David M. Maslove, Jacob Klein, M. Kathryn Brohman, Patrick Martin
BACKGROUND: Blockchain technology is emerging as an innovative tool in data and software security. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the role of blockchain in supporting clinical trials data management and develop a proof-of-concept implementation of a patient-facing and researcher-facing system. METHODS: Blockchain-based Smart Contracts were built using the Ethereum platform. RESULTS: We described BlockTrial, a system that uses a Web-based interface to allow users to run trials-related Smart Contracts on an Ethereum network. Functions allow patients to grant researchers access to their data and allow researchers to submit queries for data that are stored off chain. As a type of distributed ledger, the system generates a durable and transparent log of these and other transactions. BlockTrial could be used to increase the trustworthiness of data collected during clinical research with benefits to researchers, regulators, and drug companies alike. In addition, the system could empower patients to become more active and fully informed partners in research. CONCLUSIONS: Blockchain technology presents an opportunity to address some of the common threats to the integrity of data collected in clinical trials and ensure that the analysis of these data comply with prespecified plans. Further technical work is needed to add additional functions. Policies must be developed to determine the optimal models for participation in the system by its various stakeholders.
Ali Dorri, Ambrose Hill, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak · 6 authors
Blockchain is increasingly being used as a distributed, anonymous, trustless framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, most of the existing solutions suffer from reliance on Trusted Third Parties (TTP), lack of privacy, and traffic and processing overheads. In our previous work, we have proposed a Secure Private Blockchain-based framework (SPB) for energy trading to address the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we present a proof-on-concept implementation of SPB on the Ethereum private network to demonstrates SPB's applicability for energy trading. We benchmark SPB's performance against the relevant state-of-the-art. The implementation results demonstrate that SPB incurs lower overheads and monetary cost for end users to trade energy compared to existing solutions.
The research objective of the article: The aim of the paper is to present the challenges and opportunities of Initial Coin Offering (ICO) procedure (sometimes appearing in literature and official documents as the Initial Token Offering (ITO)) from the point of view of a company as well as verify the hypothesis about ICO as a cheap form of capital rising that is often presented in websites dedicated to ICO. There are enumerated the differences and similarities to the Initial Public Offering and possible advantages over other methods of capital rising. The paper points out the most important barriers to the use of ICO. The research method applied: As there is shortage of available research papers and literature related to the topic that are focused on financial aspects such as comparison between ICO and other methods of capital rising, there was conducted the analysis of reliable internet sources and a case study method of Ethereum – the first company that applied the Initial Coin Offering procedure. The mentioned research method has its limits, as it is necessary to verify received information. That is the reason why only professional websites dedicated to the topic were used. The outcome of the research (considerations, analyses), main conclusion(s): the Initial Coin Offering procedure is recognised as a very controversial topic. It is clearly visible that ICO has many advantages over traditional forms of rising capital for the company, but, so far, ambiguous legal status, cost level and high risk of scams and other possible abuses make it difficult to become widely applied by newly created companies.
