Blockchain-based cryptocurrency systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have attracted much attention during the last decade. In recent years, a trend of combining Internet of Things (IoT) devices with blockchain technology has emerged. Digital payments can be made on front-end IoT devices, while a back-end blockchain serves as a distributed ledger to ensure the validity of payments across the system. Nevertheless, fast payments are usually on demand in such a scenario, but an open problem still remains on how to protect blockchain-based systems from double-spending attacks in the context of fast payment. Off-chain techniques, such as Lightning Network and Raiden Network, act as countermeasures to this problem, but they all suffer from the hidden transactions problem. To combat this problem, we propose FastPay, a solution for achieving secure fast payments in blockchain-backed edge-IoT systems. Preliminary evaluation on our prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of FastPay.
Asoke K. Talukder, M. Chaitanya, David Arnold, Kouichi Sakurai
Studies suggest that a significant proportion of the diagnosis in non-communicable diseases (NCD) is erroneous, unwanted, or unnecessary. To reduce the disease burden and improve public health, algorithmic support is essential. To realize this, health data must be computer understandable, secured, ubiquitous, and interoperable. Medical and disease data entered into computers are unstructured natural language texts with medical jargons which a computer normally cannot understand. EMR (Electronic Medical Records) are data silos in the hospital and do not interoperate. In this paper we present Ethereum based future ready Proof of Disease (PoD) consensus protocol with a computer understandable single instance of truth. It will solve many challenges that electronic health records (EHR) or health information exchange (HIE) have failed to address. This medical system will help achieve all the complex needs of P6 (Participatory, Personalized, Proactive, Preventive, Predictive and Precision) medicine and finally reduce the disease burden.
Ahmed S. Almasoud, Maged M. Eljazzar, Farookh Hussain
In recent years, Blockchain technology has been highly valued and disruptive. Several researches have presented a merge between blockchain and current application i.e. medical, supply chain, and e-commerce. Although Blockchain architecture does not have a standard yet, IBM, MS, AWS offer BaaS (Blockchain as a Service). In addition to the current public chains i.e. Ethereum, NEO, and Cardeno; there are some differences between several public ledgers in terms of development and architecture. This paper introduces the main factors that affect integration of Artificial Intelligence with Blockchain. As well as, how it could be integrated for forecasting and automating; building self-regulated chain.
Aleksandr Kapitonov, Ivan Berman, Vitaly Bulatov, Sergey Lonshakov · 5 authors
The paper describes work organization methods for manufacturing with plenty of autonomous agents with the help of market mechanisms what authors call robot economy. As a technological basis, the application of decentralized technologies is presented and justified: Blockchain technologies and smart contracts of the Ethereum network. The paper is an extension of the article “Blockchain-based protocol of autonomous business activity for multi-agent systems of UAVs” and describes in more detail the architecture of the robots economy protocol. The main attention is paid to the protocol functionality and its basic elements. There is a description of the architecture of an autonomous agent working on the principles of robot economy in the article. The article shows how the work of a smart factory is organized. As a result, the experience of approbation of the presented methods in various projects and experiments is presented.
Traditionally, a Certification Authority (CA) is required to sign, manage, verify and revoke public key certificates. Multiple CAs together form the CA-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). The use of a PKI forces one to place trust in the CAs, which have proven to be a single point-of-failure on multiple occasions. Blockchain has emerged as a transformational technology that replaces centralized trusted third parties with a decentralized, publicly verifiable, peer-to-peer data store which maintains data integrity among nodes through various consensus protocols. In this paper, we deploy three blockchain-based alternatives to the CA-based PKI for supporting IoT devices, based on Emercoin Name Value Service (NVS), smart contracts by Ethereum blockchain, and Ethereum Light Sync client. We compare these approaches with CA-based PKI and show that they are much more efficient in terms of computational and storage requirements in addition to providing a more robust and scalable PKI.
Nowadays, the development of the Internet of Things is growing rapidly. This condition raises security problems because of the many violations of security policies. In addition, the development of blockchain is also growing rapidly since it was first popularized in Bitcoin. Security issues on this IoT can be solved using blockchain. One way that can be done is to make secure communication between IoT devices. In this study, an IoT system will be created without and using blockchain which will then be compared between the two. The communication protocol used in IoT systems without blockchain is MQTT. Meanwhile, the blockchain platform used is Ethereum along with a smart contract. Both of these IoT systems will be analyzed for their security level by simulating attacks and observing their security aspects. The test results show that the IoT system based on blockchain technology has a higher level of security than the IoT system without blockchain technology.
