Ethereum, a cryptocurrency currently valued at 46 billion US dollars, has grown over 6,500% in the last 12 months. Despite the growth in value, we still have very limited Ethereum network visibility. In this thesis, we analyze the Ethereum network from two vantage points: the DEVp2p network and the Ethereum Mainnet. The DEVp2p peer-to- peer (P2P) network was developed specifically for and ultimately underlies the Ethereum Mainnet. We examine overall composition of the DEVp2p network. We analyze our peer connections on the Ethereum Mainnet—the main Ethereum network established on top of DEVp2p. We compare the Ethereum network’s properties to those of other well-studied P2P networks, namely BitTorrent and Gnutella. We develop novel techniques to measure the Ethereum P2P network and gain visibility into this previously opaque network.
The blockchain is a perceptive invention - the discovery of a person or group of people. But since its invention, it has evolved into something greater and present opportunities for tempestuous innovation. Blockchain has tried to allure evreryone across different domains like industrial sector, banking, healthcare, land holdings and even the public and private sector. The blockchain is an imperishable digital log of financial transactions that can be scheduled to record not just efficient transactions but practically everything that holds a price. It enables global business transactions with less conflict and more trust. Blockchain has invented an era into technology in which the digital information can be distributed without being imitated. Bitcoin blockchain is the most popular public blockchain network, with around 10K nodes. The other big cryptocurrency blockchain project is Ethereum. Ethereum however wasn't designed to be a form of currency but instead it is intended to enable "smart contracts". Many cryptocurrencies are built on the top of blockchain, with the most popular being Bitcoin. In this paper we are going to present an overview of the blockchain technology with focus on two most widely used cryptocurrencies and their comparative analysis.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Zhiqing Huang, Xiongye Su, Yanxin Zhang, Changxue Shi · 6 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in the development of various fields. The increasing scale and scope of applications make a great demand of IoT data exchange in recent years. Meanwhile, a number of IoT data exchange platforms which dedicated to connecting various and distributed data sources are emerging. In such a platform, service providers can search and exchange the data sets that they need. However, the centralized infrastructure cannot provide enough trust as the third-party intermediaries for data exchange. As a result, most platforms unable to satisfy the complex requirements due to few institutions and individuals are willing to share their IoT data sets in such an untrustworthy environment. This paper proposes a decentralized solution based on the blockchain for IoT data trusted exchange. Specifically, In this paper, the basic principles of blockchain and corresponding key technologies are expounded through in-depth analysis of three main reliable requirements in IoT data exchange. Besides, this paper provides an architecture of above solution and detailed design of its main trust component. Finally, it realizes a prototype by using Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts and presents its auditable, transparent, decentralized features visually.
Following the success of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperledger, blockchains are now gaining widespread adoption in a wide variety of applications, using a diversity of distributed ledger systems with varying characteristics. Yet, beyond the original bitcoin protocol, the safety and reliability properties of such systems are not sufficiently analyzed. To better understand the behavior of these systems, we propose VIBES: a configurable blockchain simulator for large scale peer-to-peer networks. With VIBES, users can explore important characteristics and metrics of the network, reason about interactions between nodes, and compare different scenarios in an intuitive way. VIBES differentiates itself from previous works in its ability to simulate blockchain systems beyond bitcoin and its support for large-scale simulations with thousands of nodes.
Cryptocurrency platforms such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have become more popular due to decentralized control and the promise of anonymity. Ethereum is particularly powerful due to its support for smart contracts which are implemented through Turing complete scripting languages and digital tokens that represent fungible tradable goods. It is necessary to understand whether de-anonymization is feasible to quantify the promise of anonymity. Cryptocurrencies are increasingly being used in online black markets like Silk Road and ransomware like CryptoLocker and WannaCry. In this paper, we propose a model for persisting transactions from Ethereum into a graph database, Neo4j. We propose leveraging graph compute or analytics against the transactions persisted into a graph database.
