Hao Dai, H. P. Young, Thomas J S Durant, Guannan Gong · 8 authors
The governance of data used for biomedical research and clinical trials is an important requirement for generating accurate results. To improve the visibility of data quality and analysis, we developed TrialChain, a blockchain-based platform that can be used to validate data integrity from large, biomedical research studies. We implemented a private blockchain using the MultiChain platform and integrated it with a data science platform deployed within a large research center. An administrative web application was built with Python to manage the platform, which was built with a microservice architecture using Docker. The TrialChain platform was integrated during data acquisition into our existing data science platform. Using NiFi, data were hashed and logged within the local blockchain infrastructure. To provide public validation, the local blockchain state was periodically synchronized to the public Ethereum network. The use of a combined private/public blockchain platform allows for both public validation of results while maintaining additional security and lower cost for blockchain transactions. Original data and modifications due to downstream analysis can be logged within TrialChain and data assets or results can be rapidly validated when needed using API calls to the platform. The TrialChain platform provides a data governance solution to audit the acquisition and analysis of biomedical research data. The platform provides cryptographic assurance of data authenticity and can also be used to document data analysis.
Patrick G. Sylim, Fang Liu, Alvin Marcelo, Paul Fontelo
BACKGROUND: Drug counterfeiting is a global problem with significant risks to consumers and the general public. In the Philippines, 30% of inspected drug stores in 2003 were found with substandard/spurious/falsely-labeled/falsified/counterfeit drugs. The economic burden on the population drug expenditures and on governments is high. The Philippine Food and Drug Administration (FDA) encourages the public to check the certificates of product registration and report any instances of counterfeiting. The National Police of Philippines responds to such reports through a special task force. However, no literature on its impact on the distribution of such drugs were found. Blockchain technology is a cryptographic ledger that is allegedly immutable through repeated sequential hashing and fault-tolerant through a consensus algorithm. This project will develop and test a pharmacosurveillance blockchain system that will support information sharing along the official drug distribution network. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop a pharmacosurveillance blockchain system and test its functions in a simulated network. METHODS: We are developing a Distributed Application (DApp) that will run on smart contracts, employing Swarm as the Distributed File System (DFS). Two instances will be developed: one for Ethereum and another for Hyperledger Fabric. The proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm of Ethereum will be modified into a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) or practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm as it is scalable and fits the drug supply chain environment. The system will adopt the GS1 pedigree standard and will satisfy the data points in the data standardization guidelines from the US FDA. Simulations will use the following 5 nodes: for FDA, manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, and the consumer portal. RESULTS: Development is underway. The design of the system will place FDA in a supervisory data verification role, with each pedigree type-specific data source serving a primary data verification role. The supply chain process will be initiated by the manufacturer, with recursive verification for every transaction. It will allow consumers to scan a code printed on the receipt of their purchases to review the drug distribution history. CONCLUSIONS: Development and testing will be conducted in a simulated network, and thus, results may differ from actual practice. The project being proposed is disruptive; once tested, the team intends to engage the Philippine FDA to discuss implementation plans and formulate policies to facilitate adoption and sustainability. REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER: RR1-10.2196/10163.
This letter questions the true nature (true versus spurious) of the Long Range Dependence (LRD) behavior observed in the returns and volatility series of four Cryptocurrencies (CC). Using a robust approach, this letter shows that the LRD behavior exhibited by the returns and volatility series of Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ripple is a true behavior, and not a statistical artifact. As for Ethereum, the results show that the true LRD is only supported for the volatility series. Our results confirm the inefficiency of all the considered markets, with the exception of Ethereum.
Paolo Missier, Shaimaa Bajoudah, Angelo Capossele, Andrea Gaglione · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) data are increasingly viewed as a new form of massively distributed and large scale digital assets, which are continuously generated by millions of connected devices. The real value of such assets can only be realized by allowing IoT data trading to occur on a marketplace that rewards every single producer and consumer, at a very granular level. Crucially, we believe that such a marketplace should not be owned by anybody, and should instead fairly and transparently self-enforce a well defined set of governance rules. In this paper we address some of the technical challenges involved in realizing such a marketplace. We leverage emerging blockchain technologies to build a decentralized, trusted, transparent and open architecture for IoT traffic metering and contract compliance, on top of the largely adopted IoT brokered data infrastructure. We discuss an Ethereum-based prototype implementation and experimentally evaluate the overhead cost associated with Smart Contract transactions, concluding that a viable business model can indeed be associated with our technical approach.
