Blockchain Papers

Shaily Roy, Samiha Nanjiba

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering, 2018.

Authors unavailable

Bitcoin is a digital currency raised by Satosghi Nakamoto, which is Completely decentralized, Highly anonymous, cross-border. Nowadays it has became one of the most widely used currency. Recently, as the used capacity has approached the capacity limitation of each block, the time needed to confirm a transaction increase dramatically. As a result, bitcoin cannot satisfy the need of a large number of bitcoin transactions. This paper aims to apply merged mining technology to bitcoin blockchain scaling, which builds another blockchain called auxiliary blockchain based on bitcoin blockchain and stores some of small rapid transactions in auxiliary blockchain. This paper also proves the merged mining technology can concentrate computing power and design a special miner reward program.

Shaomi Rahman, Jonayed Nafis Hemel, Syed Junayed Ahmed Anta, Hossain Al Muhee

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering, 2018.

Qing Zhou, Qingqing Zhang, Qi Zhang

In recent years, with the development of the Internet, network currency has gradually emerged. Bitcoin which is produced on the basis of complex algorithms has developed rapidly and attracted wide attention in academia. This paper explores the influence factors of bitcoin market transaction by analyzing the interaction between agents in bitcoin market transaction. Applying complex adaptive system modeling method based on multi-agent, this paper establishes an agent-based bitcoin market transaction model, and designs behavioral rules as well as transaction mechanism in detail for each agent in the process of market transaction. Then, we carry out a simulation on the Starlogo simulation platform and analyze the impact of the change in trader’s number on market transaction.

Alican Beydemir, İbrahim Soğukpınar

Importance of Internet of Things technologies increased in recent years. However, these technologies carry some security vulnerabilities because of their network communication layer. The root cause of these vulnerabilities is usually the Authentication problem. Zero knowledge proof method is a strong cryptographic solution for Authentication problem that is proving of having a knowledge to another party without revealing anything other than the veracity of the statement. Zero knowledge proof method is consist of two-way complex mathematical algorithms for both parties. In this work, a new method that uses zero knowledge proofs has been proposed to provide efficient solution for Internet of Things technologies. New method was implemented and tested, then compared with existing proposed zero knowledge proof based authentication methods.

Zhidong Chen, Zhuo Yu, Zhangbo Duan, Kai Hu

Blockchain technology is growing massively where the number of blockchain platforms and decentralized applications are increasing rapidly in the last years. However, most of the existing blockchain networks are operating in a standalone environment isolated from each other, which increases scalability and connectivity issues in the current blockchain platforms as well as limiting the blockchain adoption in industry ecosystems. In the current phase, different blockchain networks don't have mutual trust where they cannot interact with each other and their capacity level has only reached a level similar to LAN. Due to the high barriers between the independent isolated blockchain platforms, researchers have started to focus on the concept of Blockchain interoperability. Blockchain interoperability is the ability of connecting multiple blockchain networks together, which significantly increases and solves scalability and connectivity issues in the blockchain platforms. Given the potential of blockchain interoperability and cross blockchain communication, many researchers are working on finding the optimal cross blockchain communication solution. As blockchain interoperability is emerging as an essential blockchain feature, the number of proposed blockchain interoperability solutions have been increasing within the last few years. In this paper, a survey of all the available cross blockchain communication solutions are discussed with a comparison of the proposed architectures.

Authors unavailable

Bitcoin transaction fee is an important kind of transaction costs that can be observed. In this paper, we address that the long-term effects of the demand are greater than that of the supply through empirical analyses of the influence degree of computational power, the number of transactions and the price of bitcoin. Based on the theory of supply and demand, there is a trend upward for bitcoin transaction fee in the future.

