Peter Howson, Antulio Rosales, Olivier Jutel, Inte Gloerich · 8 authors
This paper explores how so-called ‘Web3’ blockchain projects are materially and socially constituted. A blockchain is an append-only distributed database. The technology is being hyped as applicable for a whole range of industries, social service provisions, and as a fix for economic disparities in communities left behind by mainstream financial systems. Drawing on case studies from our ongoing research we explain how, despite being virtual, Web3 projects are dependent on clearly defined spaces of production from which they derive their speculative value. We conceptualise this relationship as Crypto/Space, where space and blockchain software are mutually constituted. We consider how Crypto/Spaces are produced in three ways: 1) how project developers are adopting a parasitic relationship with host locations to appropriate energy, infrastructure, and local resources; 2) how projects enable ‘virtual land grabs’ where developers are engaging in land acquisitions, and associated displacement of local people, with no real intention to use the land for the declared purpose; and 3) how blockchain technology and speculative finance imaginaries are inspiring new anarcho-capitalist crypto-utopian ‘Exit zones’, often in the Global South. Far from being a zero-sum virtual game world, we argue that cryptocurrency projects are parasitic, often requiring predation on poor and otherwise marginalised communities to appropriate resources, onboard new users and enable favourable regulation.
This article explores how decentralized Web3 is reshaping Internet governance by enabling the emergence of new forms of nation-statehood and redefining traditional concepts of state sovereignty. Based on fieldwork conducted in Silicon Valley since August 2022, this article systematically addresses the following research question: How is decentralized Web3 reshaping Internet governance and influencing the rise in new nation-statehood paradigms? It compares three emerging paradigms around Web3: (i) Network States (Srinivasan), envisioning digital entities rooted in crypto-libertarian principles; (ii) Network Sovereignties (De Filippi), emphasizing communal governance aligned with digital commons; and (iii) Algorithmic Nations (Calzada), drawing on Arendtian thought and demonstrating how communities—such as indigenous and stateless groups, as well as e-diasporas—can attain self-determination through data sovereignty. This article contributes a unique conceptual analysis of these paradigms based on fieldwork action research in Silicon Valley, responding to evolving technologies and their potential to reshape Internet governance. This article argues that decentralized Web3 provides a transformative vision for Internet governance but requires careful evaluation to ensure that it promotes inclusivity and equity. It advocates for a hybrid approach that balances global and local dynamics, emphasizing the need for solidarity, digital justice, and an internationalist perspective in shaping future Internet governance protocols.
Abstract Rarely any study investigates how information gatekeeping through the solutions and services enabled by algorithms, hereafter referred to as algorithmic technologies (AT), creates negative consequences for the users. To fill this gap, this state‐of‐the‐art review analyzes 229 relevant articles from diverse academic disciplines. We employed thematic analysis to identify, analyze, classify, and reveal the chain reactions among the negative consequences. We found that the gatekeeping of information (text, audio, video, and graphics) through AT like artificial intelligence (e.g., chatbots, large language models, machine learning, robots), decision support systems (used by banks, grocery stores, police, etc.), hashtags, online gaming platforms, search technologies (e.g., voice assistants, ChatGPT), and Web 3.0 (e.g., Internet of Things, non‐fungible tokens) creates or reinforces cognitive vulnerability, economic divide and financial vulnerability, information divide, physical vulnerability, psychological vulnerability, and social divide virtually and in the offline world. Theoretical implications include the hierarchical depiction of the chain reactions among the primary, secondary, and tertiary divides and vulnerabilities. To mitigate these negative consequences, we call for concerted efforts using top‐down strategies for governments, organizations, and technology experts to attain more transparency, accountability, ethical behavior, and moral practices, and bottom‐up strategies for users to be more alert, discerning, critical, and proactive.