В данной работе раскрываются особенности возникновения и особенности работы с криптовалютами Bitcoin, Ethereum, Namecoin, которые собственные создатели позиционируют, как новые ветви развития всей криптовалюты. Исследовано, чем пользуются банки мира, или куда можно инвестировать сегодня. Проведен системный анализ, какую криптовалюту выбрать для получения большей прибыли.
Kampanje javnog prikupljanja sredstava sve su češći način financiranja novih projekata, no dolaze uz otvorena pitanja oko pouzdanosti sudionika i sigurnosti prikupljenih sredstava. Postojanje okruženja u kojem bi ispravno i sigurno funkcioniranje prikupljanja i povrata sredstava bilo garantirano, pogodovalo bi povećanju popularnosti ovog načina financiranja, povećalo interes potencijalnih donatora i ohrabrilo pokretače novih projekata. Tehnologija blok-lanca stvorila je okruženje za nastanak decentraliziranih kriptovaluta, omogućivši obavljanje transakcija bez uključivanja treće strane kao centralnog autoriteta kojemu se vjeruje. Platforma Ethereum, bazirana na tehnologiji blok-lanca, u takvom okruženju u kojem nema potrebe za vjerovanjem trećoj strani, omogućuje definiranje pametnih ugovora koji mogu sadržavati proizvoljnu logiku i pravila za vlasništvo, transakcije i ostalo. Korištenjem pametnih ugovora platforme Ethereum, razvijeno je rješenje za decentralizirano prikupljanje sredstava, uz proširenja koja donatorima pružaju određenu kontrolu nad trošenjem prikupljenih sredstava, kao i mogućnost prekida projekta uz osiguran povratak preostalih sredstava.
Gihan J. Mendis, Moein Sabounchi, Wei Jin, Rigoberto Roche
Deep learning algorithms have recently gained attention due to their inherent capabilities and the application opportunities that they provide. Two of the main reasons for the success of deep learning methods are the availability of processing power and big data. Both of these two are expensive and rare commodities that present limitations to the usage and implementation of deep learning. Decentralization of the processing and data is one of the most prevalent solutions for these issues. This paper proposes a cooperative decentralized deep learning architecture. The contributors can train deep learning models with private data and share them to the cooperative data-driven applications initiated elsewhere. Shared models are fused together to obtain a better model. In this work, the contributors can both design their own models or train the models provided by the initiator. In order to utilize an efficient decentralized learning algorithm, blockchain technology is incorporated as a method of creating an incentive-compatible market. In the proposed method, Ethereum blockchain's scripting capabilities are employed to devise a decentralized deep learning mechanism, which provides much higher, collective processing power and grants access to large amounts of data, which would be otherwise inaccessible. The technical description of the mechanism is described and the simulation results are presented.
Regio A. Michelin, Ali Dorri, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Marco Steger · 7 authors
There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consumers and producers in smart cities. Vehicles can use smart city data for decision-making, such as dynamic routing based on traffic conditions. Moreover, the multitude of embedded sensors in vehicles can collectively produce a rich data set of the urban landscape that can be used to provide a range of services. Key to the success of this vision is a scalable and private architecture for trusted data sharing. This paper proposes a framework called SpeedyChain, that leverages blockchain technology to allow smart vehicles to share their data while maintaining privacy, integrity, resilience and non-repudiation in a decentralized, and tamper-resistant manner. Differently from traditional blockchain usage (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), the proposed framework uses a blockchain design that decouples the data stored in the transactions from the block header, thus allowing for fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block to avoid large sized blocks is proposed. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.
Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies are gaining unprecedented popularity and understanding. Meanwhile, Ethereum is gaining a significant popularity in the blockchain community, mainly due to the fact that it is designed in a way that enables developers to write smart contract and decentralized applications (Dapps). This new paradigm of applications opens the door to many possibilities and opportunities. However, the security of Ethereum smart contracts has not received much attention; several Ethereum smart contracts malfunctioning have recently been reported. Unlike many previous works that have applied static and dynamic analyses to find bugs in smart contracts, we do not attempt to define and extract any features; instead we focus on reducing the expert's labor costs. We first present a new in-depth analysis of potential attacks methodology and then translate the bytecode of solidity into RGB color code. After that, we transform them to a fixed-sized encoded image. Finally, the encoded image is fed to convolutional neural network (CNN) for automatic feature extraction and learning, detecting compiler bugs of Ethereum smart contract.