Syeda Sumbul Hossain, Samen Anjum Arani, Md. Tanvir Rahman, Touhid Bhuiyan · 6 authors

In every nation, democratic elections are a momentous and weighty occurrence, and the voting system that is now in place requires the use of ballots or electronic voting machines (EVM). Transparency, poor turnout, vote manipulation, distrust of electoral organizations, fabrication of unique IDs (voting party IDs), and delays in posting results are some of the issues that arise as a result of these procedures. The matter of safety is of the utmost importance. When considering the installation of a computerized voting system, voter confidentiality has always been one of the most important concerns. There is no question regarding the system's capability to secure itself in contrast to prospective assaults and safeguard data in the face of such big choices. Utilization of blockchain technology is one approach that might be taken to resolve security concerns. The blockchain technology has an endless number of different uses that might be implemented. The technology known as blockchain is a distributed ledger that makes it possible for peer-to-peer networks all over the world to handle digital assets. In this context, distributed ledger technology represents an intriguing development. A grouping of all transactions is referred to as a block. Immutability, decentralisation, security, transparency, and anonymity are some of the outstanding properties offered by blockchain technology. The combination of blockchain technology with smart contracts has shown promise as a viable option for the development of trustworthy and open-source electronic voting systems. In this article, we demonstrate how to use blockchain technology with the help of a wallet and the Solidity programming language to build an electronic voting application. The programme was designed as a smart contract for the Ethereum network. In order to avoid having the same person vote twice, the user's wallet will only hold a certain number of tokens (gas), which will be depleted each time the user casts a vote. This article talks about the pros and cons of using blockchain technology. It also shows a practical solution in the form of a web app for voting and analyses its limits.

Willy Sudiarto Raharjo, Dessy Sutanti

Cryptography is known for it's ability to protect confidential information, but it can also be used for other purposes. One of them is for identity verification or authentication. One of the biggest disadvantages of traditional authencation method is at the end of the session, the verifier knows about secrets which is supposed to be known only by prover. In this paper, we implemented a ZeroKnowledge Proof-based secret ticket verification system using Feige Fiat Shamir protocol. The goal of this system is to help prover identified themselves to the verifier, but also prevent the verifier to understand anything about the prover's secret information. The system is also able to prevent ticket duplication or double-use of tickets by using an interactive proof verification method. By combining it with cryptography, not only we can achieve completeness and soundness property of Zero-Knowledge Proof, but we can also achieve information security property. Index Terms - Feige Flat Shamir, Verification, Zero Knowledge Proof.