Hari Mohan, Kaustubh Kumar Shukla, Lilia Tightiz, Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban
The integration of blockchain technology with the IoToffers numerous opportunities to enhance the privacy, security, and integrity. This study comprehensively analyze the challenges, scope, and potential solutions associated with integrating blockchain technology and the IoT, with a specific emphasis on nuclear energy applications. We discuss the roles and various aspects of blockchain and the IoT, highlighting their multiple dimensions and applications. Our study develops a secure data management framework that incorporates encryption, integrity verification, an integrated communication network, and a robust data flow architecture. We explore the several aspects of data security, privacy, and integrity, along with the potential solutions in the integration of blockchain and IoT. The study also investigates the secure transaction process, with a specific focus on cryptographic, mathematical, and algorithmic perspectives. We demonstrated the use of blockchain technology in the nuclear energy sector using flow charts, comprehensively addressing the associated security and privacy concerns. While emphasizing the applicability of our methodology to the nuclear sector, we also acknowledge limitations such as requirements for practical validation, challenges with resource-constrained IoT environments, increasing cyberthreats, and limited real-time data availability. The future scope of our study focuses on standardization, scalable blockchain, post-quantum cryptography, privacy, regulations, real-world testbeds, and deep learning for nuclear sector security. Our findings highlight that the integration of blockchain and IoT can significantly enhance the security and privacy of nuclear energy applications, although practical validation and optimization are necessary.
Onome Blaise Ohwo, Wumi Ajayi, Alfred A. Udosen, Afolarin I. Amusa · 6 authors
The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart homes has raised concerns about privacy breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive data. However, traditional access control mechanisms often fail to address these issues that infringes on the privacy of the users of this technology. This study proposes a privacy-preserving access control mechanism which uses blockchain technology and attribute-based access control to authenticate users, authorize access to smart home devices, and regulate data access while preserving user privacy. Thereby, authentication users using attributes like biometric data or passwords while avoiding direct disclosure of personal information. Access requests are processed using predefined policies stored in smart contracts on the blockchain, with short-lived tokens used to mitigate risks like replay attacks and user profiling. The mechanism uses the Go-Ethereum blockchain runtime framework and the Solidity smart contract development language on an edge server, with smart contracts managed using the Remix Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Data encryption and user authentication are ensured through the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and the mechanism effectively mitigates potential threats like Denial-Of-Service (DOS) attacks and modification attacks. Future research should enhance scalability, optimize resource utilization, and integrate emerging technologies like differential privacy.
Truth and Privacy-preserving service are two key issues for data collection in Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS). However, most of the existing data collection studies use CRH to calculate the truth value, which is difficult to guarantee the data accuracy. The proposed privacy-preserving service methods either neglect the truth-value computation or still adopt the CRH method. To solve the challenge, we propose a Reputation and Privacy-Preserving Service based Truth Data Collection (RPPS-TDC) scheme to achieve the privacy-preserving accurate data collection for MCS. RPPS-TDC scheme consists of two steps: worker trust calculation and reputation-based truth value calculation. Firstly, data requester performs the initial weights calculation on the received data using DBCRH method. Secondly, reputation center uses the initial weights to update the reputation, which is based on the trustworthy worker inference. Finally, the workers are reweighted according to their reputation. We select workers based on trust_MaxHeap, thus obtaining more accurate data. At the same time, we give workers payments based on their trust weights. All the above operations are completed under data encryption, ensuring that only the data requesters have access to the workers’ submitted data. The platform consists of mining nodes, and reputation center resides on the blockchain, thus achieving distributed computing which overcomes the shortcomings of the traditional MCS system. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RPPS-TDC is effective and outperforms previous strategies in two key performance metrics: data accuracy and compensation rationality allocation.
