Blocks In Blockchain Research Articles

EASL: Enhanced append-only skip list index for agile block data retrieval on blockchain

The weakness of blockchain is widely recognised as the linear, temporal cost required for retrieving data due to the sequential structure of data blocks. To address this, conventional approaches have relied on database indexing techniques applied to each individual replica copy of a blockchain. However, this only partially addresses the problem, because if the index is not distributed it is not available for devices in the blockchain network. If an index is to be incorporated and distributed within blockchain, the unique attribute of immutability necessitates a more innovative approach. To that end, we propose an Enhanced Append-only Skip List (EASL). This specialised indexing technique utilises binary search with skip lists in blockchain, resulting in a sublinear cost for data retrieval. The EASL indexing technique is maintained by each newly appended blockchain block and offers enhanced readability and robustness using an explicitly recorded index structure. Our proposed technique is 42% more efficient in computing and 60% more efficient in storage consumption than its predecessor, the Deterministic Append-only Skip List (DASL) indexing technique. This is achieved through agile data retrieval, resulting in energy cost savings from less computational effort to maintain the index, and less network bandwidth to retrieve blockchain data. The code for the proposed technique is publicly available on GitHub {https://github.com/jarednewell/EASL/}, to expedite future research and encourage the practical application of this effectual data index.

Document Storage and Verification System Using Blockchain Technology

A banking or identity provider can set up a customer identification data verification process between reliant parties with the use of the electronic know your customer (e-KYC) system. Due to its high degree of accessibility and availability and its efficient resource usage, the majority of banks choose to implement their e-KYC system on the cloud. All of the KYC procedures used by banks rely on encryption, which is a cumbersome process that may cause consumer data to be disclosed to unaffiliated financial institutions. Blockchain technology can be used to increase the efficiency of this system because it can automate a lot of human labor and is impervious to attacks of all kinds. The distributed ledger and immutable blockchain block make the perfect addition to the KYC process. The use of smart contacts can automate the identification of fraud. Any kind of KYC can be used to store information related to KYC identity. Consequently, financial institutions can establish a shared private blockchain on their premises for the purpose of document validation. This allows the user to maintain control over their private documents while also simplifying the process for banks to obtain the records needed for compliance

Survey on Document Storage and Verification System using Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology promises to be hugely trending and empowering in financial domain computing applications. The digital economy is becoming an integral part of modern life. So as the use of the digital world increases there are more chances of decrease is the security level. So more the use of digitization more the frauds and less the security. In some cases of personal data, leakage has brought back into the focus the security issues with the different identity sharing mechanisms. A customer is expected to provide his identity for authentication by different agencies. So the KYC process deals with the identification of the user. And in turn, provides the required security. The KYC procedures which are used by the banks are completely dependent on the encryption which is slow and it can lead to the loss of customer details to other theirs party financial institutions. This system can be efficient by using Blockchain technology, which has the potential to automate a lot of manual processes and it is also resistant to hacks of any sort. The immutable blockchain block and its distributed ledger is the perfect complement to the process of KYC. With the addition of smart contacts, fraud detection can be automated. For KYC identity details storage we can make use of any types of KYC. So, the banks can develop a shared private blockchain within the bank premise and the same can be used for verifying the documents. This allows the user to get control of their sensitive documents and also makes it easier for banks to obtain the documents they need for compliance

A secure energy trading in a smart community by integrating Blockchain and machine learning approach

ABSTRACT In today’s smart communities, small-scale energy systems are essential for sustainable development and efficient resource management. However, ensuring the confidentiality, safety, and accurate prediction of energy consumption patterns in energy trading is a major challenge. To address these issues, an innovative solution that synergistically combines two cutting-edge technologies: blockchain and machine learning is proposed. This paper unveils a novel approach that harmoniously merges blockchain with the Recalling-Enhanced Recurrent Neural Network (RERNN) to revolutionize energy trading systems called ‘Blockchain-Enhanced Energy Trading with Recalling-Enhanced Recurrent Neural Network (BET-RERNN).’ Data from IoT-enabled smart devices is securely stored in blockchain blocks, ensuring data integrity and immutability. Blockchain’s decentralized nature creates a trust-less environment for energy trading, protecting the privacy and anonymity of participants while maintaining transparency. At the heart of our system lies the advanced machine-learning capabilities of the RERNN model. By processing the data stored on the blockchain, RERNN accurately predicts optimal power generation for small-scale energy systems, enabling smart communities to make informed decisions and optimize their energy consumption. The BET-RERNN scheme provides a plethora of strengths. First, participants can securely engage in energy trading without compromising sensitive information, fostering a more resilient and efficient market. Second, blockchain technology ensures that all energy-related data is protected from tampering and unauthorized access, ensuring system reliability and trust. An in-depth comparison of RERNN’s performance to traditional General Regression Neural Network (GRNN) and Gradient Boost Decision Tree (GBDT) methods is conducted. To verify the strategy’s effectiveness, MATLAB simulations are employed, demonstrating its real-world applicability and scalability. By combining blockchain and machine learning, a secure and privacy-preserving smart community is established, promoting sustainable energy practices for a greener future.