Waleed W. Smari, Antonio Montero Navarro, William K. McQuay

During the past two decades, we have seen rising interest in computer-supported collaboration and, with the advent of the Web 2.0 and semantic technologies, increased importance for collaborative work. Worldwide, people expect unlimited access to information within and across cultures. Social networking continues to expand and impact collaboration approaches at the personal and enterprise levels. As a result, the computer-supported collaboration research community has turned its attention to the study of human social behavior from records such as blogs, wikis, social media, and social networking sites 1. The desire for mobile and pervasive connectivity is pushing expansion of an ever growing wired and wireless high speed backbone that globally combines computing, sensing, and communication technologies. Annually, new classes of mobile devices are added to the traditional desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphones. However, computer-based collaboration encompasses complex hardware and software issues that have been in the focus of the research community for a long time 2. In 1981, Johnson-Lenz coined the term groupware as ‘intentional group processes plus software to support them’ 3. By 1988, the term computer-supported cooperative work was defined as ‘a scientific discipline guiding the design and development of groupware in a meticulous and appropriate way’ 4. Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is a multidisciplinary discipline that encompasses technical, human, and social factors that can vary its implementations depending on the context, culture, organization, and country that apply it 5. As collaborative/cooperative applications evolved, important challenges also arose for developers 6. As a result, significant on-going research works address topics such as collaboration systems infrastructure, human systems, collaboration work and processes, and unique domain-specific issues. The field of infrastructure is one of the most active areas in computer-supported collaboration, with research focused on underlying technologies such as cloud computing, big data, service-oriented architectures, smart networks, and grids. Advanced infrastructure technologies offer a vision of resources (networks, computational servers, storage, search engines, collaboration tools and applications, etc.) as a service, with greater ease to collaborate while lowering cost. The Internet of Things (IoT) captures the growing importance of sensor swarms and collaborative devices that are often attached to one's smartphone or tablet. At the same time, there are new complementary challenges for privacy and security as we attempt to understand how to handle trust in complex systems and how to measure trustworthiness in human-to-human, human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine collaborations. The field of human systems focuses on the human component in collaboration such as coordination and cooperation mechanisms, cultural and psychological aspects, natural languages, human-machine interaction and interfaces, human centric aspects of trust and trustworthiness, cognitive engineering, and user-centered design. The field of collaboration work and processes focuses on aspects that traditionally relate to management and business but gradually have been considered by the software engineering area, such as virtual and remote project coordination, distributed team management, workflows, coordination, distributed and virtual organizations, and distributed design and development. Finally, the domains where computer-based collaboration can be applied continue to grow and are almost endless. Social media, knowledge management, e-learning, financial systems, simulation environments, decision making, design and engineering, logistics, e-business, telemedicine, public health, and emergency and disaster response are some examples of these domains. The annual International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems, held since 1999, comes in the mid of these exciting developments. The conference has also produced special journal issues in recent years and this is one of them. This special issue contains eleven papers representing recent advances in the areas of the infrastructure, operation, evaluation, and application of collaboration systems. These papers were carefully selected from the 2012 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2012), which was held at the Westin Westminster Hotel, Denver, Colorado, USA, on 21–25 May, 2012 7 and the 2013 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2013), which was held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, San Diego, California, USA, on 20–24 May, 2013 8. Selected papers from the conference were invited for extended submission based on the conference technical program committee and the track organizers recommendations. In addition and in order to provide a wider overview of the current research in collaboration related topics, an open Call for Papers was publicly announced and distributed. In response, additional papers were received with a total of eighteen papers submitted for consideration. The complete set of submissions went through three rigorous review cycles, with three to six reviews per paper per cycle. Upon the conclusion of the review process, the eleven submissions that received the highest review ratings were accepted for publication in this special issue. The papers published in this special issue can be classified under three groups: collaborative system design methodologies, security and trust, and collaborative applications. The selected papers in each of these groups are briefly introduced in this section. There are six manuscripts that fall under this category, which covers a wide range of issues, approaches, and solutions. Drabble 9 presents an overview of the Cassandra Analysis and Planning System (CAPS) collaborative design tool kit, which provides designers with the capabilities to identify the direct effects of their own decisions and their indirect effects on the designs of others. The CAPS provides capabilities for reasoning with both quantitative and qualitative