The article presents an econometric analysis of the effect of stock indicators, such as Comex Gold futures, Dow Jones Industrial Average index and NASDAQ Composite, on the Ethereum cryptocurrency dynamics in the 100-day period. As part of the study, an econometric model of the dynamics of e-currency was built. The survey results show that when the Comex gold futures price changes by 1% on average, the Ethereum price changes by 5.01% in the same direction, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average index changes by 1%, the Ethereum price is 10.897%, and when the NASDAQ Composite index changes, the Ethereum price will change in the opposite direction to 3.59%
We present SOLAR, a new analysis tool for automatically detecting standard violation errors in Ethereum smart contracts.Given the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode of a smart contract and a user specified constraint or invariant derived from a technical standard such as ERC-20,SOLAR symbolically executes the contract, explores all possible execution paths, and checks whether it is possible to initiate a sequence of malicious transactions to violate the specified constraint or invariant. Our experimental results highlight the effectiveness of SOLAR in finding new errors in smart con-tracts. Out of the evaluated 779 ERC-20 and 310 ERC-721smart contracts, SOLAR found 255 standard violation errors in 197 vulnerable contracts with only three false positives.237 out of the 255 errors are zero-day errors that are not re-ported before. Our results sound the alarm on the prevalence of standard violation errors in critical smart contracts that manipulate publicly traded digital assets
The digitalization and massive adoption of advanced technologies in the automotive industry not only transform the equipment manufacturer's operating mode, but also change the current business models. The increased adoption of autonomous cars is expected to disrupt government regulations, manufacturing, insurance, and maintenance services. Moreover, providing integrated, personalized, and on-demand services have shared, connected, and autonomous cars in the smart city for a sustainable ecosystem. To address these issues in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based distributed framework for the automotive industry in the smart city. The proposed framework includes a novel miner node selection algorithm for the blockchain-based distributed network architecture. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed framework, we simulated the proposed model on a private Ethereum blockchain platform using captured dataset of mined blocks from litecoinpool.org. The simulation results show the proof-of-concept of the proposed model that can be used for wide range of future smart applications.
Michael Rodler, Wenting Li, Ghassan Karame, Lucas Davi
Recently, a number of existing blockchain systems have witnessed major bugs and vulnerabilities within smart contracts. Although the literature features a number of proposals for securing smart contracts, these proposals mostly focus on proving the correctness or absence of a certain type of vulnerability within a contract, but cannot protect deployed (legacy) contracts from being exploited. In this paper, we address this problem in the context of re-entrancy exploits and propose a novel smart contract security technology, dubbed Sereum (Secure Ethereum), which protects existing, deployed contracts against re-entrancy attacks in a backwards compatible way based on run-time monitoring and validation. Sereum does neither require any modification nor any semantic knowledge of existing contracts. By means of implementation and evaluation using the Ethereum blockchain, we show that Sereum covers the actual execution flow of a smart contract to accurately detect and prevent attacks with a false positive rate as small as 0.06% and with negligible run-time overhead. As a by-product, we develop three advanced re-entrancy attacks to demonstrate the limitations of existing offline vulnerability analysis tools.
Blockchain, the rapid developing technology behind Bitcoin, is increasingly becoming popular. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that distributes digital transactions peer-to-peer to a decentralized network of nodes that verify the transactions and keep a cryptographic secured copy of the entire history of transactions. The network automatically reaches consensus about the correct history of records, which makes the database transparent and immutable. This consensus role makes it possible to take away the third party in certain processes, such as the bank or the notary. Blockchain also enables digital payments and smart contracts. Smart contracts are digital contracts that can be executed automatically by the blockchain. This enables digital registration of for example identity, birth certificates and votes. But smart contracts have many more automation applications that can be coded in computer code, which has the potential of making many processes in both the public as the private sector more efficient and less costly. Governmental services are especially applicable for blockchain, as they could become more efficient and can even be made obsolete in some cases. In this thesis, we review solutions using blockchain technology, identify key provenance features and implement a solution for student academic career platform on Ethereum blockchain. In this platform all the transactions represents the university exams passed by the students and their grades. Transactions can only be created by authorized personnel. Students can read their career history, administrative staff and professors can record grades. So, nobody can be able to change grades after they are rated.
Blockchain has been widely adopted in the last few years even though it is in its infancy. The first well-known application built on blockchain technology was Bitcoin, which is a decentralized and distributed ledger to record crypto-currency transactions. All of the transactions in Bitcoin are anonymously transferred and validated by participants in the network. Bitcoin protocol and its operations are so reliable that technologists have been inspired to enhance blockchain technologies and deploy it outside of the crypto-currency world. The demand for private and non-crypto-currency solutions have surged among consortiums because of the security and fault tolerant features of blockchain. To introduce blockchain concepts, we survey the three most popular blockchain architectures: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger Fabric. We then build Gradubique, a blockchain network built on top of Hyperledger Fabric. Gradubique allows instructors from any school to post exam and course grades to the Gradubique network. Employers and graduate schools can extract transcripts from Gradubique. Security is guaranteed by the blockchain technology. Standardization and translation of transcripts can be built into the network, and the distributed nature of the network can make it virtually cost-free.