Document verification system at college level using Blockchain

Blockchain technology promises to be hugely trending and empowering in education domain computing applications. The digital is becoming an integral part of modern life. So as the use of the digital world increases there are more chances of decrease is the security level. So more the use of digitization more the frauds and less the security. In some cases of personal data, leakage has brought back into the focus the security issues with the different identity sharing mechanisms. A customer is expected to provide his identity for authentication by different agencies. So the document verification process deals with the identification of the user. And in turn, provides the required security. The document verification procedures which are used by the colleges are completely dependent on the encryption. This system can be efficient by using Blockchain technology, which has the potential to automate a lot of manual processes and it is also resistant to hacks of any sort. The immutable blockchain block and its distributed ledger is the perfect complement to the process of document verification. With the addition of smart contacts, fraud detection can be automated..

Security Management for Transaction and KYC using Block Chain Technology

Abstract: Blockchain technology promises to be hugely trending and empowering in financial domain computing applications. The digital economy is becoming an integral part of modern life. So as the use of the digital world increases there are more chances to decrease the security level. So more the use of digitization more the frauds and less the security. In some cases of personal data, leakage has brought back into the focus the security issues with the different identity sharing mechanisms. A customer is expected to provide his identity for authentication by different agencies. So theKYC process deals with the identification of the user. And in turn, provides the required security. The KYC procedures which are used by the banks are completely dependent on the encryption which is slow and it can lead to the loss of customer details to other theirs party financial institutions. This system can be efficient by using Blockchain technology, which has the potential to automate a lot of manual processes and it is also resistant to hacks of any sort. The immutable blockchain block and its distributed ledger is the perfect complement to the process of KYC. With the addition of smart contacts, fraud detection can be automated. For KYC identity details storage we can make use of any types of KYC. So, the banks can develop a shared private blockchain within the bank premise and the same can be used for verifying the documents. This allows the user to get control of their sensitive documents and also makes it easier for banks to obtain the documents they need for compliance.

Application of Blockchain to Secure e-FIR

Abstract: Electronic First Information Report (e-FIR) is a document filed to the police stations by a victim or accuser when offense is committed. In traditional e-FIR databases, offense’s records can be tampered because of its centralized nature. Also intentional false e-FIR can be registered. Thus, data transparency and integrity is big concern. To overcome this problem e-FIR with decentralized blockchain system can be integrated with e-FIR portal. The main characteristics of the blockchain technology are advanced security and decentralized system. This technology uses the encrypted blocks to make FIR data secured. Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol is used in this system. Users have to submit e-FIR through portal which will be stored in blocks in blockchain. Due to advanced security feature of system, data tampering will be prevented. Integrating such FIR registration system will ensure transparency and enhance data integrity.

Ensuring Information Security of OLAP-Containing Distributed Electronic Systems using Blockchain Technology

The article outlines the properties of blockchain technology, according to which the content of blockchain blocks is immutable and the use of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network implies decentralized management. It describes the essence and meaning of smart-contracts and smart-views derived from them, which are involved in the process of data analysis and decision making. The article considers the papers devoted to various approaches to the problem of integration of blockchain technology and data storage. To ensure all three key aspects of information security — the integrity, availability and confidentiality of information, which is important for both government and corporate structures, the article proposes to use a private blockchain, instead of a public one. A modification of the model of an electronic decision support system containing an OLAP block, which includes a private blockchain, is developed. It is shown that this DSS model can be used as an electronic demographic DSS, which is an infrastructure for solving state problems in this area, since many of the characteristics of this model correspond to the multisectoral nature of demography.