As the technologies are evolving day by day, they are able to rejuvenate any sector either individually or by incorporating other technologies. There are many prominent sectors in the market such as healthcare, education, entertainment, business, information technology, retail, etc. Every sector has its own set of profits and consequences, but apart from all, the banking or finance sector is the only sector that provides dynamicity to all other sectors and helps them to generate maximum revenue from their principal investment. In this chapter, the authors are focusing on the traditional and modern ways of banking, currencies such as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and how the modern currency will change the transaction procedure in the global banking system, creating an amalgamation of such currency with a current transaction system with the role of technology such as Blockchain in the betterment of the global banking system making the system fully decentralized, distributed, transparent, fast, immutable, and efficient.
This chapter describes a short-lived experiment in organizational governance that attempted to utilize algorithmic authority through cryptocurrency and block-chain technologies to create a social and political world quite unlike anything we have seen before. It details the governance structures that were promised by the developers and community members involved in the making of The decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and in contrast, those that were observed in its discourses before, during, and after the “exploit.” The DAO was a decentralized, crowdfunded, direct-management organization and investment platform. In the original vision of decentralized autonomous organizations, as proposed by Vitalik Buterin, founder and member of the Ethereum Foundation, a DAO is a pseudo-legal organization run by an assemblage of human and “robot” participants. From the earliest days of The DAO, many community members acknowledged that the enormous complexity of decentralized and algorithmic governance required a new kind of experimental “science” to map the “uncharted territory” The DAO was entering.
As blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies increase in popularity, their decentralization poses unique challenges in network partitions. In traditional distributed systems, network partitions are generally a result of bugs or connectivity failures; the typical goal of the system designer is to automatically recover from such issues as seamlessly as possible. Blockchain-based systems, however, rely on purposeful "forks" to roll out protocol changes in a decentralized manner. Not all users may agree with proposed changes, and thus forks can persist, leading to permanent network partitions. In this paper, we closely study the large-scale fork that occurred in Ethereum, a new blockchain technology that allows for both currency transactions and smart contracts. Ethereum is currently the second-most-valuable cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of over $28B. We explore the consequences of this fork, showing the impact on the two networks and their mining pools, and how the fork lead to unintentional incentives and security vulnerabilities.
The adoption of blockchain-based distributed computation platforms is growing fast. Some of these platforms, such as Ethereum, provide support for implementing smart contracts, which are envisioned to have novel applications in a broad range of areas, including finance and Internet-of-Things. However, a significant number of smart contracts deployed in practice suffer from security vulnerabilities, which enable malicious users to steal assets from a contract or to cause damage. Vulnerabilities present a serious issue since contracts may handle financial assets of considerable value, and contract bugs are non-fixable by design. To help developers create more secure smart contracts, we introduce FSolidM, a framework rooted in rigorous semantics for designing con- tracts as Finite State Machines (FSM). We present a tool for creating FSM on an easy-to-use graphical interface and for automatically generating Ethereum contracts. Further, we introduce a set of design patterns, which we implement as plugins that developers can easily add to their contracts to enhance security and functionality.
The adoption of blockchain-based distributed computation platforms is growing\nfast. Some of these platforms, such as Ethereum, provide support for\nimplementing smart contracts, which are envisioned to have novel applications\nin a broad range of areas, including finance and Internet-of-Things. However, a\nsignificant number of smart contracts deployed in practice suffer from security\nvulnerabilities, which enable malicious users to steal assets from a contract\nor to cause damage. Vulnerabilities present a serious issue since contracts may\nhandle financial assets of considerable value, and contract bugs are\nnon-fixable by design. To help developers create more secure smart contracts,\nwe introduce FSolidM, a framework rooted in rigorous semantics for designing\ncon- tracts as Finite State Machines (FSM). We present a tool for creating FSM\non an easy-to-use graphical interface and for automatically generating Ethereum\ncontracts. Further, we introduce a set of design patterns, which we implement\nas plugins that developers can easily add to their contracts to enhance\nsecurity and functionality.\n
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Integrative various distributed generation in energy infrastructure have brought great opportunities in recent years. However, this integration has also led to critical challenges in energy management, such as congestion pricing and non-optimality of dispatch. To address these challenges, deregulation and decentralization of electricity market is one of the effective solutions. Although various deregulation schemes have been proposed in recent years, there still remain some serious challenges in achieving resilient management of real-time energy deregulation especially in the presence of disasters. To counter this issue, in this paper, we propose a model for a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) transactive microgrid where prosumers (Producer/ Consumer) can trade local generation with each other via a smart management system. Furthermore, in our proposed model, the energy trading is executed in a decentralized manner by leveraging Blockchain technologies. Among different Blockchain technologies, we adopt the Ethereum Blockchain in our work. The auction models for energy trading are proposed by incorporating a smart contract that is the essential component of the Blockchain. In our simulations, the proposed P2P energy trading model is evaluated.
