model and its performance overhead have limited adoption. TEEs provide a new and valuable hardware functionality that has no obvious analogue in programming languages, which means that developers must manually partition their application into trusted and untrusted components. This paper describes an approach that fully integrates trusted execution into a language. We extend the Go language to allow a programmer to execute a goroutine within an enclave, to use low-overhead channels to communicate between the trusted and untrusted environments, and to rely on a compiler to automatically extract the secure code and data. Our prototype compiler and runtime, GOTEE, is a backward-compatible fork of the Go compiler. The evaluation shows that our compiler-driven code and data partitioning efficiently executes both microbenchmarks and applications. On the former, GOTEE achieves a 5.2×throughput and a 2.3× latency improvement over the Intel SGX SDK. Our case studies, a Go ssh server, the Go tls package, and a secured keystore inspired by the go-ethereum project, demonstrate that minor source-code modifications suffice to provide confidentiality and integrity guarantees with only moderate performance overheads.

Frutos Cerezo, Jaime de

Blockchain o la cadena de bloques es una tecnologia emergente muy novedosa y que ha supuesto una gran revolucion. Esta cadena de bloques puede almacenar de forma distribuida y muy segura multitud de datos, ya sean transacciones monetarias, contratos inteligentes o hasta la informacion de la ruta que ha seguido una mercancia. En este TFG se quiere hacer hincapie en esta ultima aplicacion. En la cadena de bloques se podria reflejar numerosos datos de todo tipo de mercancias: lugares por los que ha pasado (trazabilidad), fechas de produccion, fechas de caducidad… Cualquiera podria acceder a esta informacion, pero no modificarla, aqui reside su gran fortaleza y por lo que actualmente, muchas grandes corporativas estan contando con esta tecnologia para ofrecer mas fiabilidad a sus clientes. Con este trabajo se busca implementar esta aplicacion de trazabilidad de mercancias mediante el uso de Blockchain contando con la red ‘Ethereum’, la cual ofrece buenas caracteristicas como gran fiabilidad, ningun tipo de censura, fraudes o acciones de terceras partes. A su vez se desarrollaria una aplicacion web para el uso de esta implementacion. El uso que se le daria a este servicio seria el siguiente: - Los involucrados en la creacion, transporte, venta… de las mercancias podrian subir a nuestra Blockchain datos de estas cada vez que pasan por sus manos. Por ejemplo, cuando un productor acaba su tarea con su producto, este subiria al primer bloque de la cadena las especificaciones del producto, fechas importantes a tener en cuenta y otros datos utiles; el transportista, subiria datos de la ruta que ha seguido el producto en el mismo bloque… y asi hasta llegar al vendedor y a los clientes. Un unico producto abarcaria un bloque de la cadena. Esta utilidad de recoleccion de informacion estaria abstraida en una aplicacion web, por ejemplo, asi los encargados de emplear este servicio no necesitarian especializarse en esta tecnologia de reciente uso. Hoy en dia hay muy pocas personas que se hayan dedicado a estudiar Blockchain, la mayoria de sus usuarios son autodidactas que se interesaron en el tema por pura aficion. (Cabe destacar que todos estos datos irian firmados digitalmente para aportar mayor integridad y autenticidad a la cadena) - Por otra parte, los clientes dispondrian de una forma sencilla de acceder a los datos de la cadena. Por ejemplo, el vendedor les ofreceria un codigo QR en cada etiqueta de producto donde con un simple escaneo el cliente obtendria todos los datos del producto de una forma rapida. (De forma similar se podria realizar con un link en una web o una aplicacion movil especializada con una lista de productos) Este TFG se encargaria del desarrollo de todas las aplicaciones envueltas en los procesos anteriores, serian aplicaciones web para registrar productos y su informacion y la aplicacion necesaria para la utilizacion de los supuestos clientes.

Meng Li, Liehuang Zhu, Xiaodong Lin

No abstract is available for this record.

Theodoros Kasampalis, Dwight Guth, Brandon Moore, Traian Florin Şerbănuţă · 9 authors

No abstract is available for this record.