Blockchain as a service environment: a dependability evaluation

Blockchain has become an important processing paradigm in recent years. The blockchain supports financial transactions and validates contracts, documents and data. However, the evolution of blockchain has become viable for many applications. The servers’ availability and reliability (dependence) are required in the data processing. The contract will only be signed if there are enough components to form the blockchain blocks. This paper analyses the dependency between project components that use blockchain. We present a model based on stochastic Petri net (SPN) for evaluating the dependency of the blockchain architecture. The Design of Experiments (DoE) method was used to analyse this model’s factors, seeking to know which ones had the higher impact on the system. The sensitivity analysis showed that the MongoDB component has a greater impact on the system dependency and the need to upgrade such a component. Also, for reliability, making component improvements is unnecessary if the system has fewer than 36,000 h of runtime.

Technological Aspects and Environmental Consequences of Mining Encryption

Introduction. The digital economy has significantly changed not only the types, forms and mechanism of payments, but also the form of money itself. Electronic money is becoming more popular, which increases the relevance and importance of the study of technical aspects and environmental consequences of mining encryption. The choice of equipment for cryptocurrency mining and its impact on the environment remains a rather debatable issue. It is also not clear how to calculate the costs of mining cryptocurrencies in order to determine the cost of such coins which creates obstacles to the normal reflection in the accounting of such activities in the future and the payment of the corresponding taxes on such operations where cryptocurrencies are involved.
 Aim and tasks. The study aims is to investigate modern approaches to cryptocurrency mining and the characteristics of the mining process itself, as well as the selection of the main equipment and a list of costs to ensure this activity takes into account the environmental consequences of mining encryption.
 Results. Cryptocurrency mining is the process of creating digital currencies. All transactions in the network are not processed by any central authority, but by any user connected to the network. The creation of cryptocurrency, i.e. its emission, is the acquisition of certain property rights. Determining the cost of mining, for example, one bitcoin depends on the amount of resources spent: the depreciation of the equipment that was used to generate new blockchain blocks and the monthly costs of its maintenance, the cost of high-speed Internet service, the configuration of the mining software product on a particular pool, combined electricity costs.
 Conclusions. The development of the cryptocurrency market has both positive and negative consequences at the micro and macro levels. Advantages include independence from the state-regulated banking system and general accessibility; high economic efficiency of mining; transparency of transactions, confidentiality and anonymity, security of data owners; high data security against external influences and attacks; absence of time or territorial restrictions; general availability and lack of need to create centralized data repositories; effective mechanism against theft, counterfeiting and inflation, irreversible nature of transactions. At the macro level, the advantages are the high capitalization of cryptocurrencies, which can contribute to meeting the financial needs of the state as a whole and independence from the state. Therefore, further accounting of such a specific asset as cryptocurrency requires detailed research.

PROACT: Parallel multi-miner proof of accumulated trust protocol for Internet of Drones

Several types of networks that comprise unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV or drone) are being utilized in important applications such as emergency response, environment and infrastructure monitoring, defense and security, and commerce. In such networks, swarms of UAVs cooperate in executing one or more missions to achieve the application's objectives. The UAVs communicate with terrestrial networks by connecting to fixed or mobile ground control stations (GCS). The ability of drones to connect to online applications and offer services to Internet users has led to the proliferation of the Internet of Drones (IoD). However, IoD applications are highly vulnerable to many types of cyberattacks. Hence, mechanisms must be deployed to secure the IoD operations and data. Recently, the blockchain has been proposed as a solution to detect and prevent malicious attacks on the UAV network (UAVN). Due to the UAV's limited resources, it becomes a challenge to integrate the blockchain into the IoD. In this paper, we propose a model that enables a drone to store the important data that it requires during its flight within a lightweight blockchain system. In addition, we propose a new blockchain consensus mechanism in which several miners produce their blocks in parallel, which decreases the time needed to add transactions securely to the blockchain and meets the requirements of delay-sensitive applications. Our simulations prove the advantages of the proposed model in decreasing the transaction-to-blockchain delay, the average drone energy consumption, and the blockchain block size as compared to other IoD blockchain systems.

