Андрій Олександрович Гашко, Андрій Петрович Бондарчук, Максим Петрович Трембовецький, Олександр Ілліч Чумак
The article examines an automated method for verifying the correctness of smart contracts in the Solana blockchain network. The relevance of the research is driven by the growing popularity of Web3 applications and the need to ensure their security, as even minor errors in smart contract code can lead to significant financial losses. The primary goal is to develop an automated verification methodology for smart contracts that can detect vulnerabilities such as the absence of founder rights verification, arithmetic operation errors, and missing transaction check signatures. Using static analysis techniques in the Rust programming language, the authors propose an approach that enables rapid analysis-taking less than three minutes per contract-and automatic generation of reports on identified vulnerabilities. The methodology is based on analyzing external data flows through smart contracts, allowing for the early detection of potential threats. To automate the process, Python and Bash scripts are employed, integrating with cloud services such as Amazon Web Services to scale the analysis. Testing results on real Web3 applications demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology, particularly in reducing analysis time and improving the accuracy of error detection. An important aspect of the research is the continuous updating of knowledge bases and analysis tools, enabling the consideration of new types of attacks and vulnerabilities. The article also highlights the importance of interoperability between different blockchain networks, which remains a challenging task but is a key element for the future development of Web3. The research results show that the proposed methodology is promising for scaling and adapting to new challenges in blockchain ecosystems such as Solana. Thus, the developed approach to automated smart contract verification not only enhances the security of Web3 applications but also contributes to their further development, ensuring stability and reliability in the dynamic evolution of blockchain technologies.
A sharding framework has been proposed by Ethereum 2.0, and researchers have tried to enhance its applicability and scalability to real blockchain networks. Each shard can execute transactions requested by users, so the number of transactions dealt with by the shard-based blockchain grows as the number of shards increases. Dealing with cross-shard transactions, however, is a major hindrance to blockchain performance, because each such transaction requires cooperation among different shard validators in the network. Given this background, this paper proposes a novel cross-shard architecture in which each shard has its own transaction server (TS) and each TS has the role of dealing with transaction requests/results coming from different users or different shards. In this architecture, it is possible for each validator to concentrate on dealing with the transactions in its own shard, so there is no need to multicast transaction information to the other shard validators. We describe the proposed cross-shard framework in detail and demonstrate how a cross-shard transaction can be executed using the hierarchically connected smart contract functions. In the proposed architecture, the interactions among different shard validators can be reduced by having each validator select its neighbors from among members of its own shard after each epoch. This frequent change of neighbors for each validator makes it robust against eclipse attacks. In addition, this architecture speeds up the validation process of transactions/blocks in each shard; we show the effect by measuring the block transmission delays in the proposed architecture in a simulation environment.
The creator economy is valued at over $250 billion and is largely supported by ad revenue, sponsorships, and platform monetization-controlled subscription. Creators face a variety of issues such as earnings cut, face demonetization, and platform policy, which threatens sustainability as a creator. This report introduces TOKN, a hybrid Web2-Web3 monetization strategy that enables creators to tokenize their work and get paid directly for their content on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. By using smart contracts, micropayments, and access tokenization through APIs and browser extensions, TOKN provides creators with greater financial empowerment while maintaining the discoverability and ease of use of Web2 platforms. Through a review of monetization inefficiencies, blockchain integration, and regulatory implications, this research highlights how a hybrid solution can bridge the gap between the usability of Web2 and the financial incentives of Web3-creating a scalable, secure, and platform-agnostic monetization model for digital creators.
The promise of Web3's decentralized, transparent, and user-owned systems offers transformative potential for global commerce. However, Web3 remains largely inaccessible or intentionally avoided due to user experience friction and persistent risk perceptions. Highly publicized failures over the years point to a fundamental weakness in achieving durable trust required for widespread adoption. This paper introduces a normative theory centered on five interdependent principles, spanning enforcement, trust, duty segregation, governance, and adaptability. Together, they define falsifiable conditions for integrity-by-design Web3 commercial infrastructure. These principles are collectively necessary, though not sufficient, to uphold investor protection, maintain efficient and orderly markets, and ensure transparent capital formation. This framework supports regulators, builders, investors, and institutions with a methodical approach for distinguishing legitimate infrastructure innovations from sophisticated regulatory arbitrage. As major infrastructure decisions accumulate daily, path dependencies continue to entrench brittle architectures. This work aims to chart a socio-technical path to achieving sustainable commercial integrity, thereby broadening access to trustworthy, extensible systems for long-term growth in Web3 commerce.