constraints and employs two dependency reasoning engines—one handles quantitative values and the other controls qualitative ones. CAPS supports a dynamic design process which identifies the most important design decisions, alerts the impacted designers, and supports a mitigation process to deal with any issues. The paper describes the CAPS architecture and an initial evaluation against a large collaborative task involving the design of a helicopter's electrical, hydraulic, structural, and mechanical systems. Tanaka et al. 10 study the effects real-time avatars had on distant communications when the avatars served as a substitute for videos in distributed environments. The paper discusses two experiments involving videos, photos, or avatars to supplement voice communications. In the first experiment, the subjects watched a conversation partner's video, avatar, photo, or nothing when speaking to the distant partner. The trials were made separately to observe the effects of motion and appearance on the frequency of pauses and speed of speaking. In the second experiment, the researchers compared avatar chat and a tele-operated robot conferencing to find how a physical embodiment influenced the degree of smoothness of speech. Traditionally, in distributed collaborative systems, video connections have been considered unimportant to effective distant communication. Dorn and Taylor 11 investigate the adaptability of the collaboration structure based on an analysis framework consisting of aspects such as behavior, asynchrony, state, and execution. They discuss seven distinctively different collaboration patterns in terms of those aspects. These collaboration patterns and resulting insights into their inherent adaptability may guide design decisions and trade-off analyses for the development of collaborative environments. The collaboration pattern construct is an extension of design pattern concepts and mechanisms from the software architecture domain. The success of software architecture description languages 20 led the authors to investigate a modeling approach for collaboration topologies and the development of a human Architecture Description Language (hADL) for specifying adaptation authority or flexibility conditions. In Davoust et al. 12, the authors define, classify, and characterize distributed wikis. They have identified three classes of distributed wiki systems, each using a different collaboration model and distribution scheme: highly available wikis, decentralized social wikis, and federated wikis. They have classified existing distributed wikis according to these classes and detail their underlying complexities and social and technical motivations. Davoust et al. 13 address the challenge that existing wiki systems, such as Wikipedia, depend on a centralized authority and cannot easily accommodate multiple points of view. The authors present P2Pedia, a social peer-to-peer wiki system, where users have their own local repository and can collaborate by creating, discovering, editing, and sharing pages with their peers but without synchronizing them. Multiple versions of each page can thus coexist on each repository and across the network, which allows for multiple points of view. Browsing or searching the wiki can yield multiple page versions. The authors describe an experimental study where the system was deployed for academic writing exercises, and the results are analyzed to demonstrate this collaboration approach. Missikoff et al. 14 present an end-to-end framework based on an open, collaborative approach for developing and maintaining business domain ontologies. While modern virtual enterprises require the definition of a common, agreed to, and shared conceptual basis that is captured in a reference ontology, no single methodology has been recognized as the primary solution for building ontologies. The authors propose a method for building domain ontologies, which is capable of integrating in one single software framework the features of cooperative participation, shared agreement, multilevels of formalism, and reuse of knowledge. The authors' methodology is characterized by a social participation approach that allows a community of practice, including knowledge engineers, domain experts, and ontology stakeholders to cooperate to produce conceptual models and reach consensus on their suitability while providing formal encoding into a computational ontology. Security and privacy issues in collaboration environments continue to be a major concern. We have three manuscripts that address some of the contemporary concerns. In Aldini et al. 15, the authors have proposed a collaborative framework for checking Android applications for malware by generating probabilistic behavior contracts. Repackaged Android applications are based on genuine applications, but they can include some hidden malwares to access private data or user credit information. The proposed framework performs analysis of the app's behavior at run-time from a contract that is built dynamically from monitoring real world usage. The contract specifies the set of legal actions that can be performed by an application. In the proposed framework, application contracts are generated dynamically by a central server that merges execution traces that are collected and shared continuously by collaborative users executing the application. Because the contract is built by monitoring real user behaviors, it is possible to detect misbehaviors that may not be noticed through static analysis alone. Kong et al. 16 present a technique for indoor location of mobile devices using Bluetooth wireless signal strength. The proposed method treats locations as fuzzy sets and fuzzifies the signal strength to define set membership. Membership values are then fused from multiple sources using a rules engine to deduce location values. The principal benefits of this technique include that it requires little or no calibration, can be used with widely available commercial devices, and places more attention on location information such as a room and floor of a building rather than coordinates. In Tang et al. 17, the authors address the need for extensions to the role-based access control model as cloud service providers