Blockchain Papers

Jinzhi Lu, Xiaochen Zheng, Zhenchao Hu, Huisheng Zhang · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Lakshmojee Koduru, Praveen Baskar

No abstract is available for this record.

Keshava Prasad Halemane

The Monty-Hall (parameterized strategist-host) Theorem along with a constructive proof is presented, by solving the corresponding Monty-Hall Problem, wherein the host plays a parameterized strategy on the guest. It establishes the limits on the range of values for the probability of winning the prize. Eight extreme strategies (corresponding to the set of extreme values for the three perturbation parameters) have been well characterized. It is shown that there does not exist any strategy wherein a switched-choice will always (irrespective of the placement of the prize and irrespective of the initial-choice of the guest) lead to an enhancement in the chances of winning the prize. The classical Monty-Hall Problem is a special case with zero-value for each of the three perturbation parameters. This paper is an attempt to correct the errors (of long-standing historical significance) in the application of statistical methodology in solving the classical Monty-Hall Problem - one of them being the erroneous use of conditional probabilities for updating the knowledge to facilitate the decision-making by the guest, based on the information about a losing-choice, which itself is dependent on the initial-choice of the guest. Similar scenarios in data science, machine learning & artificial intelligence can have serious far-reaching consequences.

Zhengxun Wu, Jiasun Li

No abstract is available for this record.

Aubain Nzokem

The paper presents two series representations of a L{\'e}vy process for the Generalized Tempered Stable (GTS) distribution: a series representation generated by the inverse tail integral and a short noise representation. Both series representations are used to simulate the daily returns of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Q-Q plot analysis shows smooth linear patterns, indicating strong agreement between the empirical and theoretical GTS distributions.

Khaoula Hidawi

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a revolutionary method for managing digital assets, providing transparency and secure ownership records on a blockchain. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for leveraging NFTs to manage UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) flight data. Our approach focuses on ensuring data integrity, ownership transfer, and secure data sharing among stakeholders. This framework utilizes cryptographic methods, smart contracts, and access control mechanisms to enable a tamper-proof and privacy-preserving management system for UAV flight data.

Min Li, Na Li, Na Li, Zhen Wu

This paper is concerned with a class of linear-quadratic stochastic large-population problems with partial information, where the individual agent only has access to a noisy observation process related to the state. The dynamics of each agent follows a linear stochastic differential equation driven by individual noise, and all agents are coupled together via the control average term. Using the mean-field game approach and the backward separation principle with a state decomposition technique, the decentralized optimal control can be obtained in the open-loop form through a forward-backward stochastic differential equation with the conditional expectation. The optimal filtering equation is also provided. By the decoupling method, the decentralized optimal control can also be further presented as the feedback of state filtering via the Riccati equation. The explicit solution of the control average limit is given, and the consistency condition system is discussed. Moreover, the related $\varepsilon$-Nash equilibrium property is verified. To illustrate the good performance of theoretical results, an example in finance is studied.

Sinka Gao, Guoqiang Li, Hongfei Fu

WebAssembly, or WASM for short, is a binary code format for a stack-based virtual machine, first published in 2018 and now becomes a main-steam technology for providing distributed serverless functions. Recently, the demand for privacy and trustless serverless functions has started to grow in cloud, edge, and grid computing, which poses a question for those serverless function providers: how they ensure trustworthy computation in safety-critical scenarios like financial systems, cybersecurity, private data handling, etc. To address this, we leverage the technology ZKSNARK (zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge), a powerful proof system that allows efficient verification of the evaluation problem of statements, to give WASM runtime the ability to provide trustless computation service. More precisely, we present ZKWASM, a ZKSNARK backed virtual machine that emulates the execution of WASM bytecode and generates zero-knowledge-proofs for the emulation result. The proof generated by the ZKWASM virtual machine can then be used to convince an entity, with no leakage of confidential information, that the result of the emulation enforces the semantic specification of WASM.