Purwono Purwono, Alfian Ma’arif, Wahyu Rahmaniar, Qazi Mazhar ul Haq · 6 authors
Blockchain technology has a promising future in a number of industries and enterprises. Formerly connected to virtual currency like Bitcoin, blockchain has evolved into a versatile technology with many applications. In the upcoming years, it is predicted that blockchain will revolutionize a variety of industries, including banking, supply chain management, healthcare, voting systems, and more. The future of blockchain technology depends critically on its ability to increase security and transparency. By providing a decentralized and unchangeable record, eliminating the need for middlemen, and boosting participant confidence, blockchain promotes secure and traceable transactions. This transparency has the potential to transform whole industries by reducing fraud, streamlining processes, and increasing output. Blockchain also has the power to change financial systems. Blockchain-based smart contracts facilitate faster, more efficient transactions by automating and enforcing contractual agreements without the need for middlemen. By enabling speedier cross-border transactions, reducing costs, and boosting financial inclusion, tokenization and blockchain-based digital currencies have the potential to overturn conventional banking institutions. Blockchain’s key attributes, including decentralization, transparency, immutability, and security, make it a desirable choice for a range of organizations. Cross-border payments, trade finance, and smart contracts are just a few of the financial sector processes that blockchain technology has the potential to enhance and automate, lowering costs and increasing productivity. Additionally, the tamper-resistance of blockchain technology can boost transaction security and reliability, allowing for a wider use in traditional financial institutions. Outside of the financial industry, blockchain technology has a lot of promise, particularly in industries like supply chain management, healthcare, energy, intellectual property, and governance. By enabling transparent and traceable transactions, blockchain may improve supply chain efficiency, ensure product authenticity, and boost customer trust. By facilitating the secure exchange of patient data and research data, the decentralized nature of blockchain technology can enhance data security, interoperability, and privacy in the healthcare sector. A more decentralized and sustainable energy ecosystem may be supported by blockchain technology through peer-to-peer energy exchange, grid management, and monitoring of renewable energy certificates in the energy sector. Additionally, blockchain technology has the potential to transform decentralized governance structures, voting procedures, intellectual property rights, and digital identity management. By allowing people to own and manage their digital identities, blockchain can enhance privacy and reduce identity theft. Blockchain-based voting systems can offer transparency, security, and verifiability, thereby increasing voter turnout and public trust in democratic institutions. Blockchain can also enable the secure and transparent management of intellectual property rights, fostering author credit and just compensation.
This paper intends to review the need of cryptocurrency on the European and International market. Why cryptocurrency is bad and good at the same time for the international financial market is one of the main issues of this paper. Where are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin going to and why cryptocurrencies are necessary on today’s market. Although there is no sure thing on crypto, on the long term, the market keeps going up and there is much interest in this direction.
In this paper, we explore the design and construct a prototype implementation of an Ethereum application, BMCProtector, which is based on Blockchain and Smart Contract technology, to protect music copyright and ensure rights holders income rights. With the blockchain, musicians can easily authorize and manage their music copyright on a public ledger. Without intermediaries being involved during the propagation process, rights holders can receive a greater share of royalty payments from the music industry automatically and instantly. We deal with piracy issues using encryption and watermarking methods. We also introduce a versioning mechanism to update the data in the smart contract for correcting mistakes made by the publisher. BMCProtector provides a solution to protect music copyright more effectively.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the recent rise of cryptocurrencies' popularity, the security and management of crypto-tokens have become critical. We have witnessed many attacks on users and providers, which have resulted in significant financial losses. To remedy these issues, several wallet solutions have been proposed. However, these solutions often lack either essential security features, usability, or do not allow users to customize their spending rules. In this paper, we propose SmartOTPs, a smart-contract wallet framework that gives a flexible, usable, and secure way of managing crypto-tokens in a self-sovereign fashion. The proposed framework consists of four components (i.e., an authenticator, a client, a hardware wallet, and a smart contract), and it provides 2-factor authentication (2FA) performed in two stages of interaction with the blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first one that utilizes one-time passwords (OTPs) in the setting of the public blockchain. In SmartOTPs, the OTPs are aggregated by a Merkle tree and hash chains whereby for each authentication only a short OTP (e.g., 16B-long) is transferred from the authenticator to the client. Such a novel setting enables us to make a fully air-gapped authenticator by utilizing small QR codes or a few mnemonic words, while additionally offering resilience against quantum cryptanalysis. We have made a proof-of-concept based on the Ethereum platform. Our cost analysis shows that the average cost of a transfer operation is comparable to existing 2FA solutions using smart contracts with multi-signatures.