As the importance of data privacy protection continues to grow, blockchain technology has emerged as a new avenue for safeguarding data privacy due to its immutable and decentralized characteristics. This paper proposes a blockchain-based provenance mechanism designed for data privacy protection, leveraging blockchain technology to ensure data integrity and traceability while securing personal privacy. First, the limitations of existing data protection mechanisms are analyzed, and the application of blockchain in various scenarios for data provenance is elaborated. Next, the critical role of smart contracts in the automatic execution of data processing and access control rules is explored, along with how blockchain's transparency and anonymity protect user privacy. Additionally, a novel blockchain architecture combining zero-knowledge proof technology is proposed to enable encrypted processing and verification of sensitive data without exposing the actual content. Finally, a series of experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of this mechanism. This research not only provides a new technical approach for data privacy protection but also lays a theoretical foundation for the application of blockchain in the field of data security.
IT has made significant progress in various fields over the past few years, with many industries transitioning from paper-based to electronic media. However, sharing electronic medical records remains a long-term challenge, particularly when patients are in emergency situations, making it difficult to access and control their medical information. Previous studies have proposed permissioned blockchains with limited participants or mechanisms that allow emergency medical information sharing to pre-designated participants. However, permissioned blockchains require prior participation by medical institutions, and limiting sharing entities restricts the number of potential partners. This means that sharing medical information with local emergency doctors becomes impossible if a patient is unconscious and far away from home, such as when traveling abroad. To tackle this challenge, we propose an emergency access control system for a global electronic medical information system that can be shared using a public blockchain, allowing anyone to participate. Our proposed system assumes that the patient wears a pendant with tamper-proof and biometric authentication capabilities. In the event of unconsciousness, emergency doctors can perform biometrics on behalf of the patient, allowing the family doctor to share health records with the emergency doctor through a secure channel that uses the Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange protocol. The pendant's biometric authentication function prevents unauthorized use if it is stolen, and we have tested the blockchain's fee for using the public blockchain, demonstrating that the proposed system is practical.
Abstract Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are becoming increasingly popular as a way to represent and own digital property. However, the usage of NFTs also prompts questions about privacy. In this work, we show that it is possible to use NFTs to retrieve enough information to fingerprint users. By doing so, we can uniquely associate users with blockchain accounts. This would allow linking several blockchain accounts to the same user. This work focuses on the vulnerabilities presented by some popular NFT marketplaces. Since NFTs may have HTML files embedded, they allow the use of fingerprinting techniques if not handled carefully. Finally, we provide recommendations and countermeasures for the different actors in this ecosystem to avoid these kinds of tracking methods and, in doing so, safeguard user privacy.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Dominik Meißner, Frank Kargl, Benjamin Erb, Felix Engelmann
Taking part in surveys, experiments, and studies is often compensated by rewards to increase the number of participants and encourage attendance. While privacy requirements are usually considered for participation, privacy aspects of the reward procedure are mostly ignored. To this end, we introduce PrePaMS, an efficient participation management system that supports prerequisite checks and participation rewards in a privacy-preserving way. Our system organizes participations with potential (dis-)qualifying dependencies and enables secure reward payoffs. By leveraging a set of proven cryptographic primitives and mechanisms such as anonymous credentials and zero-knowledge proofs, participations are protected so that service providers and organizers cannot derive the identity of participants even within the reward process. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a prototype of PrePaMS to show its effectiveness and evaluated its performance under realistic workloads. PrePaMS covers the information whether subjects have participated in surveys, experiments, or studies. When combined with other secure solutions for the actual data collection within these events, PrePaMS can represent a cornerstone for more privacy-preserving empirical research.
Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS) has become a novel paradigm for enabling data collection by worker recruitment, and the reputation plays a crucial role in achieving high-quality data. Although identity, data, and bid privacy preserving have been thoroughly investigated with the advance of blockchain technology, existing literature barely focuses on reputation privacy, which prevents malicious workers from submitting false data that could affect truth discovery for data requester. Therefore, we propose a Blockchain-Based Reputation Privacy Preserving for Quality-Aware Worker Recruitment Scheme (BRPP-QWR). First, we design a lightweight privacy preserving scheme for the whole life cycle of the worker’s reputation, which adopts sub-address retrieval technique combined with Pedersen Commitment and Compact Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group (CLSAG) signature to enable fast and anonymous verification of the reputation update process. Subsequently, to tackle the unknown worker recruitment problem, we propose a Reputation, Selfishness, and Quality-based Multi-Armed Bandit (RSQ-MAB) learning algorithm to select reliable and high-quality workers. Lastly, we implement a prototype system on Hyperledger Fabric to evaluate the performance of the reputation management scheme. The results indicate that the execution latency for the reputation score verification and retrieval latency can be reduced by an average of 6.30%–56.90% compared with ARMS-MCS. In addition, experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets show that the proposed RSQ-MAB algorithm achieves an increase of at least 20.05% in regard to the data requester’s total revenue and a decrease of at least 48.55% and 3.18% in regret and Multi-round Average Error (MAE), respectively, compared with other benchmark methods.
Thiago Dias Monteiro, Otavio Próspero Sanchez, Gustavo Hermínio Salati Marcondes de Moraes
Purpose The current scenario shows increased adoption of off-chain voting applications in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to avoid complexity and costs for user engagement in their governance. This paper aims to comprehend the trends and patterns within the DAO community with off-chain voting systems and blockchain usage. Design/methodology/approach This exploratory study uses a two-pronged quantitative approach, combining descriptive statistical analysis and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Input data from different DAO proposals and votes were analyzed. Findings Results indicate that the 179 DAOs analyzed account for 26,538 proposals and 1,268,474 followers of the entire Snapshot base in January 2023, showing high concentration in engagement. The preferred social media communication channels are Twitter and GitHub, showing a decrease of Ethereum as a main chain, with Polygon and Binance Smart Chain already accounting for 22%. Basic voting can lead to greater user involvement in the voting process. Research limitations/implications This study complements the traditional governance theory perspective and advances in the emerging literature on DAOs and blockchain with an empirical analysis. Practical implications As blockchain technology gains increasing adoption, comprehending trends and patterns within the DAO community becomes pivotal in identifying opportunities and challenges for innovation and improvement. Social implications Findings can facilitate the development of improved governance models and decision-making processes for DAOs, leading to a more robust and sustainable ecosystem. Originality/value This study presents a broader IT-based governance foresight via blockchain while providing an understanding of the voting process, technology features and governance mechanisms for social community engagement and decision-making in DAOs.
On 30 April, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 amending Regulation (EU) 910/2014 as regards establishing the European Digital Identity Framework, known as eIDAS 2.0, was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. This amendment introduces zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) privacy-enhancing technologies to support two key innovations: the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) and the electronic attestations of attributes ((Q)EAA). In parallel, the European Digital Identity Wallet Architecture and Reference Framework (EUDIW ARF) provide a common set of standards and best practices for the technical implementation of eIDAS 2.0. This paper analyses how the EUDIW can rely on ZKPs since neither the eIDAS 2.0 Regulation nor the EUDIW ARF does so. We propose a software product regime for the cryptographic derivation of data in a ZKP format through three mutually compatible regulatory options: zero-knowledge issuance by default through the EUDIW, through a software product extension of the EUDIW, or a private standalone wallet. These schemes provide the legal basis for the secure use of ZKPs, ensure effective compliance with the GDPR, and contribute to the debate on the value that electronic ledgers introduced by eIDAS 2.0 bring to digital identity.