expand user activities for cross-tenant interaction. Currently, most cloud service providers isolate user activities and data within a single tenant boundary. It is anticipated that this situation will evolve to foster cross-tenant collaboration supported by Authorization as a Service (AaaS). At present, there is no widely accepted model for cross-tenant authorization. The authors have built on an existing informal multi-tenancy authorization system (MTAS) 21, formalized the MTAS model, and proposed extensions for finer-grained cross-tenant trust. They have demonstrated the utility and feasibility of MTAS by means of an example policy specification, developed a prototype system, and conducted experiments on the prototype. The design and development of collaboration applications are important to respond to society's needs and solutions. In this special issue, there are two papers that apply. Lang and Fink 18 address rival machine scheduling of one or more homogeneous machines by autonomous agents. Machine scheduling by itself is computationally complex, and the presence of autonomous agents makes the problem more difficult. Autonomous agents pursue their own goals, act noncooperatively, and might not be willing to reveal information due to privacy concerns. To overcome the conflict of interests and prevent strategic interactions, the authors present a negotiation protocol to facilitate the coordination of noncooperative agents. Pani et al. 19 present the design and evaluation of a patient-centric collaborative tele-rehabilitation framework aimed at supporting a multidisciplinary team in the follow-up of domiciliary patients. The proposed framework builds on the experience of a clinical trial that exploited a novel tele-rehabilitation device not originally intended to support collaborative scenarios. The authors argue that collaborative technology in healthcare represents an important way to improve the quality of the care services and at a reduced cost. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with a panel of experts to evaluate the proposed approach. Based on the papers submitted to and accepted in this special issue, we can draw some interesting conclusions. Computer-supported collaboration is in the mainstream interest of the research community. It is utilized in the everyday way of work of individuals, communities, and organizations. This usage is identifying subtle problems that have to be solved by researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. Technological, procedural, human, and domain-dependent issues have to be addressed by works such as those presented in this special issue. However, because computer-supported collaboration is being used in vastly different domains, the problems that this use identify are of very diverse nature. As we have seen, the papers published in this special issue address collaborative design, real time avatars, collaboration patterns, distributed wikis, business ontologies, malware detection, location of mobile devices, access control, autonomous agents, and tele-health. We anticipate this trend to continue as these systems and technologies get more pervasive and experience wider usage in numerous sectors and application domains. In some cases, the issues addressed by computer-supported collaboration fall within the focus of interest of other well-established areas of computer science and engineering such as operating systems, software engineering, information systems, or telecommunications,. In other cases, they are more related to organizational and business, sociology, psychology, anthropology, or human factors. If computer-supported collaboration is to be a discipline on its own, the key issues that describe it have to be identified. It is commonly accepted that computer-supported collaboration is not just a narrow and deep computing discipline but, on the contrary, is a broad and multidisciplinary field that cuts across many computing and noncomputing areas. In our opinion, the definition of the discipline of computer-supported collaboration has to be one of the hot topics of the research community in the short term. Thus, the development of the computer-supported collaboration body of knowledge could help to define this discipline. We hope that works like this special issue promote the interest for this discipline and its research topics. The guest editors of this special issue would like to express their deep gratitude to all authors, external reviewers, and Geoffrey Fox for their efforts in making this special issue possible. Moreover, they wish to thank all of the external reviewers who contributed at different levels to this special issue: Marie-Hélène Abel, Gail-Joon Ahn, Mortaza S. Barg, Louise Barkhuus, Sanat K. Bista, Christos Bouras, Mario Cannataro, Kyle Chard, Giuliana Dettori, Schahram Dustdar, Ana María Fernández-Pampillón, Maria Grazia Fugini, Ronald Hartung, Andrea J. Hester, Douglas Hodson, Claudia Ignat, James Joshi, Malik Ahmad Kamran, Kyoung-Yun Kim, Gregorij Kurillo, Tanu Malik, Cristina Manresa, Laurent Moccozet, Pascal Molli, James Myers, Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Mads Nygaard, Francesco Palmieri, Daniel Perry, T.K. Prasad, Wolfgang Prinz, Paolo Renna, Vassil Roussev, Filippo A. Salustri, Liliana P. Santacruz, Antonio Sarasa, José Luis Sierra, Hala Skaf-Molli, Irena Spasic, Anna Squicciarini, Kyle Stewart, Julianne Stiller, Jeffrey Stuckman, Hassan Takabi, Giordano Tamburrelli, Srikumar Venugopal, Bin Wang, Liu Yang, Chee Shin Yeo, Dimitrios Zissis, and Urko Zurutuza.

Jianhong Zhang, Hua Chen, Qin Geng

Certificate-based cryptography solves certificate revocation problem and eliminate third-party queries in the traditional PKI and avoid key escrow in the ID-based cryptography. It is a better alternative for the traditional public key system. In this paper, we proposed an efficient certificate based signature scheme based on Schnorr signature and zero-knowledge proof technique. Our proposed scheme doesn't use pairing operator which is the most expensive computation. Then we show that our proposed scheme is proven to be against two forgeable attacks in the random oracles model, and the security is related to that of Schnorr signature.