This Paper is an attempt to develop a Health based Block chain technology for security of health data which assures benefit for the patients. The closed model Blockchain is implemented on a health sector in this implementation in order to find out the similarity between patients for having a reference based implementation, managing and sharing electronic health and medical records to allow patients, clinics, hospitals and other medical data researchers to share data., and increase interoperability. The profile matching algorithm with blockchain security is being implemented using the Ethereum crypto currency implementation using the Pyeth software on Python platform . The experimental setup involving the Heart rate sensor, Blood Pressure sensor and the Raspberry Pi is developed to realize the output of the required implementation. It is observed that the profile matching is possible using the mining techniques and correlation between the two patients data collected in the blocks.
André Greubel, Alexandra Dmitrienko, Samuel Kounev
In the Tor anonymity network, the distribution of topology information relies on the correct behavior of five out of the nine trusted directory authority servers. This centralization is concerning since a powerful adversary might compromise these servers and conceal information about honest nodes, leading to the full de-anonymization of all Tor users. Our work aims at distributing the work of these trusted authorities, such increasing resilience against attacks on core infrastructure components of the Tor network. In particular, we leverage several emerging technologies, such as blockchains, smart contracts, and trusted execution environments to design and prototype a system called SmarTor. This system replaces the directory authorities with a smart contract and a distributed network of untrusted entities responsible for bandwidth measurements. We prototyped SmarTor using Ethereum smart contracts and Intel SGX secure hardware. In our evaluation, we show that SmarTor produces significantly more reliable and precise measurements compared to the current measurement system. Overall, our solution improves the decentralization of the Tor network, reduces trust assumptions and increases resilience against powerful adversaries like law enforcement and intelligence services.
Christof Ferreira Torres, Julian Schütte, Radu State
The capability of executing so-called smart contracts in a decentralised manner is one of the compelling features of modern blockchains. Smart contracts are fully fledged programs which cannot be changed once deployed to the blockchain. They typically implement the business logic of distributed apps and carry billions of dollars worth of coins. In that respect, it is imperative that smart contracts are correct and have no vulnerabilities or bugs. However, research has identified different classes of vulnerabilities in smart contracts, some of which led to prominent multi-million dollar fraud cases. In this paper we focus on vulnerabilities related to integer bugs, a class of bugs that is particularly difficult to avoid due to some characteristics of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the Solidity programming language.
Decentralized Justice in the Era of Blockchain ODR that is built on blockchain technology and infrastructure is championed by supporters as being capable of revolutionizing dispute resolution. Kleros is a decentralized dispute resolution platform built on the Ethereum blockchain that uses cryptoeconomic theories and game theory to recruit and incentivize a worldwide pool of ‘jurors’ to decide the cases arbitrated through the platform. This article discusses some early evaluations of whether this kind of decentralized ODR is likely to succeed by viewing the model through a normative framework, including considering whether crowdsourcing of justice on a decentralized platform is a viable way to conduct ODR. The article then discusses the likelihood of the success of the sub-court model, including whether choice-of-law issues might be problematic for a worldwide, decentralized system. Finally, the article considers whether the cryptoeconomic and game theories that provide the foundation for the Kleros platform are likely to result in a jury pool, much less an actual jury, that could be considered ‘fair.’ The article is informed by the author’s experience with the Kleros platform through participation in its interactive initial coin offering and engaging in its beta-testing phase.