Chun-Feng Liao, Ching-Ju Cheng, Kung Chen, Chen-Ho Lai · 6 authors
In recent years, Blockchain technology has been highly valued, and the related applications have begun to be developed in large numbers. A smart contract is a software component encompass business logics and transactions that run on a blockchain. Thus, verifying whether the contract logics fully reflect the business requirements are one of the most important software engineering issues in blockchain application development. Currently, developing smart contracts is still a challenging task even for experienced programmers due to the lacking of an integrated tool for developing and testing. In response to this challenge, this paper presents a service platform that supports BDD-style (Behavior-Driven Development) smart contract development, testing, and deployment for the Ethereum-based blockchains. This platform focuses on providing and resolving the cross-cutting concerns across the life-cycle of smart contract development. The feasibility of this platform is shown by demonstrating how an application scenario, namely, loyalty points exchange, can be implemented using the proposed platform. Our experiences indicate that the burdens of developers when developing smart contracts can be effectively reduced and thus increases the quality of contracts.
Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) plays a vital role in various domains, which are home, agricultural, healthcare, tourism, transportation and education. The more of its development, the more we need to consider about its security and privacy issues. In this paper, we consider smart home system (SHS) as a case study. SHS is an integration of home appliances together with sensors to get automatic operations of heating, lighting, air conditioning, home security, health care systems, etc. Moreover, SHS allows homeowner to monitor and perform appliances functions remotely at any instant time via the Internet. Due to the widespread availability and proliferation of the SHS, attackers can impersonate as a homeowner to steal important data (e.g., vital signs) for doing extortion and life threatening. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach of private Blockchain implementation for SHS to cope of its privacy and security issues. We review Ethereum Blockchain packages for SHS according to its smart contract features for handling access control policy, data storage and data flow management.
Ethereum, the well-known blockchain platform, does not have any limit for block size, unlike Bitcoin. However, there are other obstacles in processing unlimited transactions per second. Ethereum blockchain code runs by different clients, and they run on different speed and present the different level of performance. This paper studies Ethereum transactions and it analyzes two most popular Ethereum clients, Geth and Parity, on a private blockchain to obtain the better understanding of the effect of different clients on Ethereum performance. The results show that the transactions are 89.8 percent on average faster in Parity client in comparison with Geth client, using the same system configuration.
Simplicity is a typed, combinator-based, functional language without loops and recursion, designed to be used for crypto-currencies and blockchain applications. It aims to improve upon existing crypto-currency languages, such as Bitcoin Script and Ethereum's EVM, while avoiding some of the problems they face. Simplicity comes with formal denotational semantics defined in Coq, a popular, general purpose software proof assistant. Simplicity also includes operational semantics that are defined with an abstract machine that we call the Bit Machine. The Bit Machine is used as a tool for measuring the computational space and time resources needed to evaluate Simplicity programs. Owing to its Turing incompleteness, Simplicity is amenable to static analysis that can be used to derive upper bounds on the computational resources needed, prior to execution. While Turing incomplete, Simplicity can express any finitary function, which we believe is enough to build useful ``smart contracts'' for blockchain applications.
