Blockchain Papers

David Bednorz, Knut Neumann

No abstract is available for this record.

Christiana Chamon, Leyla Nazhandali, Vinod Lohani, Dayoung Kim

This Innovative Practice Work-in-Progress Paper presents an ongoing effort to develop a blockchain-based micro-credentialing system for engineering education, addressing the challenges of capturing and verifying granular skill achievements in digital learning environments. By leveraging blockchain technology, privacy-preserving biometric authentication, and incentive mechanisms like Proof of Stake Learning (PoSL), our system ensures secure, tamper-proof, and portable micro-credentials. Integrated into Virginia Tech's ECE 2564: Introduction to Embedded Systems course, the platform allows students to earn NFT Knowledge Coins for validated contributions, preparing them for workforce entry through coding interview simulations. Preliminary findings indicate strong student interest in self-sovereign credentialing and faculty support for automated assessments. This work aims to enhance transparency, equity, and employer trust in micro-credentials, with broader impacts on underrepresented groups and regional STEM education.

Cameron Hahn

This work aims to build on URI’s autonomous Lab on Paper (LoP) platform technology, which was used to conduct enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs), to conducting enzymatic activity assays. This requires new optimizations and designs to accommodate the test. In this work we use alkaline phosphatase (ALP) enzyme as the model analyte for the proof-of-concept. To accompany the new device, new MATLAB analytical tools were written and tested, to aid in robust colorimetric signal analysis. The test fixture was designed to be reusable, when a new paper circuit and reagent vials are supplied, however, it was assumed that an eventual final product will be a single use system. The circuit was built with modularity in mind to facilitate the development of future tests. Flow speed tests were shown to follow the form of Washburn’s equation. The housing was optimized for ease of use. The proof of concept was proven; achieved however it demonstrated a lack in the precision of the measurements. The signal followed the expected form of a linear curve, however, overlapping in test results means that the precision of the measurement is weak. Several challenges limited the success of the platform and should be investigated in future work. The most important is a full examination and mitigation of the “coffee ring” effect in order to produce a uniform image in the detection zone.

Harry E. Pence

High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Aside from a few brave souls who follow the financial gyrations of the online currrency known as Bitcoin, most chemists are probably not very familiar with blockchain. Blockchain is a security technnology that can replace traditional academic transcripts as well as provide a new model for sharing scientific information. It might be useful as a pedagogical tool and even as a way to manage the arrival and inventory of the chemical stockroom. Blockchain may also be used to determine ownership of intellectual property and to track the shipment of chemicals to prevent their use for illegal purposes, such as terrorism.

Clifford C. Leznoff, Wolodymyr Sywanyk

We study the following two related questions:\n- What are the minimal computational resources required for general secure multiparty computation in the presence of an honest majority?\n- What are the minimal resources required for two-party primitives such as zero-knowledge proofs and general secure two-party computation?\nWe obtain a nearly tight answer to the first question by presenting a perfectly secure protocol which allows n players to evaluate an arithmetic circuit of size s by performing a total of O(s log s log2 n) arithmetic operations, plus an additive term which depends (polynomially) on n and the circuit depth, but only logarithmically on s. Thus, for typical large-scale computations whose circuit width is much bigger than their depth and the number of players, the amortized overhead is just polylogarithmic in n and s. The protocol provides perfect security with guaranteed output delivery in the presence of an active, adaptive adversary corrupting a (1/3 ¿ ") fraction of the players, for an arbitrary constant ¿ > 0 and succiently large n. The best previous protocols in this setting could only offer computational security with a computational overhead of poly(k; log n; log s), where k is a computational security parameter, or perfect security with a computational overhead of O(n log n). We then apply the above result towards making progress on the second question. Concretely, under standard cryptographic assumptions, we obtain zero-knowledge proofs for circuit satisfiability with 2 -k soundness error in which the amortized computational overhead per gate is only polylogarithmic in k, improving over the ¿(k) overhead of the best previous protocols. Under stronger cryptographic assumptions, we obtain similar results for general secure two-party computation.