Chun‐Wei Chen, Jianwei Su, Tung-Wei Kuo, Kung Chen
In this paper, we focus on the design of consensus algorithms for permission-based blockchains, i.e., private blockchains. In most consensus algorithms, blocks are proposed by a specific role called “leader”. In this paper, we introduce a new role called “witness” to supervise the leader. The presence of the witness facilitates the design of the consensus algorithm. We propose a witness-based consensus algorithm that guarantees safety and liveness. We implemented this consensus algorithm on Go Ethereum. The experimental result shows that in a blockchain where four nodes participate in the consensus process, we can achieve a throughput of 1000 transactions per second (TPS). Even if these four nodes are located on different continents, and one of them is faulty, we can still achieve a throughput of 300 TPS. Finally, we find that during the experiment, a significant portion of time is spent on activities other than the consensus task. The result suggests that to further increase the throughput of a private blockchain, the consensus task and non-consensus activities should be considered jointly.
The use of Blockchain Technology in the Internet of Things will let applications in numerous domains such as Smart home, Industrial Automation, Transportation etc thrive by easily monitoring, tracking and securing data. IoT solutions using blockchain helps in transferring and verifying transactions in a secure manner. However, there are many blockchain platforms available that vary in many ways such as their purpose, ease of participation, governance etc. To determine which blockchain implementation should be leveraged for applying to IoTs, there exists a need for comparing different blockchain platforms. One important aspect we can consider for comparison is the energy consumption of blockchains and analyzing energy-performance trade-offs. Towards this goal, we profile the impact of workloads and further quantify the power consumed by different operations performed on the Ethereum platform and Hyperledger Fabric platform. In contrast to existing approaches that are focused on performance, we characterize performance and energy consumption for real workloads and analyze energy-performance trade-offs. The insights from the study can be used in developing secure protocols for IoTs using blockchains.
Blockchain technology has been seeing widespread interest as a means to ensure the integrity, confidentiality and availability of data in a trustless environment. They are designed to protect data from both internal and external cyberattacks by utilizing the aggregated power of the network to resist malicious efforts. In this article, we will create our own decentralized messaging application utilizing the Ethereum Whisper protocol. Our application will be able to send encrypted messages both securely and anonymously. We will utilize the Ethereum platform to deploy our blockchain network. This application would be resistant to most suppression tactics due to its distributed nature and adaptability of its communication protocol.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The value of various Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum are always elusive. Hence, it would be a great value addition to investors if a model is able to predict what would be the nature of the crypto market for the next day. Through this paper, a time-series model using Long Short-Term Memory Networks is built to determine the value of cryptocurrency in the future. As a study, three cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum has been taken into consideration. A comparison of the results by using opinion mining to interpret the mood of the market on the current day for different currencies has been done. The sentiment scores got from natural language processing of textual data are used as features to the model used for predictions. The time-series charts are plotted using Plotly – python library for graphing plots. The Mean Absolute Error calculated between the actual and predicted values is used as the uncertainty quantification method. These uncertainty quantification methods are compared to analyze the present-day scenario of the market using opinion mining.
Recent proliferation in disruptive technologies has opened up a new horizon for Internet of Vehicles (IoV). The success of IoV highly depends on the robustness of vehicular information system as a dispute among the service providers on data rights or any kind of security violation could disrupt the transport services altogether. In this work we propose a blockchain based novel architecture for vehicle authentication and privacy preservation with seamless access control for IoV. Proposed architecture is decentralized, robust and scalable. Along with privacy preserving authentication and conflict-free access-log maintenance, the proposed BlockAPP protocol also supports an optional traceability feature. Performance evaluation using smart contact over Ethereum Blockchain validates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.