This article evaluates the legal framework of cryptocurrency in various countries. The new currency instrument is abstract currencies. They are currencies in the sense that they can be exchanged peer-to-peer. They are representations of numbers, i.e. abstract objects. An abstract currency system is a self-enforcing system of property rights over an abstract instrument which gives its owners the freedom to use and the right to exclude others from using the instrument. Cryptocurrency or virtual currency is a cryptographically protected, decentralized digital currency used as a means of exchange. Due to the development of new technologies and innovations, the rate of use of virtual currency is rapidly increasing throughout the globe, replacing not only cash payments and payments by bank transfer, but also electronic cash payments. Among the best-known representatives of cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum. Legal scholars have not yet reached a consensus regarding the nature and legal status of virtual currency. Virtual currency possesses the nature of obligations righ ts as well as property rights, since it may be both a means of payment and a commodity. Depending on the country, the approach to cryptocurrencies may be different. Today there is already an international cryptocurrency community that does not have a single coordinating center. Only progressive jurisdiction and state regulation of cryptocurrency activity will allow the creation of the conditions that will ensure the implementation of legitimate and safe cryptocurrency relations.
Decentralized Ledger Technology, popularized by the Bitcoin network, aims to keep track of a ledger of valid transactions between agents of a virtual economy without a central institution for coordination. In order to keep track of a faithful and accurate list of transactions, the ledger is broadcast and replicated across machines in a peer-to-peer network. To enforce validity of transactions in the ledger (i.e., no negative balance or double spending), the network as a whole coordinates to accept or reject new transactions based on a set of rules aiming to detect and block operations of malicious agents (i.e., Byzantine attacks). Consensus protocols are particularly important to coordinate operation of the network, since they are used to reconcile potentially conflicting versions of the ledger. Regardless of architecture and consensus mechanism used, resulting economic networks remain largely similar, with economic agents driven by incentives under a set of rules. Due to the intense activity in this area, proper mathematical frameworks to model and analyze behavior of blockchain-enabled systems are essential. In this paper, we address this need and provide the following contributions: (i) we establish a formal framework, with tools from dynamical systems theory, to mathematically describe core concepts in blockchain-enabled networks, (ii) we apply this framework to the Bitcoin network and recover its key properties, and (iii) we connect our modeling framework with powerful tools from control engineering, such as Lyapunov-like functions, to properly engineer economic systems with provable properties. Apart from the aforementioned contributions, the mathematical framework herein proposed lays a foundation for engineering more general economic systems built on emerging Turing complete networks, such as the Ethereum network, through which complex alternative economic models are explored.
Ethereum platforma za pametne ugovore svjetlo dana je ugledala 2015. godine, a bila je predložena već 2013. godine. Ona je uvelike inspirirana prvom i najpoznatijom kriptovalutom Bitcoin. Mi smo upotrijebili Ethereum platformu da napravimo pametni ugovor u programskom jeziku Solidity. Svrha tog pametnog ugovora je prediktivno definiranje budućih događaja. Nad tim pametnim ugovorim izgradili smo odgovarajuću web aplikaciju. Pri implementaciji naišli smo na određene tehničke probleme i probleme u vezi sinkronizacije. Takvi problemi su uobičajeni u većini distribuiranih aplikacija. U ovome diplomskom radu smo adresirali i raspravili te konkretne probleme.
The Holy Quran is the fundamental Islamic scripture revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings of Allah be upon him) for the past 1400 years. In today’s Internet, there exist online sources which provide incomplete or false Quranic text which may either be published deliberately or unintentionally. The research investigates the possibility of developing a digital trust framework that secures the integrity of the Quranic text using blockchain technology. The research uses blockchain technology as the emerging secured distributed ledger to establish digital trust. The Ethereum blockchain platform was used to validate the proposed framework. The proposed digital trust framework was developed in a three-level architecture consisting of participants, digital trust and Quranic text. The key components of the proposed framework were found useful in Ethereum blockchain platform for effective use in distributed ledger, distributed consensus, smart contract, decentralized application development and cryptographic algorithms for database encryption and user authentication in Whisper, Swarm and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The findings show the effectiveness, efficiency and usability of the proposed digital trust framework on the Ethereum blockchain platform and demonstrate how user of Quran and blockchain miner interact with the system to verify and validate Quranic content. The research has recommended the use of blockchain technology to secure the integrity of the Quranic text. The work facilitates the protection of the Quranic text as well as proving a mean to verify the authenticity of the Quranic content.
