Blockchain Papers

Hafsa Assidi, Edoukou Berenger Ayebie, El Mamoun Souidi

No abstract is available for this record.

John Dixon, Stefano Penazzi, Amar Ramudhin, Ken Hawick

Blockchain technologies have been shown to be able to successfully underpin secure online financial services (e.g. Bitcoin), and have since developed a reputation as a fix-all solution for transparency, accountability and security issues in storing data and transactions in both public and private settings. However, cross-business consortiums with obvious use-cases, such as those evident in the logistics supply chain, are not yet regularly adopting a common blockchain for transaction storage and accountability because of a lack of understanding and trust. Furthermore, because blockchains are commonly designed to send raw data, visible to every connected node, the potential for competitors or unauthorized parties to analyze the common ledger and discover business secrets is a clear cause for apprehension. In this paper, we analyze the problems facing the uptake of blockchain technologies in supply chain management, inspect a relevant supply chain scenario with reference to the place of the blockchain within real-world logistics data management, and describe a technical and architectural approach which allows scalable, private sharing of business data whilst retaining the accountability and integrity of the blockchain.

LI Zichen,LIU Boya,WANG Peidong,YANG Yatao

To ensure the wireless communication security of the reader and tag in the Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) system,based on domestic public key cryptography algorithm SM2 and introducing zero knowledge proof idea,this paper proposes a two-way authentication protocol.Then security and efficiency analysis are given.The formal analysis is made by using BAN logic.Results show that the two-way authentication of the proposed protocol is completed in the case that reader and tag just interact twice,and has high safety and communication efficiency.

Kentaroh Toyoda, P. Takis Mathiopoulos, Iwao Sasase, Tomoaki Ohtsuki

For more than a decade now, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been quite effective in providing anti-counterfeits measures in the supply chain. However, the genuineness of RFID tags cannot be guaranteed in the post supply chain, since these tags can be rather easily cloned in the public space. In this paper, we propose a novel product ownership management system (POMS) of RFID-attached products for anti-counterfeits that can be used in the post supply chain. For this purpose, we leverage the idea of Bitcoin's blockchain that anyone can check the proof of possession of balance. With the proposed POMS, a customer can reject the purchase of counterfeits even with genuine RFID tag information, if the seller does not possess their ownership. We have implemented a proof-of-concept experimental system employing a blockchain-based decentralized application platform, Ethereum, and evaluated its cost performance. Results have shown that, typically, the cost of managing the ownership of a product with up to six transfers is less than U.S. $1.

Katina Michael

Katina Michael interviews Amal Graafstra [1] about his forthcoming initiative MyUki.com (pronounced /yoo kee/) (Figure 1). UKI is an implantable near-field communication (NFC) platform for identity, security, cryptography, and payment applications. Graafstra is the entrepreneur who started Dangerous Things. com in 2013 (Figure 2), and, in this interview, he speaks on the changes he has witnessed since the Maker Revolution. Graafstra believes it is time to move ahead with products and services that can be consumed by the general population, not just members of the tech community. He observes the shortcomings of our online identities that are owned by companies and not individuals and is proposing a way to integrate biological identity using an embedded implant that will give the user greater control over all of his or her transactions. While UKI is mostly about security, cryptography, and bitcoin transactions, Graafstra is also looking at various ways his product might be used, everything from access control, transit ticketing, e-payments, and privacy applications [2].