Yavuz Selim Kıyak, Işıl İrem Budakoğlu, Özlem Çoşkun
<b>Aim:</b> We aimed to reveal awareness of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) among clinical year students (fourth, fifth, and sixth years in undergraduate medical training) in a medical school. <br><b>Methods:</b> This was a descriptive study. The participants were clinical year medical students in a medical school. We developed an electronic survey form on blockchain, Holochain, and other DLTs. Self-perceived knowledge levels on DLTs and Web3 were solicited, as well as DLT-based cryptocurrency-related questions to understand their practical involvement. This approach was taken because, while DLTs are used in healthcare and education, their most common application is in cryptocurrencies. We reported descriptive statistics. <br><b>Results:</b> Total number of participants was 546. Of the students, 74.7% have never heard of blockchain, and 86.3% have never heard of Holochain. DLTs such as DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), Hashgraph, and Tempo have never been heard of by over 90% of the students. 75.3% stated they are worried about the security and privacy of their data on the internet. 20.3% of the students stated that they have purchased a cryptocurrency at least once, 7.9% used a cryptocurrency wallet where they hold its private key, and 6.8% used a decentralized exchange. If there were an elective course on DLTs in the faculty, 54.8% of the students would be willing to take this course. <br><b>Conclusions:</b> DLT and Web3 awareness among medical students is low. However, there is an interest in taking an elective course on these technologies. In order to create awareness, medical schools could leverage this interest to learn more about Web3 solutions.
Roberto A. Pava-Díaz, Jesús Gil-Ruiz, Danilo Alfonso López-Sarmiento
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) embodies the fundamental human right to own and control a digital identity that grants access to public, social, and financial services. The absence of a dedicated digital identity layer in the development of the Internet has rendered SSI a significant challenge in contemporary society. Blockchain technology emerges as a promising solution by enabling the creation of decentralized and automatically verifiable identities. This study contextualizes SSI and analyzes how blockchain technology facilitates the autonomous management of digital identities. It explores nine prominent frameworks in this field—Sovrin, uPort, Jolocom, ShoCard, Litentry, Civic, KILT, Idena, and ION—highlighting their features, functionalities, and compliance with digital identity principles. The research concludes by identifying the challenges and opportunities in implementing these systems for digital identity management, thus contributing to the advancement of this emerging field.
Ibrahim Mutambik, Abdullah Almuqrin, Zuopeng Zhang, Zahyah H. Alharbi
Although cryptocurrencies are not yet widely used as a method of payment in retail and commercial transactions, they are attracting a growing level of interest. However, if cryptocurrencies are to attract mass adoption for settlement, they will need to have merchant and consumer trust. This paper examines the factors which contribute to the development of trust, and whether the perception of trust varies between cultures (Arab and non-Arab). To explore this, the study analysed, using multigroup partial least squares analysis, 729 survey responses. The analysis examined the impact of four factors on perceived trust in cryptocurrency payments, and found that the perception of information confidentiality, identifiability and traceability all have a significant effect, while perceptions of fraud vulnerability had very little impact. There were also clear socio-cultural effects. This research offers significant insights into the trust dynamics essential for the acceptance of crypto-payment-services and highlights the importance of culture perspectives.
Differential Privacy (DP) stands as a secure and efficient mechanism for privacy preservation, offering enhanced data utility without compromising computational complexity. Its adaptability is evidenced by its integration into blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) contexts, including smart wearables, smart homes, etc. Nevertheless, a notable vulnerability surfaces in decentralized environments where existing DP mechanisms falter in withstanding collusion attacks. This vulnerability stems from the absence of an efficient strategy to synchronize the privacy budget consumption and historical query information among all network participants. Adversaries can exploit this weakness, collaborating to inject a substantial volume of queries simultaneously into disparate blockchain nodes to extract more precise results. To address this issue, we propose a novel dual response DP mechanism to preserve privacy in blockchain-based IoT scenarios. It encompasses both direct and indirect response strategies, enabling an adaptive response to external queries, aiming to provide better data utility while preserving privacy. Additionally, this mechanism can synchronize historical query information and privacy budget consumption within the blockchain network to prevent privacy leakage. We employ Relative Error (RE), Mean Square Error (MSE), and privacy budget consumption as evaluation metrics to measure the performance of the proposed mechanism. Experimental outcomes substantiate that the proposed mechanism can adapt to blockchain networks well, affirming its capacity for privacy and great utility.