Seunghyun Yoo, Seungbae Kim, Joshua Joy, Mário Gerla
A proof-of-work blockchain adopts an incentive-driven design to encourage people to participate in the network. Miners provide computing resources and services in exchange for incentives such as static block rewards and transaction fees collected from blockchain users. However, our findings suggest that the current reward scheme may not encourage miners to process user transactions. A non-cooperative strategy that submits a block with no transaction can be more rewarded than a cooperative strategy. As a consequence, the non-cooperative strategy can prevail over the cooperative strategy, decrease the system throughput, and distort credit distribution. We particularly choose Ethereum project as a subject since it is a general-purpose smart contract platform. By investigating the past two years of its ledger history, we find network propagation and block processing delays are the most significant factors that cause miners to choose the non-cooperative strategy. From this finding, we develop a more accurate statistical model for a block discovery time, as well as a reward matrix. We then derive the condition that either strategy has no additional gain, which also helps to estimate whether the transaction fee is underpriced or not. Simulation results show that the non-cooperative strategy is no longer dominant under the revised reward scheme.
Blockchain-based systems such as cryptocurrencies are achieving widespread usage, with a market capitalization of $150B (USD)as of September 2017. However, the most prominent platforms that account for over 70% of this market - Bitcoin & Ethereum - are exhibiting increasingly lower levels of decentralization. This poses the problem of concentrating levers of consensus to a select group of agents in the system. At the same time, attempts at higher levels of decentralization poses the problem of limiting scalability of such systems. In this paper, using mechanism design we propose a way of designing payoffs in order to disincentivize certain exhibited behaviors and incentivize desired behaviors of miners in such systems. Our approach indicates potential for research in this area for solving the much larger problem of centralization in decentralized systems such as blockchain.
Blockchain is one of the most hyped technologies of recent years. It promises to restructure the way applications are developed and to replace the widely client-server model used today. While the technology is promising the ecosystem of tools and development methodologies are still in their early stages. In this paper a proof of concept blockchain application is developed, regarding the exchange of data between different universities in different countries, with respect to the Erasmus program. A decentralized application has been designed from ground up and is proposed to be installed in multiple nodes located in all participating universities. Ethereum platform has been chosen and the required smart contracts have been implemented. Additionally an easy to use web interface have been developed in order to be usable for end users. We have evaluated both the development process and the efficiency of the resulting implementation.
The emerging data-driven techniques have greatly increased the demand for effective data sharing infrastructure, which is our fundamental motivation in designing effective data trade paradigms. One of the critical challenges of data sharing is to achieve a good trade-off between the privacy and data utility. To address this challenge, in this paper we exploit the Blockchain techniques and contract theory to design a Blockchain-based peer-to-peer data trading mechanism. In our proposed mechanism, the data trading is supported by Ethereum Blockhain technique. To effectively capture and regulate the complex interaction between the data aggregators (AGG) and the data owners, we propose a contract theoretic approach to design the smart contract that is the essential component of Ethereum Blockchain. The performance of our proposed Blockchain-enabled data trading mechanism is evaluated.
Internet of Things (IoTs) offers a plethora of opportunities for remote monitoring and communication of everyday objects known as things with applications in numerous domains. The advent of blockchains can be a significant enabler for IoTs towards conducting and verifying transactions in a secure manner. However, applying blockchains to IoTs is challenging due to the resource constrained nature of the embedded devices coupled with significant delay incurred in processing and verifying transactions in the blockchain. Thus there exists a need for profiling the energy consumption of blockchains for securing IoTs and analyzing energy-performance trade-offs. Towards this goal, we profile the impact of workloads based on Smart Contracts and further quantify the power consumed by different operations performed by the devices on the Ethereum platform. In contrast to existing approaches that are focused on performance, we characterize performance and energy consumption for real workloads and analyse energy-performance trade-offs. Our proposed methodology is generic in that it can be applied to other platforms. The insights obtained from the study can be used to develop secure protocols for IoTs using blockchains.
Public key distribution and device authentication remain the main security challenges in many systems and applications. Existing solutions are based on Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) backed by Certificate Authorities (CA) to validate the authenticity of the devices. However, distributing and provisioning certificates for each client showed to be impractical especially for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this paper we propose a distributed PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) platform based on the Ethereum Blockchain. It contains a decentralized key-store that holds the public keys of all devices, and includes a generic protocol for PSK (Pre-Shared Keys) distribution. PSK keys can then be used by PSK-based security protocols (TLS-PSK, DTLS-PSK, SRTP...) for securing the communication channel between two devices. This platform includes a client-side module, a public key management module configured on the server, and a smart contract software deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain network. This generic platform can be used by many applications for client and server authentication, data integrity, and secure peer to peer communications. Moreover, this promising system may potentially eliminate the trust requirement imposed by the existing PKI/CAs infrastructure on clients.