Antonio Rizzi, Giovanni Romagnoli, Frédéric Thiesse

OBJECTIVE: This paper aims at proposing a new framework for the classification of RFID deployments in fashion and apparel retailing. The framework encompasses several different use cases (UCs) pursued by fashion and apparel retailers in the last decade, and updates, expands and goes beyond what has already been presented in the related literature. DESIGN, METHODOLOGY, APPROACH: We carried out a comprehensive literature review on RFID deployments in fashion and apparel retail. We searched different sources of information, that is, scientific papers, conferences and seminars proceedings, websites, magazines, newspapers etc., up to 160 papers that were carefully analysed and organised in a structured database. This data set also comprehends information from confidential projects. We analyse contents on the level of single RFID projects, that is, feasibility studies, proofs of concept, pilots or deployments. For each project, we determine what specific UCs were at stake. Eventually, the framework of all possible RFID UCs emerged from the analysis, and we set up a panel of industry partners to validate the framework using the Delphi method. FINDINGS: We structured the new framework along two levels: first, 6 categories were identified (i.e., level 1 use cases). Each category was then detailed, resulting in a total of 18 specific UCs (i.e., level 2 use cases). Each level 2 UC corresponds to a very specific objective pursued by an RFID implementation. For each UC, we propose a set of business metrics to evaluate deployment success as well as benefits achieved. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: From a practitioner’s perspective, the framework offers a comprehensive and well-structured overview of the cost- and the revenue-related potentials of RFID implementations in the industry. Researchers, on the other hand, may use the framework to identify opportunities for further research regarding RFID deployments in retailing. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: Our framework is based on the current body of literature, and complements prior studies, which served as the starting point for our research.

Juan José Echevarria, Jon Legarda, Janire Larrañaga, Jonathan Ruiz-de-Garibay

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication enables devices in proximity to establish a wireless direct link. However, these devices may be severely constrained in terms of memory, CPU, and processing resources. Hence, a D2D communication with a constrained device implies new challenges as it does not have the resources required to be secured with standard cryptography. We propose lwAKE for class 0 devices (RFC 7228), which uses one-way cryptographic functions and zero-knowledge proofs to provide mutual authentication and a secure key establishment. We specify the protocol using the High Level Protocol Specification Language and then verify the security properties using the model checkers OFMC and CL-AtSe. The significance of the protocol stands in a key reuse for any successive authentication. Experimental results show that this shortened authentication mode reduces the computational load greatly.

Saravanan Sundaresan, Robin Doss, Wanlei Zhou

In this paper, we propose a novel zero knowledge grouping proof protocol for RFID Systems. Over the years, several protocols have been proposed in this area but they are either found to be vulnerable to certain attacks or do not comply with the EPC Class 1 Gen 2 (C1G2) standard because they use hash functions or other complex encryption schemes. Also, the unique design requirements of grouping proofs have not been fully addressed by many. Our protocol addresses these important security and design gaps in grouping proofs. We present a novel approach based on pseudo random squares and quadratic residuosity to realize a zero knowledge system. Tag operations are limited to functions such as modulo (MOD), exclusive-or (XOR) and 128 bit Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNG). These can be easily implemented on passive tags and hence achieves compliance with the EPC Global standard while meeting the security requirements.

Wang Ku

According to the development of the Internet of Things,the paper put forward a newkind of RFID mutual authentication protocol. This is different from the traditional based on the encryption algorithm processing authentication information authentication protocol,the newprotocol used of the authentication method of zero-knowledge proof to member certification,and make the member authentication's security is equal to its own code of identity's security. The newprotocol solves the problem about member's certified safety depends on information security of all members who participate in the traditional authentication protocol. Newprotocol can satisfy a tag's security authentication when it is applied to multiple RFID system. This paper discusses the newprotocol's detailed description and using the Strand Space Model to prove the protocol at least meet the authentication,secrecy and tag untraceability.

Saravanan Sundaresan, Robin Doss

In this paper, we propose a secure yoking proof protocol for RFID passive tags based on Zero Knowledge. The protocols that have been proposed earlier are either found to be vulnerable to certain attacks or do not comply with EPC standard for passive tags because they use complex encryption schemes. Also, the unique design requirements of yoking/grouping proofs have not been fully addressed by many. Our protocol addresses these important security and design gaps in yoking proofs. The proposed protocol uses pseudo random squares and quadratic residuosity to realize the zero knowledge property. Tag operations are limited to functions such as modulo (MOD), exclusive-or (XOR) and 128-bit Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNG). Passive tags are capable of these operations and hence the protocol achieves EPC compliance and also meets the necessary security requirements.