Cloud computing has become an irreversible trend. Together comes the pressing need for verifiability, to assure the client the correctness of computation outsourced to the cloud. Existing verifiable computation techniques all have a high overhead, thus if being deployed in the clouds, would render cloud computing more expensive than the on-premises counterpart. To achieve verifiability at a reasonable cost, we leverage game theory and propose a smart contract based solution. In a nutshell, a client lets two clouds compute the same task, and uses smart contracts to stimulate tension, betrayal and distrust between the clouds, so that rational clouds will not collude and cheat. In the absence of collusion, verification of correctness can be done easily by crosschecking the results from the two clouds. We provide a formal analysis of the games induced by the contracts, and prove that the contracts will be effective under certain reasonable assumptions. By resorting to game theory and smart contracts, we are able to avoid heavy cryptographic protocols. The client only needs to pay two clouds to compute in the clear, and a small transaction fee to use the smart contracts. We also conducted a feasibility study that involves implementing the contracts in Solidity and running them on the official Ethereum network.
Scaling the transaction throughput of decentralized blockchain ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has been an ongoing challenge. Two-party duplex payment channels have been designed and used as building blocks to construct linked payment networks, which allow atomic and trust-free payments between parties without exhausting the resources of the blockchain.
This report documents a blockchain application developed for the real estate sector. The application enables distributed workflow management in a complicated transaction process: the selling of a share of stocks in a housing corporation. As its core element, the application utilizes Ethereum-based smart contracts to facilitate the interaction of various parties involved, as well as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to combine data from a number of separate information pools. The motive for this application has been to understand the process of developing blockchain applications with industrial partners. Moreover, the purpose of this exercise has been to examine whether Ethereum-based smart contracts could be effectively utilized for applications in industry and finance. The application and the discussions during its development indicate that similar, market-driven workflow structures may appear in value chains where the number of parties is high and where the sources of information are numerous yet disconnected.
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.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Koustabh Dolui, Fabio Antonelli
Blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin, can prove to be essential towards realizing the vision of a decentralized, secure, and open Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. There is a growing interest in many research groups towards leveraging blockchains to provide IoT data privacy without the need for a centralized data access model. This paper aims to propose a decentralized access model for IoT data, using a network architecture that we call a modular consortium architecture for IoT and blockchains. The proposed architecture facilitates IoT communications on top of a software stack of blockchains and peer-to-peer data storage mechanisms. The architecture is aimed to have privacy built into it, and to be adaptable for various IoT use cases. To understand the feasibility and deployment considerations for implementing the proposed architecture, we conduct performance analysis of existing blockchain development platforms, Ethereum and Monax.
Current trade is being heavily influenced by emerging technologies. Despite many technological advances, logistics management is at a standstill about the improvements communication systems. Updating information during the whole process is an essential element in such systems but trust in that information is even more important. For this reason, providing a mechanism that can be verified and that allows increasing the level of trust of the stakeholders could contribute to the improvement of the logistic process. The main aim of this paper is to show an analysis of the current state of blockchain technology and its possibilities regarding the development of decentralized and self-verifiable applications focusing on their integrity. Besides, a new concept of program is defined thanks to the use of a set of smart contracts which should be deployed over the Ethereum blockchain.
La tecnologia Blockchain o de cadena de blocs va sorgir com a suport de la xarxa de monedes virtuals Bitcoin, pero amb la recent aparicio dels Smart Contracts existeix la possibilitat de crear infinitud d'aplicacions que funcionin de manera distribuida i sense la necessitat d'entitats intermediaries. En aquest article es presenta una introduccio a la tecnologia Blockchain, des dels seus inicis amb Bitcoin fins a l'actualitat amb la utilitzacio dels Smart Contracts. Posteriorment es comparen algunes de les plataformes Blockchain mes utilitzades actualment com son Ethereum o Hyperledger, per a finalment mostrar una solucio en l'ambit de l'educacio: emmagatzematge d'expedients academics utilitzant la tecnologia Blockchain i els Smart Contracts.
The ever-increasing number of IoT devices necessitates a secure and scalable infrastructure to store and process generated data. Blockchain is an ideal choice with its decentralized, trustless architecture. However, low-power IoT end-devices do not possess enough horsepower to run a software client for intensive blockchain calculations. The purpose of this paper is to create a proof of concept to enable low-power, resource-constrained IoT end-devices accessing a blockchain-based infrastructure. To achieve this aim, an IoT gateway is configured as a blockchain node and an event-based messaging mechanism for low-power IoT end-devices is proposed. A demonstration of such a system is realized using LoRa nodes and gateway in a private Ethereum network.