Jongho Seol, Abhilash Kancharla, Jongyeop Kim

In the realm of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), this manuscript introduces a Hybrid Cross-Chain Model. As DeFi architectures grapple with the complexities of monolithic single-chain platforms, our proposed model orchestrates a symphony of multiple chains to facilitate seamless cross-chain communication, offering a poised solution to scalability and transaction speed challenges. Incorporating modeling effects and simulations, our rigorous performance evaluation underscores the model's excellence and includes an in-depth analysis of its performance, particularly focusing on robust security measures. The model is positioned as a cornerstone in an interconnected DeFi landscape by emphasizing stringent measures to ensure data integrity and uphold consensus mechanisms. User-centric enhancements promise swift transaction confirmations and reduced fees, improving the overall experience. The abstract culminates with a comparative analysis, positioning the Hybrid Cross-Chain Model as an innovative solution with profound implications for the future of DeFi. This manuscript advocates for ongoing research and development, heralding a new era of sophistication and resilience in decentralized finance.

Simon Brown, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez

There have been several studies into measuring the level of decentralization in Ethereum through applying various indices to indicate the relative dominance of entities in different domains in the ecosystem. However, these indices do not capture any correlation between those different entities, that could potentially make them the subject of external coercion, or covert collusion. We propose an index that measures the relative dominance of entities based on the application of correlation factors. We posit that this approach produces a more nuanced and accurate index of decentralization.

Lincoln Murr

Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism, which combines the Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree (LMD-GHOST) fork choice rule with the probabilistic Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) finality overlay, finalizes transactions in 64 to 95 blocks, an approximate 15-minute delay. This finalization latency impacts user experience and exposes the network to short-term chain reorganization risks, potentially enabling transaction censorship or frontrunning by validators without severe penalties. As the ecosystem pursues a rollup-centric roadmap to scale Ethereum into a secure global settlement layer, faster finality allows cross-layer and inter-rollup communication with greater immediacy, reducing capital inefficiencies. Single slot finality (SSF), wherein transactions are finalized within the same slot they are proposed, promises to advance the Ethereum protocol and enable better user experiences by enabling near-instant economic finality. This thesis systematically studies distributed consensus protocols through propose-vote-merge, PBFT-inspired, and graded agreement families - scrutinizing their capacities to enhance or replace LMD-GHOST. The analysis delves into the intricate tradeoffs between safety, liveness, and finality, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities in designing an optimal consensus protocol for Ethereum. It also explores different design decisions and mechanisms by which single slot or fast finality can be enabled, including cumulative finality, subsampling, and application-layer fast finality. Furthermore, this work introduces SSF-enabled and streamlined fast finality constructions based on a single-vote total order broadcast protocol. The insights and recommendations in this thesis provide a solid foundation for the Ethereum community to make informed decisions regarding the future direction of the protocol's consensus.

Stuart Harshbarger, Rosa Heckle, Michael P. Collins

International Test & Evaluation Association (ITEA) For 45 years, we’ve been the catalyst for excellence in T&E – empowering professionals through education, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation that matters. Advance Your T&E Career What We Do Uniting global T&E leaders and experts to address technological challenges collaboratively.[2024

Irene Aldridge

No abstract is available for this record.

Shengyue Yao, Jingru Yu, Yi Yu, Xu Jia · 8 authors

With a growing complexity of the intelligent traffic system (ITS), an integrated control of ITS that is capable of considering plentiful heterogeneous intelligent agents is desired. However, existing control methods based on the centralized or the decentralized scheme have not presented their competencies in considering the optimality and the scalability simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose an integrated control method based on the framework of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The proposed method achieves a global consensus on energy consumption efficiency (ECE), meanwhile to optimize the local objectives of all involved intelligent agents, through a consensus and incentive mechanism. Furthermore, an operation algorithm is proposed regarding the issue of structural rigidity in DAO. Specifically, the proposed operation approach identifies critical agents to execute the smart contract in DAO, which ultimately extends the capability of DAO-based control. In addition, a numerical experiment is designed to examine the performance of the proposed method. The experiment results indicate that the controlled agents can achieve a consensus faster on the global objective with improved local objectives by the proposed method, compare to existing decentralized control methods. In general, the proposed method shows a great potential in developing an integrated control system in the ITS.

Roman Beck, Geetika Jain

In this research, we examine the interplay between ‘actors’ and ‘agents’ in Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) systems. We identify regulatory interactions between off-chain agents setting the rules, as well as on-chain code as actors regulating the behavior of DLT users. We theorize about the relationship between agents and actors that mutually regulate each other in certain ways through the DLT system and identify the significant dimensions related to the trifecta in which the soft system agent sphere regulation of DLT is likely to interact with the hard system actor sphere regulation by DLT. By proposing the trifecta between DLT design, DLT protocol, and DLT use, we explain the relationship between these three and the role of DLT protocol as a mediator between DLT design and DLT use. Our research sheds light on the dynamics within DLT systems and the regulating forces at play from a systems’ thinking perspective.e.