In the age of Big Data, releasing protected sensitive data at a future point in time is critical for various applications. Such self-emerging data release requires the data to be protected until a prescribed data release time and be automatically released to the recipient at the release time, even if the data sender goes offline. While straight-forward centralized approaches provide a basic solution to the problem, unfortunately they are limited to a single point of trust and involve a single point of control. This paper presents decentralized techniques for supporting self-emerging data using smart contracts in Ethereum blockchain networks. We design a credible and enforceable smart contract for supporting self-emerging data release. The smart contract employs a set of Ethereum peers to jointly follow the proposed timed-release service protocol allowing the participating peers to earn the remuneration paid by the service users. We model the problem as an extensive-form game with imperfect information to protect against possible adversarial attacks including some peers destroying the private data (drop attack) or secretly releasing the private data before the release time (release-ahead attack). We demonstrate the efficacy and attack-resilience of the proposed techniques through rigorous analysis and experimental evaluation. Our implementation and experimental evaluation on the Ethereum official test network demonstrate the low monetary cost and the low time overhead associated with the proposed approach and validate its guaranteed security properties.
Randa Almadhoun, Maha Kadadha, Maya Alhemeiri, Maryam R. Al-Shehhi · 5 authors
These days, IoT devices are deployed at a massive scale, with Cisco predicting 20 billion devices by the year 2020. As opposed to endpoint devices, IoT devices are resource-constrained devices, incapable of securing and defending themselves, and can be easily hacked and compromised. Fog computing can augment such capacity limitations by providing localized compute, storage, and networking for a group of IoT devices. As fog nodes are deployed in close proximity to IoT devices, fog computing can be more effective than cloud computing. Furthermore, Blockchain has emerged as technology with capabilities to provide secure management, authentication and access to IoT devices and their data, in decentralized manner with high trust, integrity, and resiliency. In this paper, we propose a user authentication scheme using blockhain-enabled fog nodes in which fog nodes interface to Ethereum smart contracts to authenticate users to access IoT devices. The fog nodes are used to provide scalability to the system by relieving the IoT devices from carrying out heavy computation involving tasks related to authentication and communicating with the blockchain. We describe system components, architecture and design, and we discuss key aspects related to security analysis, functionality, testing and implementation of the smart contracts. The full code of the smart contracts for authentication registry, lists, rules and logic is also made publicly available at Github.
Mobile network operators can expand their capacity by aggregating their licensed spectrum with the spectrum discovered opportunistically, i.e., spatiotemporally unused spectrum by other primary users. For an accurate identification of the spectral opportunities, the mobile network has to deploy multiple sensors or it can offload this task to nearby nodes with sensing capabilities, so called helpers. Unfortunately, incentives are limited for helpers to perform energy-wasteful spectrum sensing. Instead, we envision spectrum sensing as a service (Spass) in which a smart contract running on a blockchain (BC) describes the required sensing service parameters and the contracted helpers receive payments only if they perform sensing accurately as agreed in the contract. In this paper, we first introduce Spass and derive a closed formula defining the profitability of a Spass-based business as a function of the spectral efficiency, cost of helpers, and cost of the service. Moreover, we propose two-threshold based voting (TTBV) algorithm to ensure that the fraudulent helpers are excluded from Spass. Via numerical analysis, we show that TTBV causes almost zero false alarms and can exclude malicious users from the contract after only a few iterations. Finally, we develop a running prototype of Spass on Ethereum BC and share the related source code on a publicly-available repository.
Ethereum is a public (permissionless) blockchain with a Turing complete execution machine for smart contracts. Miners that execute a smart contract receive a fee determined by the gas associated with the operation codes (opcodes) in the smart contract. It is important that the gas award is proportional to the computation resources required, to assure that incentives are aligned and denial of service attacks are avoided. Currently, the amount of gas awarded is set statically for each opcode, but it is unknown if these values are correct for various computer architectures. Therefore, we propose in this paper a benchmark approach to assess the computational resources required per opcode. We apply the benchmark approach to PC and MAC as a first illustration of the approach.