Stergios Papantonis

The main goal of this work is the design and analysis of passive components employing metamaterial structures and in particular the wire medium metamaterial. Although there has been a lot of research interest in the physics of such metamaterial structures, there are not many resources available describing the behaviour of classical components, such as waveguides and cavity resonators, that are formed by metamaterials. Therefore, the aforementioned widely used devices, are realized with the deployment of the "Fakirs bed of nails" and their performance is analyzed. Our motivation is to expand existing analytical models and their applications to commonly used passive electromagnetic components, with a view to explore potentially new applications. As a means of study analytical techniques together with numerical simulations and measurements were used. This thesis is structured in the following chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to the basic principles of electromagnetics and their use on the framework of metamaterials; as illustrations some state of the art applications are presented. The next chapter is a literature review covering the work that has been done in the area of our main research interest (i.e., the Fakir's bed of nails as a metamaterial). An overview of the mathematics describing its behaviour is given as well as applications of the proposed structure. Attention has been paid on the latest studies because they provide complete physical insight. Some results from this chapter are used later as background knowledge for the analysis of passive components. This chapter is intended to lay the foundations for the reader to continue reading the rest of this work without the need to look in the literature. Chapter three investigates the dispersion effects in parallel-plate waveguides with both plates being realized by the Fakir's bed of nails. This chapter serves as an example as to how the Fakir's bed of nails can be used to form components. An analytical solution describing the behaviour of the waveguide is presented and compared against full wave numerical simulations. Chapter four presents a theoretical study of the resonant behaviour of metallic nanorods. A clear analogy between the coupled rods and the split rings/split squares is shown. The decline in the resonant frequency as the gap decreases, previously described in terms of self-capacitance, is interpreted by surface plasmons coupled across the gap. Chapter five presents a new enabling technology for implementing tunable rectangular waveguide components and circuits with the use of 2D and 3D metamaterials; a holey metal surface and wire media, respectively. As proof of concepts, results for tunable rectangular waveguide filters are presented with the use of pin block inductive irises and capacitive posts. Furthermore, by adapting the traditional metal-pipe rectangular waveguide for tunability, regions of the solid metal walls are replaced by holey metasurfaces. Prototype tunable structures were measured for verification and good agreement is achieved between full-wave numerical simulations and measurements. Chapter six analyzes a radically new design of waveguide verification device, suitable for measuring instruments such as Vector Network Analyzers. The device is designed to enable its roperties to be changed, by known amounts, after the device has been connected to the system that requires verification. The performance of the device is based on introducing relative changes in the transmitted and reflected signals and so is insensitive to errors introduced by waveguide flange imperfections. This makes the technique, in principle, ideally suited for waveguide VNAs operating at millimeter- and submillimeter-wave frequencies where these flange errors can dominate the measurements. A verification device is designed, simulated and tested in WR-15 waveguide (50-75 GHz). The last part of this thesis presents a rigorous analysis of lossy spherical cavity resonators starting from first principles. The electromagnetic field inside the spherical cavity is expanded in normal waveguide modes and the eigenfrequencies of the cavity resonator are obtained analytically by enforcing the appropriate boundary conditions at the cavity wall. Unlike perturbation techniques, used when low losses are present, there are no inherent limitations in the presented analysis and, therefore, its applicability range is much broader. Exact analytical results, acting as a benchmark reference standard, are compared to those generated independently by two commercial full-wave simulation software packages (HFSS and COMSOL). When the wall transforms from being a perfect electrical conductor to free space, as its intrinsic conductivity decreases from infinity to zero, it is found that the eigenmode solvers with both software packages increasingly fail. With both software packages, all possible modeling strategies have been investigated and their associated limitations identified. Moreover, a plane-wave approximation model is proposed that accurately predicts the numerical simulation results.

Henrik Sternberg, Magnus Andersson

No abstract is available for this record.