Due to the inherent immutability of blockchain technology, smart contract updates require their deployment at new addresses rather than modifying existing ones, thus fragmenting version histories and creating critical blind spots for analyses. Indeed, for example, this fragmentation severely hinders security researchers ability to track vulnerability lifecycles across contract versions. While platforms like Etherscan provide detailed information about Ethereum smart contracts, they lack crucial functionality to trace predecessor-successor relationships within smart contract lineages, preventing systematic analysis of how vulnerabilities emerge, propagate, and potentially remain unresolved across versions.To address the challenge of tracing smart contract lineages, we adopt a Design Science Research (DSR) approach and introduce ContractTrace, an automated infrastructure that accurately identifies and links versions of smart contracts into coherent lineages. This tool enables the construction of lineageSet, an up-to-date, open-source dataset specifically designed to support security research on vulnerability, defect or any other property evolution patterns in smart contracts. Through a security-focused case study we demonstrate how ContractTrace reveals previously obscured vulnerability life-cycles within smart contract lineages, tracking whether critical security flaws persist or get resolved across versions. This capability is essential for understanding vulnerability propagation patterns and evaluating the effectiveness of security patches in blockchain environments. In the evaluation phase of our DSR approach, we validated our lineage detection methodology against an alternative approach using Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to cluster contract versions, confirming the security relevance and accuracy of our technique.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) technologies, when integrated with enterprise systems, create an opportunity to fully automate payment processes within ERP systems. This research develops and tests a smart contract-based cryptocurrency payment gateway framework with SAP ERP systems focusing on the FI, MM, and SD modules. Incorporating blockchain wallets, programmable transaction logic, and modular APIs enables SAP systems to independently manage multi-chain and multi-currency crypto payment initiation, confirmation, and reconciliation across multiple chains and currencies. The payment gateway minimizes payment delay, manual processing, and expenses in comparison to traditional fiat gateways utilizing smart contracts for payment validation, tokenization, and invoice reconciliation. Testing under real SAP transactional simulations on Quorum-based testnets showed an about 62% increase in reconciliation speed, 48% decrease in average cost per transaction, and 92% accuracy in volatile token conflict detection—during token volatility periods—resulting in errors. This study contributes to the development of frameworks for decentralized payment systems within ERP infrastructures, advancing the design and ERP enterprises aimed at achieving seamless interoperability, auditability, and comprehensive control over digital assets with SAP ecosystems.
Pranauv Kessavan -, S. Hendry Leo Kanickam, Veeramraju Lakshmi Ajay, Amala Margret -
Digital copyright protection systems aim to secure creators’ rights and ensure they’re fairly compensated, but traditional methods struggle with data verification and tamper-resistance. The proposed solution enhances these protections by integrating proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithms and smart contracts into the blockchain framework. PoS, a consensus mechanism in blockchain, requires participants to stake tokens, ensuring that they have a stake in maintaining the integrity of the system. This approach secures the network and safeguards against tampering. Smart contracts—self-executing, tamper-proof agreements stored on the blockchain—automate copyright enforcement, making it impossible to alter ownership records once added to the blockchain. This automation reduces manipulation risks and improves efficiency. Additionally, the decentralized structure of blockchain distributes data across multiple nodes, preventing any single entity from altering or compromising the information. This guarantees the immutability and transparency of digital content and ownership records. Together, these technologies offer a robust, efficient solution for digital copyright protection. Blockchain’s decentralized, tamper-resistant nature, combined with PoS’s secure verification and smart contracts’ automated enforcement, provides a trustworthy framework that better secures ownership and prevents unauthorized manipulation.
This paper introduces a new system for automatically handling content licensing and distributing royalties in the Web 3.0 environment using smart contracts. We address the long- standing issues of transparency, efficiency, and fairness in monetizing digital content by using blockchain technology. Our suggested system embeds licensing terms in smart contracts, allowing royalty payments to be automatically executed and content usage to be tracked in real-time. We deploy a prototype on the Ethereum platform and assess its efficiency through different criteria such as transaction speed, cost efficiency, and scalability. Findings show a 60% decrease in processing time for royalty distributions and a 40% improvement in transparency in contrast to traditional systems. Moreover, the automated system has received a 75% satisfaction rate from 50 content creators in our user study. Although difficulties like scalability and interoperability remain, this study lays the groundwork for fairer and more effective content monetization on the decentralized internet, potentially transforming the way creators and consumers engage in the digital market.