Blockchain technology has gained immense popularity because many researchers believe that it could solve numerous problems and could be applied in various fields of study. Unfortunately, behind its potentials, blockchain also possessed many challenges and limitations. The highlighted problem is the usability aspect of blockchain technology examined from developer and user perspective. This paper tried to address this problem by proposing query functionalities, with the help of query layer system, to facilitate the developer and the user to access blockchain data easily. There are three main query functionalities that will be discussed in this paper: (1) finding blockchain data based on multiple search parameters (retrieval query), (2) providing simple statistical analysis from a collection of blockchain data (aggregate query) and (3) sorting blockchain data according to its blockchain component (ranking query). For the implementation stage, Ethereum is used as platform to provide blockchain network, MongoDB is used as cloud storage service and REST API is used as web services. For the testing stage, throughput and time response are used to evaluate the performance of the developed query functionalities in the query layer system. The results are: (1) the throughput of query layer system is lower than Ethereum service for blockchain data retrieval and (2) the time response of query layer system is affected by the number of thread and the amount of data stored in cloud storage.
Parinya Ekparinya, Vincent Gramoli, Guillaume Jourjon
Recent theoretical attacks conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains through simulations or assumption violations. Unfortunately, previous results typically omit both the nature of the network under which the blockchain code runs and whether blockchains are private, consortium or public. In this paper, we study the public Ethereum blockchain as well as a consortium and private blockchains and quantify the feasibility of man-in-the-middle and double spending attacks against them. To this end, we list important properties of the Ethereum public blockchain topology, we deploy VMs with constrained CPU quantum to mimic the top-10 mining pools of Ethereum and we attack them, by first partitionning the network through BGP hijacking or ARP spooling before issuing a Balance Attack to steal coins. Our results demonstrate that attacking Ethereum is remarkably devastating in a consortium or private context as the adversary can multiply her digital assets by 200, 000× in 10 hours through BGP hijacking whereas it would be almost impossible in a public context.
Modern centralized online marketplaces such as eBay offer an alternative option for consumers to both sell and purchase goods with relative ease. However, drawbacks to these marketplaces include the platform's ability to block merchants at their own whim, the fees paid to the platform when listing a product and when selling a product, and the lack of privacy of users' data. In this paper, we propose an application that remedies all three of these drawbacks through use of the Ethereum blockchain platform. The application was developed using the Truffle development framework. The application's functions were contained within an Ethereum smart contract, which was then migrated to the Ethereum network. The user's input was read through a web interface and sent to the Ethereum network via the web3.js API. Statistics about the application were gathered on the Rinkeby test network. The application was shown to have an average transaction runtime of 3.8 seconds, and an average gas consumption of 4.6 wei. Contract creation times for the application were shown to be less than a second. A cost analysis of the application was then conducted. The gas consumption of the transactions needed to both buy and sell a product was converted into US dollars, and the gas cost of the application was then compared to the cost to use an online auction marketplace such as eBay as well as an in-person auction house such as Sotheby's. The results showed that selling on the application is cheaper than existing online options as well as existing in-person options. These tests showed that our application was successful in addressing the drawbacks of current auction marketplaces.
Blockchain is a peer-to-peer (P2P) technology that records and verifies transactions in a decentralised, cryptography-secure manner. Blockchain applications can globally manage records of any sort, such as import-export declarations, invoices, bills of lading (BLs) and certificates of origin (COs). It is a promising technology for several areas, including international trade. This paper presents blockchain, comments on blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, gives examples of private sector initiatives, shares an idea for a CO blockchain application, and discusses regulatory issues. In doing so, the paper aims to attract attention for blockchain in international trade.