Sherin Jobe, G. Venifa Mini, J. Jeya A Celin

Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing segments of IT industry since the users commitments for investment and costs are in relation to usage.The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing or high performance computing power, normally used by military and research facilities to perform tens of trillions of computations per second, in consumer oriented applications such as social networks, financial portfolios, to deliver personalized information, to provide data storage or to power large immersive computer games. Social networks in cloud are used to reflect real world relationships that allow users to share information and form connections between one another, essentially creating dynamic Virtual Organizations. It can be used to share/store data and information within a community ranging from low level computation or storage through high level mash-ups such as photo storage. Anonymous authentication is a technique enabling users to prove the privilege without disclosing real identities. Many existing anonymous authentication protocols assume absolute trust to the cloud provider where all private keys are stored. This trust result in serious security and privacy issues in cloud provider. In the proposed work secure and efficient anonymous mutual authentication protocol using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for cloud services are implemented based on zkp technique. Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is an interactive system where one party wants to prove its identity to a second party using a password but does not want the second party to learn anything about the password. A mandatory access control (MAC) mechanism is to enforce confidentiality and integrity between a large numbers of users by providing a set of standard questions within a group. Finally present experimental results and validate the acceptable performance impact of our deployment on a modern social network.

Robert D. Winkworth

Radio frequency identification has enabled exciting new prospects in wireless ID services, particularly for personnel. Unfortunately, the earliest applications relied upon acquiescent mechanisms that accepted and returned data with no intermediary processing. The advent of smart cards made possible an on-chip revolution in the use of contact identification devices. What I explore here is the extension of these embedded systems to their non-contact counterparts (namely RFID). The processing layer is of utmost importance to us in the study of privacy controls, as it opens the discussion on how personnel ID in general may evolve from storage devices that may be intercepted and duplicated into cryptographically sound logic devices that can resist common attacks and directly participate in the decisions concerning disclosure. This brings us to one of the most vital aspects of the research, the zero-knowledge proof. Frequently RFID is applied as a convenient means of answering questions about discrete state (from a comfortable distance). Wherever possible, we wish to answer those questions without compromising user privacy in the process. The integration of RFID and embedded systems allows us to perform proofs based on internal comparisons and calculations rather than irrevocable release of the data. This is the security of the embedded systems used widely in electronic commerce with the convenience of near-field communications. It holds the promise of a better all-around user experience, with better protections, more control, and easier methods of performing common objectives.

Roel Peeters, Jens Hermans

Abstract. We present the first wide-strong RFID identification protocol that is based on zero-knowledge. Until now this notion has only been achieved by schemes based on IND-CCA2 encryption. Rigorous proofs in the standard model are provided for the security and privacy properties of our protocol. Furthermore our protocol is the most efficient solution presented in the literature. Using only Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), the required circuit area can be minimized such that our protocol even fits on small RFID tags. Concerning computation on the tag, we only require two scalar-EC point multiplications. Keywords. RFID, Private Identification, Zero-Knowledge, Elliptic Curve Cryptography. 1

David Baldo, Giuliano Benelli, Alessandro Pozzebon, Roberto Sesto

In this paper we describe the system realized for the FIDES project, a research project financed by Tuscany Region in Italy to promote the decentralization of monitoring operations on chronic patients or elderly people. The aim of the project was the implementation of a platform provided with a set of devices measuring all the main vital parameters, to be positioned inside the pharmacies. The parameters, once measured, became available both to the user, allowing him to check his health situation, and to the doctors, allowing the remote monitoring of a patient. The system has been designed to allow the user to perform autonomously part of the measurements, in order to reduce as much as possible the impact of the system on the everyday life of the pharmacy. © 2011 GR T Popa University.