Smart contracts have caused significant economic losses due to various vulnerabilities, highlighting the importance of their security. Traditional vulnerability detection methods often focus on a single aspect, either neglecting the semantic and structural information in the source code or overlooking critical execution changes in the bytecode. This can result in incomplete security assessments. To address this, we propose HCBERT (HybridCodeBERT), a pre-trained hybrid model for smart contract vulnerability detection. HCBERT efficiently ex- tracts features from both source code and bytecode by fusing their information and integrating attention mechanisms with graph-based structures such as data flow and control flow graphs. Additionally, leveraging advanced pre-training techniques, we enhance the model's ability to capture complex patterns. Experimental results show that HCBERT achieves detection accuracies of 89.57%, 82.91 %, 94.73%, and 85.79% for four key vulnerabilities: reentrancy, delegate call, timestamp dependency, and overflow/underflow, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Ablation experiments further confirm the benefits of feature fusion and the integration of graph structures and pre-training techniques in improving detection performance.
Abhijeet R. Raipurkar, Anushka Zade, Palak Agrawal, Praful R. Pardhi · 6 authors
This paper introduces PaperChain, a blockchain-based platform that addresses the inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, and outdated processes inherent in traditional document management systems. Traditional systems struggle with issues like fraud, data breaches, and manual errors. PaperChain tackles these challenges with a decentralized approach using Filecoin's infrastructure and the Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) system. The platform provides a tamper-proof record-keeping environment, leveraging smart contracts for automation and PaperChain cryptocurrency (PRC) for transactions. The integration of MetaMask further simplifies authentication, while Filecoin's decentralized storage ensures advanced cryptographic validation mechanisms to protect against document tampering and duplication. PaperChain sets a new standard for secure and transparent document management in the digital age.
In Ethereum, private transactions are designed to circumvent the public network, but they can sometimes be leaked into the public network before on-chain posting. Motivated by the huge profits of these private transactions, we propose reorganization attacks in the current Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, enabling malicious validators to actively leak private transactions for profits. While prior research on reorganization attacks has focused on consensus security, our work is the first study shedding light on the economic implications of exploiting private transactions. Through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we confirm the effectiveness of our attacks. Additionally, we comprehensively examine real-world datasets covering 30,062,232 private transactions from September 15, 2022 to Decemeber 31, 2023 for profit analysis, uncovering that the most lucrative private transactions are often tied to Maximum Extractable Value (MEV). To further bolster the practicability and feasibility of our attacks, we scrutinize real-world cases aligning with our attack patterns. We find that attacks are risk-free due to the predictability of validators’ duties. Our findings offer valuable insights into the economics of exploiting private transactions, potential vulnerabilities, and consensus security, laying the foundation for future research.
Jing Jiang, Xiaofeng Wang, Qianqian Xing, Jin Tang
Currently, personal information leakage and identity theft have become risks that cannot be ignored. As a robust authentication mechanism, multi-factor authentication (MFA) has gained prominence. However, many existing MFA schemes based on certificate-less public key cryptography amalgamate multiple authentication factors into a single factor for local verification, which fails to achieve independent authentication of each factor and is difficult to resist internal privilege attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes a certificate-less multi-factor privacy authentication scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed scheme divides the full private key into multiple authentication factors and employs the Schnorr zero-knowledge proof technique to independently generate challenge values for each factor, facilitating separate authentication of multiple factors. Notably, this approach eliminates the need to reconstruct the full private key during the authentication process, thereby effectively mitigating the risk of private key leakage.