Edoardo Rosa, Gabriele D’Angelo, Stefano Ferretti

In this paper, we describe LUNES-Blockchain, an agent-based simulator of blockchains that is able to exploit Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) techniques to offer a high level of scalability. To assess the preliminary implementation of our simulator, we provide a simplified modelling of the Bitcoin protocol and we study the effect of a security attack on the consensus protocol in which a set of malicious nodes implements a filtering denial of service (i.e. Sybil Attack). The results confirm the viability of the agent-based modelling of blockchains implemented by means of PADS.

Georgios Darivianakis, Angelos Georghiou, John Lygeros

Distributed model predictive control (MPC) has been proven a successful method in regulating the operation of large-scale networks of constrained dynamical systems. This paper is concerned with cooperative distributed MPC in which the decision actions of the systems are usually derived by the solution of a system-wide optimization problem. However, formulating and solving such large-scale optimization problems is often a hard task which requires extensive information communication among the individual systems and fails to address privacy concerns in the network. Hence, the main challenge is to design decision policies with a prescribed structure so that the resulting system-wide optimization problem to admit a loosely coupled structure and be amendable to distributed computation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a decentralized problem synthesis scheme which only requires each system to communicate sets which bound its states evolution to neighboring systems. The proposed method alleviates concerns on privacy since this limited communication scheme does not reveal the exact characteristics of the dynamics within each system. In addition, it enables a distributed computation of the solution, making our method highly scalable. We demonstrate in a number of numerical studies, inspired by engineering and finance, the efficacy of the proposed approach which leads to solutions that closely approximate those obtained by the centralized formulation only at a fraction of the computational effort.

Zhongqi Cheng, Tim Schmidt, Guantao Liu, Rainer Doomer

The rapidly growing design complexity has become a big obstacle and dramatically increased the time required for SystemC simulation. In this case study, we exploit different levels of parallelism, including thread- and data-level parallelism, to accelerate the simulation of a Bitcoin miner model in SystemC. Our experiments are performed on two multi-core processors and one many-core Intel(g) Xeon PhiTMCoprocessor. Our results show that with the combination of data- and thread-level parallelism, the peak simulation speed improves by over 11x on a 4-core host, 50x on a 16-core host, and 510x on a 60-core host, respectively. The results confirm the efficiency of combining thread- and datalevel parallelism for higher SystemC simulation speed, and can serve as a benchmark for future optimization of system level design, modeling, and simulation.

Sanjit A. Seshia, Shiyan Hu, Wenchao Li, Qi Zhu

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is an integration of computation with physical processes whose behavior is defined by both computational and physical parts of the system. In this paper, we present a view of the challenges and opportunities for design automation of CPS. We identify a combination of characteristics that define the challenges unique to the design automation of CPS. We then present selected promising advances in depth, focusing on four foundational directions: combining model-based and data-driven design methods; design for human-in-the-loop systems; component-based design with contracts, and design for security and privacy. These directions are illustrated with examples from two application domains: smart energy systems and next-generation automotive systems.

キヨタカ シミズ, Kiyotaka Shimizu, 清孝 志水

We study a two-level system having N local systems in the lower level subordinate to a central system in the higher one, such that both central and local systems have decision-making units. The central system is a coordinating agency and the local ones are semi-autonomous operating devisions. The basic principle of planning for this organization is that the central system allocates resources so as to optimize its own objective, while the local ones optimize their own objectives using the given resources. A local objective function, fn, is a function of the lower level decision variable vector x=(x1,・・・, xN) and the higher level one a=(a1,・・・, aN), where an is a resource vector allocated to the local system n. Since the functions ■ are mutually independent, the lower level composes a multi-objective system, in which the lower level decision-makers minimize a vector objective function f =(f1,・・・,fN) with respect to x in cooperation with each other. Thus, the lower level generates a set of noninferior (i.e. Pareto optimal) solutions ■(a) being parametric with respect to a. The central decision-maker, then, chooses the optimal resource allocation a⁰ and the best noninferior solution ■⁰ corresponding to a⁰ from among a set of ■(a). The above problem becomes a decentralized two-level optimization, when the local system contains only its own variables (xn, an). Several theorems and iterative algorithms for the formulated problems are obtained by use of mathematical programming techniques.