Hong Liu, Huansheng Ning

As radio frequency identification (RFID) applications become ubiquitous, security and privacy issues have been addressed with universal acceptances. This paper proposes a lightweight Zero-Knowledge Authentication Protocol (ZKAP) based on alternative mode to address such severe problems. In ZKAP, dual zero-knowledge proofs are randomly chosen to provide anonymity and mutual authentication without revealing any sensitive identifiers. Pseudo-random flags and access lists employed for quick search and check ensure high efficiency and scalability. Meanwhile, formal proof model based on reasonable mathematical assumptions is established to prove the adaptive completeness, soundness and zero-knowledgeness, and the attack models are adopted to analyze the resilience and resistance for malicious attacks. It indicates that ZKAP owns no obvious design defects theoretically and is robust enough to resist major attacks (e.g., forgery, replay, Man-in-the-Middle, and tracking). The protocol is attractive and appropriate for low-cost and resource-restricted RFID systems.

Dahui Li

RFID is one of the wireless network key technologies in NGN(next generation network).RFID tag dues to its basic functionsl,eading to the leak privacy problemI.ntroduces the RFID system composition,working principle,and analyzes the RFID in existing in the application of privacy issues of reason,then on RFID existing privacy protection schemes are analyzed,and points out its shortcomings.After the comprehensive understanding RFID’s privacy issues and some privacy protection technology founded,proposes a RFID identify agreement based on zero knowledge proof to promote healthy development of NGN.

Lei Yang

The RFID tag offers a viable and powerful replacement for barcodes.The challenge in providing security for low cost RFID tags is that they are computationally weak devices,unable to perform even basic symmetrickey cryptographic operations.In this paper,the risk of security in RFID technology is discussed,so the authentication protocol is very necessary.However,there are some disadvantages in the two types of authentication protocols which are widely used at present.An authentication protocol based on zero knowledge proof which is suitable for RFID technology is put forward,and its validity and performance is analyzed.

Naif Alzahrani

Counterfeit products, especially in the pharmaceutical sector, have plagued the international community for decades. To combat this problem, many anti-counterfeiting approaches have been proposed. They use either Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Near Field Communication (NFC) physical tags affixed to the products. Current anti-counterfeiting approaches detect two counterfeiting attacks: (1) modifications to a product's tag details, such as changing the expiration date; and (2) cloning of a genuine product's details to reuse on counterfeit products. In addition, these anti-counterfeiting approaches track-and-trace the physical locations of products as the products flow through supply chains. Existing approaches suffer from two main drawbacks. They cannot detect tag reapplication attacks, wherein a counterfeiter removes a legitimate tag from a genuine product and reapplies it to a counterfeit or expired product. Second, most existing approaches typically rely on a central server to authenticate products. This is not scalable and creates tremendous processing burden on the server, since significant volumes of products flood through the supply chain's nodes. In addition, centralized supply chains require substantial data storage to store authentication records for all products. Moreover, as with centralized systems, traditional supply chains inherently have the problem of a single-point of failure. The thesis of this dissertation is that a robust, scalable, counterfeiting-resistant supply chain that addresses the above drawbacks and can be simultaneously achieved by (i) using a combination of NFC tags on products and a distributed ledger such as blockchain for reapplication-proof, decentralized, and transparent product authentication (ii) a novel game-theoretical consensus protocol for enforcing true decentralization, and enhancing the protocol's security and performance. In this dissertation, we first propose a new Tag Reapplication Detection (TRD) system to detect reapplication attacks using low-cost NFC tags and public key cryptography. To detect reapplication attacks, TRD tracks the number of times a tag has been read in the supply chain using a 'central' authentication server. Second, leveraging the blockchain technology, we propose the Block-Supply Chain, a transformation of TRD into a decentralized supply chain. In this chain, each node maintains a blockchain (distributed public ledger) per product. This blockchain comprises chained blocks, where each is an authentication event. The Block-Supply Chain can detect tag reapplication attacks and can replace the centralized supply chain design, thus overcoming the centralization issues. One of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain technology is the consensus protocol. Consensus protocols ensure that all nodes in the blockchain network agree on the validity of a

Andrew Campbell, Arndt Sorge, Mark J. Warner

No abstract is available for this record.