MODEL AND METHOD OF ASSESSING THE MEDICAL DATA SUFFICIENCY

The conducted state-of-the-art on known decisions on the use of blockchain technologies in the construction of information technology for medical data management showed that, despite a large number of different solutions, effective methods and solutions for medical data management based on blockchain technologies are currently lacking. Thus, improving the efficiency of medical data management by developing methods of medical data management based on blockchain technologies is currently an urgent problem. The aim of this study is to improve the efficiency of medical data management by developing a method for assessing the sufficiency of medical data before placing them in the blockchain. Models of blockchain block, blockchain fragment and blockchain node, presented in formalized form, as well as models of medical data management process (data sufficiency assessment) are developed, which are the theoretical basis for developing a method of assessing the medical data sufficiency. Rules for determining the sufficiency of medical data have been developed., which provide analysis of medical data in order to find all the predetermined necessary elements of medical data; to decide on the sufficiency or insufficiency of information; output of visualized hints, which data elements are missing, to ensure the ability to quickly add data; quantitative assessment of the sufficiency of medical data. The paper developed a method for assessing the sufficiency of medical data, which provides: the ability to analyze a variety of medical data for their sufficiency; the ability to quantify the sufficiency of medical data; in case of insufficiency of medical data in the set, formation of recommendations on supplementing the set of medical data – as a guide, what information should be added to the set of medical data to be able to download them to the section “Block data” of blockchain.

Methods of medical data management based on blockchain technologies.

The healthcare sector in Ukraine has long been in need of change, and many opportunities of blockchain technology can help it lead the transformation of this sector and ensure compliance with the requirements of the efficiency, safety, novelty, and economic benefits. State-of-the-art on known decisions on the use of blockchain technologies in the information technology for medical data management showed that, despite a large number of different solutions, effective methods and solutions for medical data management based on blockchain technologies are currently lacking. Therefore, improving the efficiency of medical data management by developing methods of medical data management based on blockchain technologies is currently an urgent problem. The paper developed a method for assessing the sufficiency of medical data, which provides: the ability to analyze a variety of medical data for their sufficiency; the ability to quantify the sufficiency of medical data; in case of insufficiency of the medical data, formation of recommendations on supplementing the medical data to be able to upload them to the "Block Data" section of the blockchain block. The paper developed a method of performing transactions on medical data, which consists of the stages of entering information into the blockchain and obtaining information from the blockchain. The developed method of performing transactions on medical data provides the ability to decide on the addition of transactions and medical data from the patient to the blockchain; the ability to decide on the issuance of data from the blockchain on request from a doctor.

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled DDoS Detection for Blockchain-Based Smart Transport Systems.

A smart public transport system is expected to be an integral part of our human lives to improve our mobility and reduce the effect of our carbon footprint. The safety and ongoing maintenance of the smart public transport system from cyberattacks are vitally important. To provide more comprehensive protection against potential cyberattacks, we propose a novel approach that combines blockchain technology and a deep learning method that can better protect the smart public transport system. By the creation of signed and verified blockchain blocks and chaining of hashed blocks, the blockchain in our proposal can withstand unauthorized integrity attack that tries to forge sensitive transport maintenance data and transactions associated with it. A hybrid deep learning-based method, which combines autoencoder (AE) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP), in our proposal can effectively detect distributed denial of service (DDoS) attempts that can halt or block the urgent and critical exchange of transport maintenance data across the stakeholders. The experimental results of the hybrid deep learning evaluated on three different datasets (i.e., CICDDoS2019, CIC-IDS2017, and BoT-IoT) show that our deep learning model is effective to detect a wide range of DDoS attacks achieving more than 95% F1-score across all three datasets in average. The comparison of our approach with other similar methods confirms that our approach covers a more comprehensive range of security properties for the smart public transport system.

Обработка ошибочных ситуаций в больших блокчейн-сетях алгоритмом достижения консенсуса, основанном на решении задачи византийских генералов

Blockchain networks built on the basis of PoS, DPoS, LPoS, PoE, PoIT, pBFT algorithms have certain limitations associated with the reduction of the new transactions inclusion rate in the blockchain when the number of blockchain network nodes participating in block creation increases. The developed stake distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerant (sdBFT) algorithm of consensus achievement allows to increase by several orders of magnitude the number of network nodes participating in consensus achievement in comparison to existing BFT algorithms, while maintaining the speed f transactions inclusion in the blockchain. The main erroneous situations in large blockchain networks are investigated in terms of their processing by the sdBFT algorithm. The processing of seven main erroneous situations in a blockchain is given: a master node is not available; an escort node is not available; an incorrect transaction is received; different number of closed blocks on different nodes of a blockchain network at the same time; a node rejects a new blockchain block; a network rejects a new blockchain block; two blocks with identical numbers appear in the network. It is shown that the correct interaction of the sdBFT algorithm with the blockchain network enables not only high performance with a large number of nodes and high transaction arrival rate, but also the ability of the blockchain using this algorithm to work out all the major error situations that arise in the operation of the blockchain network