This article intention was to set up the big picture of all 1,639 cryptocurrencies up and give a policy recommendation for Thai government. Hence, there were three following objectives as follows: 1) to investigate the state of the art of all cryptocurencies in the source of Code / Forking due to limitation of number of pages 2) to identify the best practice of cryptocurrency, and 3) to study the role of General Prayuth Chan-o-cha’s government towards cryptocurrency. Documentary research and descriptive statistics like frequency and percentage were used in this study. The findings found that there were twelve groups of qualified cryptocurrencies in CoinMarketCap, led by two well-known giant family of crypto market, Ethereum (35.5%) and Bitcoin (16.1%). Then, the best practices were on the provision of coins or tokens, twelve techniques for managing blokchain (such as Blockchainas-a Service), blocktime was between 0.03 and 30 minutes with Mean = 1.96, S.D. = 2.29 whereas TPS was between 0 - 1,400,000 with Mean = 1341.87 and S.D. = 36021.52, most of cryptocurrencies had their own Web Site (95.8%) and E-mail (78.8%), coding played a big role in cryptocurrency such as C . Last, cryptocurrency had both open and hidden-and-dark faces. In the open face, tax, law, people’s identification will be useful. In contrary to the open side, setting an autonomous public organization is one and only one solution for all cryptocentric affairs.
Leveraging the wisdom of crowd for knowledge discovery and monetization is increasingly popular nowadays. Among others, one popular way of leveraging the crowd wisdom is crowdsensing with truth discovery, which is able to discover truthful knowledge from the unreliable sensory data harvested from mobile clients. In order to become truly successful, however, a number of challenges are yet to be addressed. First, safeguarding clients' sensory data is demanded for privacy protection. Second, in many real crowdsensing applications, data are usually collected in a streaming manner, so truth discovery is naturally required to be efficiently conducted in a streaming fashion. Thirdly, knowledge monetization should be made full-fledged, endowed with features of transparency and streamlined processing while fully addressing the practical needs of parties in the monetization ecosystem. In this paper, we present our initial effort on a crowdsensing framework that enables privacy-preserving knowledge discovery and full-fledged blockchain-based knowledge monetization. Our framework enables privacy-preserving and efficient truth discovery over encrypted crowdsensed data streams for truthful knowledge discovery. Meanwhile, with careful integration of the newly emerging blockchain-based smart contract technology, our framework allows full-fledged knowledge monetization. Tackling the challenges of monetization fairness and (on-chain) knowledge confidentiality, our customized knowledge monetization design well respects the interests of knowledge seller and requester, with full support of transparency, streamlined processing, and automatic quality-aware rewards for clients. Extensive experiments on Microsoft Azure cloud and Ethereum blockchain demonstrate the practically affordable performance of our design.
Blockchain is one type of distributed ledger technology, which comes from Bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system. Its characteristics like decentralization and immutability make it possible to resolve data barrier and security problems in centralized system. In this paper, we discussed the existing problems of advanced manufacturing and several advantages while applying blockchain. Then we proposed a blockchain model for industrial internet based on well-known blockchain system such as bitcoin ethereum and hyperledger fabric. After that, we gave the workflow for a personalized service in this blockchain model.
This work presents ChainFS, a middleware system that secures cloud storage services using a minimally trusted Blockchain. ChainFS hardens the cloud-storage security against forking attacks. The ChainFS middleware exposes a file-system interface to end users. Internally, ChainFS stores data files in the cloud and exports minimal and necessary functionalities to the Blockchain for key distribution and file operation logging. We implement the ChainFS system on Ethereum and S3FS and closely integrate it with FUSE clients and Amazon S3 cloud storage. We measure the system performance and demonstrate low overhead.
Muskan Vinayak, Har Amrit Pal Singh Panesar, Saulo dos Santos, Ruppa K. Thulasiram · 6 authors
The recent advancement in Blockchain technology and cryp-tocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum has captured interest of many researchers in academia and industry. Since its advent, the Blockchain was inherently supposed to be used in combination with cryptocurrencies but currently this technology is being used in other areas as well. One particular area based on the distributed ledger technology that has grabbed the attention of many technologist and financial marketers is “Smart Contracts”. Based on a cryptocurrency framework known as Ethereum, these smart contracts can be used for different applications such as Option Pricing, Currency Exchange, Revenue Management System, Crowd-funding and Peer-to-Peer networking. In our current effort, we have designed a smart contract and demonstrate that this smart contract could be used to take various possible positions in an European style option. We have analyzed the contract for potential security vulnerabilities when implemented in Blockchain. These option based smart contracts could be used for collateral contract services among finance industries.