Open access
Digital Rights Management and Security
Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Web 3.0 technologies such as blockchain, cryptocurrency, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are progressively making waves. Despite their adoption in various sectors, their application in the education sector, particularly in Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs), is largely unexplored. Our research proposes the development of a secure NFT platform using blockchain technology, tailored for HEIs. The primary aim of this research is to authenticate rewards, and certificates, and digitalize badges using NFTs, minimizing potential fraud and enhancing data security. Reward NFTs can enhance students' and teachers' career recognition and credit. EduNFT is a ‘first of its kind’ in the Sultanate of Oman in creating a Web 3.0 technology-enabled campus where students are rewarded with digital assets (NFTs) for their achievements by the teachers or the institution over an NFT platform in a secured environment. It runs on the Polygon blockchain which is a "layer two" or "sidechain" scaling solution that runs alongside the Ethereum blockchain - allowing speedy transactions with low fees. The research methodology incorporates an authentication process that requires users to log in via their crypto wallets which enhances security and maintains user privacy. Instead of traditional physical rewards, this digital approach allows achievements to be stored perpetually in the blockchain, reducing risks of loss or damage. The proposed research empowers an impressive expansion of NFT utilization in higher education, contributing to the ongoing growth of the NFT space. The outcome, a pioneering NFT platform powered by Web 3.0 technology, stands to revolutionize the higher education sector, not only in Oman but potentially worldwide. In addition, the research serves as a crucial step toward integrating contemporary technologies into educational systems and furthering their evolution.
This research’s abstract highlights the use of intelligent contracts for the automation of counterfeit prevention in online retailing. The manuscript shows a considerable decrease in the number of counterfeit events and identification time, including the integration of machine learning nacle models with blockchain smart contracts. The analyses presented points out that the use of ML models in detecting fake goods based on their characteristics enhances the ability of counterfeit reduction since the models demonstrate high accuracy in their performance. Besides, with the help of smart contracts, actual operations can be monitored and checked in real-time to learn whether they adhere to the rules they are supposed to or not. However, as the results indicate, several challenges, including the compliance with regulations and the issue of interoperability, must be solved to push for the wider adoption of smart contracts in e-commerce environments. As it follows, further research should pay attention to optimizing smart contract management, work on an increased system’s capacity, and counter present novel risks represented in counterfeiting. Thus, preparing for further research, it is also possible to emphasize the fact that the use of smart contracts will lead to the creation of a more trusting atmosphere in e-commerce for both consumers and businesses due to increased trust, transparency, and security of online transactions.
Ken Huang, Youwei Yang, Fan Zhang, Xi Chen · 5 authors
Chapter 10 explores the evolving regulatory landscape surrounding Web3 technologies. It highlights the need for coordinated and adaptive regulations to foster innovation while managing potential risks. The chapter examines the impact of major crypto company collapses in 2022 on regulatory frameworks and emphasizes the importance of proactive measures to protect investors and mitigate risks. It delves into the regulatory landscapes in the United States, the European Union, China, and Web3-friendly countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Germany, and Switzerland. The chapter covers key initiatives, including the Executive Order Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets and the Responsible Financial Innovation Act in the United States, as well as stablecoin regulations and regulatory challenges related to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). It also explores the intersection of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Web3, emphasizing the challenges of privacy and compliance. Overall, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of regulatory considerations in Web3, addressing innovation, consumer protection, financial stability, and privacy concerns. It emphasizes the importance of regulatory coordination and adaptation to promote innovation while safeguarding against potential risks.
Akshatha Kamatha, A. S. Mamatha, B S Sushma, Valmeeki Thakshith · 6 authors
Traditional file-sharing systems relying on centralized servers pose significant security risks, leaving users vulnerable to data leaks and cyberattacks. As a result, individuals and organizations exercise caution when sharing sensitive information through such platforms. Proposed system introduces a cutting-edge decentralized file-sharing system, achieved by seamlessly integrating the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) with blockchain technology. This innovative approach revolutionizes data exchange, ensuring secure and efficient file sharing and storage without the need for a centralized middleman. This offers an in-depth exposition of the system's architecture and design, highlighting the integration of smart contracts for safe transactions and IPFS for distributed file storage. Notably, the proposed system covers the unique features brought forth by smart contracts and IPFS, such as trustless data exchange, distributed file access control, and dynamic file sharing permissions. The research contributes significantly to the growing body of knowledge on blockchain-based file sharing platforms, demonstrating the transformative potential of this secure and decentralized data exchange paradigm. As blockchain technology continues to evolve, this work opens up new possibilities compared to traditional file-sharing paradigms and ushering in a more equitable and resilient data-sharing ecosystem.