Application of IoT (Internet of Things) is expanding rapidly as internet connects things in our homes and our personal devices and even our body, provides ease, entertainment and comfort to our daily lives. However, as everything personal is connected, security and privacy becomes a major challenge. Blockchain-based IoT can provide a completely trusted and transparent environment with its tamper-resistant data structure, timestamp, data encryption and distributed consensus. Since cryptocurrency is the first application of blockchains, most blockchain mechanisms like Ethereum provides token-based peer-to-peer payment system that allows payment using a custom currency which enables IoT devices to pay or receive token without a third-party inclusion. In this paper we proposed to apply blockchain mechanism to education/discipline of children at home by through token-based parental control in which parent can encourage good behaviors and discourage bad behaviors of children via tokens transferred via blockchain network. Current parental control is implemented in operating systems of smartphones that only prohibits the abuse of smartphone games or inappropriate web sites. However, this token-based parental control pay tokens to children with good behaviors that allow them to play or watch the proper contents as their rewards. Devices at home like television and computer are connected to the blockchain and accessible only when the user have a sufficient amount of tokens. Children are given incentives in term of token by their parents if they do their homework properly or help their parents. Besides that, smart contract feature in Ethereum allows application to be programmed in a blockchain enables monitoring the activities of children through blockchain. This paper introduces the design of the token-based parental control by using smart contract schemes of Ethereum blockchain with a simple smart home setup as a proof of concept.
Rad uspoređuje dvije po konceptu veoma različite blockchain platforme, te na kraju donosi zaključak o uspješnosti platformi na temelju aplikacije za kontrolu ulaza. Platforma Ethereum je primjer prve platforme koja je osmišljena da podržava pametne ugovore, a u mrežu se može ući bez dozvole i čitati sve podatke na blockchainu. Hyperledger Fabric je platforma koja također podržava pametne ugovore, međutim u mrežu se ne može ući bez dozvole i ne mogu se čitati svi podatci već oni za koje čvor ima pristup. U platformi Ethereum se ne mora nikome vjerovati te je osmišljena kao javna mreža, a u Hyperledgeru se mora vjerovati određenim čvorovima i mreža je zamišljena za tvrtke. Krajnja usporedba donosi i zaključke o potrebi blockchaina za kontrolu ulaza naspram konvencionalnih baza podataka.
U ovom završnom radu obrađen je pojam hardvera za rudarenje kriptovaluta. Nakon uvoda u prvom poglavlju opisana je prva kriptovaluta "Bitcoin". U drugom poglavlju objašnjen je protokol "Blockchain" na koji Bitcoin funkcionira. U trećem poglavlju opisane su transakcije, te posao rudara u bitcoin mreži. U četvrtom poglavlju je opisana povijest hardvera, te detaljan opis hardvera ovisno o generaciji. U zadnjem poglavlju je opisan suvremeni hardver te najbolje rješenje za Bitcoin i Ethereum, drugu najvrjedniju kriptovalutu.
In December 2017, CryptoKitties, a game on the Ethereum blockchain became an instant success shortly after its launch. It attracted 180,000 users with over $20 million of spend in Ether, and was at one point taking up 12% of all Ethereum transactions.
Technically speaking, CryptoKitties is a smart contract - a piece of code with storage capability that resides on a blockchain. Smart contracts are gaining increasing popularity in recent years. We present a comprehensive review of smart contracts with a focus on existing applications and challenges they face. We have covered the smart contract mechanisms, promising use cases, as well as relevant research work and the open issues.
Master thesis “Blockchain applications of Ethereum smart contracts” describes blockchain technology with emphasis on Ethereum network and Solidity programming language. Smart contract with associated front end has been created for asset exchange, based on a price which user can define by himself.
U diplomskom radu "Primjena Ethereum pametnih ugovora na blockchain mreži" detaljno je opisana blockchain tehnologija s naglaskom na Ethereum mrežu kao i programski jezik Solidity. Kreiran je pametni ugovor s pripadajućim front end-om koji korisniku omogućuje razmjenu imovine prema cijeni koju može sam definirati.
Today, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in all aspects of life is increasing exponentially. Our cities are getting smarter and informing us about our surroundings in a contextual manner. However, we face significant challenges in deploying, managing, and collecting data from these devices. In addition, we must address the problem of storing and mining that data for higher-quality IoT services. Blockchain technology, even in today's nascent form, has the potential to be the foundation for a common, distributed, trustless, and autonomous infrastructure system. This article describes a standardized IoT infrastructure where data are stored on a distributed storage service that is fault-tolerant and resistant to distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and data access is managed by a decentralized, trustless blockchain. The illustrated system used LoRa as the emerging network technology, Swarm as the distributed data storage platform, and Ethereum as the blockchain platform. Such a data back end will ensure high availability with minimal security risks while replacing traditional back-end systems with a single "smart contract".