A Decoupled Blockchain Approach for Edge-Envisioned IoT-Based Healthcare Monitoring

The in-house health monitoring sensors form a large network of Internet of things (IoT) that continuously monitors and sends the data to the nearby devices or server. However, the connectivity of these IoT-based sensors with different entities leads to security loopholes wherein the adversary can exploit the vulnerabilities due to the openness of the data. This is a major concern especially in the healthcare sector where the change in data values from sensors can change the course of diagnosis which can cause severe health issues. Therefore, in order to prevent the data tempering and preserve the privacy of patients, we present a decoupled blockchain-based approach in the edge-envisioned ecosystem. This approach leverages the nearby edge devices to create the decoupled blocks in blockchain so as to securely transmit the healthcare data from sensors to the edge nodes. The edge nodes then transmit and store the data at the cloud using the incremental tensor-based scheme. This helps to reduce the data duplication of the huge amount of data transmitted in the large IoT healthcare network. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of the block preparation time, header generation time, tensor reduction ratio, and approximation error.

Modeling and analysis of block arrival times in the Bitcoin blockchain

In the original Bitcoin paper and other research papers since, it is assumed that Bitcoin blocks are mined at the instants of a homogeneous Poisson process. Based on blockchain block arrival data and stochastic analysis of the block arrival process, we demonstrate that this is not the case. We present a framework for studying the block arrival process, including two refined mathematical models for block arrivals, determined by combining models for a period of constant difficulty and how the difficulty evolves over time.

A blockchain-based smart home gateway architecture for preventing data forgery

With the advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the proliferation of sensor technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) is now being widely used in smart home for the purposes of efficient resource management and pervasive sensing. In smart homes, various IoT devices are connected to each other, and these connections are centered on gateways. The role of gateways in the smart homes is significant, however, its centralized structure presents multiple security vulnerabilities such as integrity, certification, and availability. To address these security vulnerabilities, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based smart home gateway network that counters possible attacks on the gateway of smart homes. The network consists of three layers including device, gateway, and cloud layers. The blockchain technology is employed at the gateway layer wherein data is stored and exchanged in the form blocks of blockchain to support decentralization and overcome the problem from traditional centralized architecture. The blockchain ensures the integrity of the data inside and outside of the smart home and provides availability through authentication and efficient communication between network members. We implemented the proposed network on the Ethereum blockchain technology and evaluated in terms of standard security measures including security response time and accuracy. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed security solutions outperforms over the existing solutions.

Framework and algorithms for identifying honest blocks in blockchain.

Blockchain technology gains more and more attention in the past decades and has been applied in many areas. The main bottleneck for the development and application of blockchain is its limited scalability. Blockchain with directed acyclic graph structure (BlockDAG) is proposed in order to alleviate the scalability problem. One of the key technical problems in BlockDAG is the identification of honest blocks which are very important for establishing a stable and invulnerable total order of all the blocks. The stability and security of BlockDAG largely depends on the precision of honest block identification. This paper presents a novel universal framework based on graph theory, called MaxCord, for identifying the honest blocks in BlockDAG. By introducing the concept of discord, the honest block identification is modelled as a generalized maximum independent set problem. Several algorithms are developed, including exact, greedy and iterative filtering algorithms. The extensive comparisons between proposed algorithms and the existing method were conducted on the simulated BlockDAG data to show that the proposed iterative filtering algorithm identifies the honest blocks both efficiently and effectively. The proposed MaxCord framework and algorithms can set the solid foundation for the BlockDAG technology.

A High Performance Blockchain Platform for Indian Banking System

Blockchain technology has gained significant attention after the introduction of bitcoin in 2008. It is a decentralized ledger useful in exchanging digital currency. Blockchain is a continuous growing list of records known as blocks managed by a peer to peer distributed network. The records in the blocks of blockchain are immutable and permanent which is well needed in the bank transactions. Blockchain technology is a peer-to-peer distributed structure that could be used to overcome the issues in the traditional banking system. This paper will demonstrate how we can use blockchain in the banking sector so that the burden of the centralized database is transferred to a decentralized network. It will also demonstrate the different algorithms that are used for the system like RSA and Verhoeff algorithm to generate the keys and to verify the user respectively.