The non-fungible token (NFT) is a record used to ensure the privilege and ownership of a certain digital asset with a distinctive digital identifier in a blockchain. In digital-multimedia assets i.e. images, videos, audio, etc. NFTs generally retain references to the properties of the asset. Due to the nature of blockchain technology, NFT is oftentimes associated with its immutability. NFTs that represent digital multimedia assets may utilize blockchain-based file servers, but oftentimes time the associated file is stored off-chain. This makes the assets themselves vulnerable to link rot and causes the NFT owner to lose access to their assets since the off-chain storageis not immutable like the NFT. To preserve the integrity of the NFT’s associated digital assets, we introduce Abridged Neat Key Instance (ANKI). ANKI is a property embedded inside NFT that contains the seed number of the digital multimedia asset to be procedurally generated. We are taking advantage of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) technology to reproduce the digital multimedia asset presented by the information available inside the NFT itself. By leveraging Procedural Content Generation(PCG) technology, our approach can regenerate the exact digital asset directly from the information encoded within the NFT.In our experiments, we successfully recreated music files using the ANKI seed and a PCG engine, verifying their accuracy by comparing the MD5 and SHA-512 checksums of the generated files with those of the original NFT assets. All 50 generated musicfiles produced identical checksums to their original counterparts,confirming the integrity of our method.
Although smart contracts have emerged as a key innovation for industries, siloed development and deployment of smart contracts pose numerous challenges to mass adoption and interoperability. This paper presents a comprehensive gap analysis of cur- rent standardisation efforts in smart contracts, focusing on common requirements, data formats, schema, and software templates. Through an examination of existing standards, best practices, and identified gaps, this paper proposes contributions to address these challenges. By advocating for cross-platform compatibility, scalability, and maintainability, it aims to advance the standardisation of smart contracts and foster their broader adoption in the industry.
Recently, smart contracts have played a vital role in automatic financial and business transactions. To help end users without programming background to better understand the logic of smart contracts, previous studies have proposed models for automatically translating smart contract source code into their corresponding code summaries. However, in practice, only 13% of smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain are associated with source code. The practical usage of these existing tools is significantly restricted. Considering that bytecode is always necessary when deploying smart contracts, in this article, we first introduce the task of automatically generating smart contract code summaries from bytecode. We propose a novel approach, named Smart Contract Bytecode Translator ( SmartBT ) for automatically translating smart contract bytecode into fine-grained natural language description directly. Two key challenges are posed for this task: structural code logic hidden in bytecode and the huge semantic gap between bytecode and natural language descriptions. To address the first challenge, we transform bytecode into Control-Flow Graph (CFG) to learn code structural and logic details. Regarding the second challenge, we introduce an information retrieval component to fetch similar comments for filling the semantic gap. Then, the structural input and semantic input are used to build an attentional sequence-to-sequence neural network model. The copy mechanism is employed to copy rare words directly from similar comments, and the coverage mechanism is employed to eliminate repetitive outputs. The automatic evaluation results show that SmartBT outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin, and the human evaluation results show the effectiveness and potential of SmartBT in producing meaningful and accurate comments for smart contract code from bytecode directly.
The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth legal analysis of the phenomenon of profitable video games, the copyright holders of which, unlike the owners of online computer games of previous generations, recognise the copyright of users in the works created or processed by them, and provide players with the opportunity to dispose of their intellectual rights to make a profit. The work employs scientific methods to analyse contentious relationships in the legal aspects of profitable video games and compares different approaches to their regulation. The fundamental legal differences in the conditions for using free and profitable video games have been identified and analysed. The paper provides the systematisation and discloses the legal nature of methods players use to generate income within network computer games. The research discovers the legal, organisational, and economic reasons and risks leading to the non-recognition of user copyrights and the imposition of a ban on their disposal by copyright holders of free video games. A mechanism has been discovered and disclosed that allowed the owners of profitable video games to eliminate intellectual and legal risks, recognise gamers’ copyrights to the works they created and launch the legal circulation of rights to them. The work analyses the model for using the blockchain infrastructure and non-fungible tokens as its elements for fixing and disposing of rights to user-generated gaming artefacts. The smart contract as the legal instrument of blockchain platforms is critically analysed. Authors made their proposals to improve the legal efficiency of a smart contract by adding a system of standard public licenses. The scientific novelty of the work lies in explaining the legal nature of the phenomenon of profitable video games and the mechanism for disposing of copyrights within them, as well as in proving the absence of identity between a profitable video game and such an object of special regulation as gambling. The practical significance of the article consists in the applicability of its results for improving the legal regulation in the context of the complication of the ecosystem, the growth of the market and the scale of the audience of online computer games.