Blockchain Approach Research Articles

Використання блокчейну першого рівня LTO Network для автоматизації міжорганізаційних бізнес-процесів

The article is devoted to the consideration of blockchain technology as a means of automating inter-organizational business processes. It is noted that the digitalization and automation of internal business processes bring significant benefits in terms of increasing productivity and reducing costs. However, organizations face difficulties when trying to obtain such benefits for inter-organizational processes, partly due to a lack of trust. This paper considers a blockchain approach to address this problem. Bitcoin has demonstrated how blockchain can provide a distributed system without the need for trust through cryptography and decentralization. LTO extends this approach with a decentralized workflow engine for ad-hoc collaboration. Information is exchanged between participants through private event chains for each process and hashed on a public blockchain. This hybrid approach allows organizations to comply with data protection requirements and avoid scalability issues typical of blockchain projects. The advantages of LTO live contracts over Ethereum smart contracts are discussed. Live contracts do not contain values directly, but describe the interaction between the parties, unlike the cryptographic "boxes" of smart contracts. Modeling live contracts as finite state machines allows visualizing them in the form of a flowchart. Alternative modeling techniques such as Petri nets and BPMN are discussed. The article describes a scenario-based approach to defining a workflow containing states, actions, participants, assets, and embedded data objects. The features of data objects, participant identifiers, process execution and its adaptability are detailed. The author explains the operation of a private event chain as an ad-hoc private blockchain that ensures the consistency of the process state between nodes. Methods of ensuring data privacy are discussed. The second part of the article is devoted to the global public blockchain LTO to confirm information from private event chains. The consensus algorithm is explained based on the importance of token ownership and its use to prevent abuse. Optimizations, such as the NG protocol and aggregation blocks, are discussed to scale with a large number of transactions. The last part describes the architecture of the platform and its components: microservices, application layers, container orchestration. The platform makes it easy to digitalize and automate inter-organizational interactions using live contracts on the blockchain.

An architecture for COVID-19 analysis and detection using big data, AI, and data architectures.

The COVID-19 epidemic is affecting individuals in many ways and continues to spread all over the world. Vaccines and traditional medical techniques are still being researched. In diagnosis and therapy, biological and digital technology is used to overcome the fear of this disease. Despite recovery in many patients, COVID-19 does not have a definite cure or a vaccine that provides permanent protection for a large number of people. Current methods focus on prevention, monitoring, and management of the spread of the disease. As a result, new technologies for combating COVID-19 are being developed. Though unreliable due to a lack of sufficient COVID-19 datasets, inconsistencies in the datasets availability, non-aggregation of the database because of conflicting data formats, incomplete information, and distortion, they are a step in the right direction. Furthermore, the privacy and confidentiality of people's medical data are only partially ensured. As a result, this research study proposes a novel, cooperative approach that combines big data analytics with relevant Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and blockchain to create a system for analyzing and detecting COVID-19 instances. Based on these technologies, the reliability, affordability, and prominence of dealing with the above problems required time. The architecture of the proposed model will analyze different data sources for preliminary diagnosis, detect the affected area, and localize the abnormalities. Furthermore, the blockchain approach supports the decentralization of the central repository so that it is accessible to every stakeholder. The model proposed in this study describes the four-layered architecture. The purpose of the proposed architecture is to utilize the latest technologies to provide a reliable solution during the pandemic; the proposed architecture was sufficient to cover all the current issues, including data security. The layers are unique and individually responsible for handling steps required for data acquisition, storage, analysis, and reporting using blockchain principles in a decentralized P2P network. A systematic review of the technologies to use in the pandemic covers all possible solutions that can cover the issue best and provide a secure solution to the pandemic.

Proposing a Zero Trust and Blockchain Approach to Tackle Software Supply Chain Attacks

Proposing a Zero Trust and Blockchain Approach to Tackle Software Supply Chain Attacks

Designing A Blockchain Approach to Secure Firefighting Stations Based Internet of Things

Designing A Blockchain Approach to Secure Firefighting Stations Based Internet of Things

Feasibility Analysis for Sybil Attacks in Shard-Based Permissionless Blockchains

Committee-based permissionless blockchain approaches overcome single leader consensus protocols’ scalability issues by partitioning the outstanding transaction set into shards and selecting multiple committees to process these transactions in parallel. However, by design, shard-based blockchain solutions are vulnerable to Sybil attacks. An adversary with enough computational/hash power can easily manipulate the consensus protocol by generating multiple valid node identifiers/IDs (i.e., multiple Sybil committee members).Despite the straightforward nature of these attacks, they have not been systematically investigated. This article fills this research gap by analyzing Sybil attacks in shard-based consensus of proof-of-work blockchain systems. Specifically, we provide a detailed analysis for Elastico, one of the prominent shard-based blockchain models. We show that the proof-of-work technique used for ID generation in the initial phase of such protocols is vulnerable to Sybil attacks when an adversary (could be a group of colluding nodes) possesses enough hash power. We analytically derive conditions for two different Sybil attacks and perform numerical simulations to validate our theoretical results under various parameters. Further, we utilize the BlockSim simulator to validate our mathematical computation, and results confirm the correctness of the analysis.

Cooperative management of an emission trading system: a private governance and learned auction for a blockchain approach

Although blockchain technology has received a significant amount of cutting-edge research on constructing a novel carbon trade market in theory, there is little research on using blockchain in carbon emission trading schemes (ETS). This study intends to address existing gaps in the literature by creating and simulating an ETS system based on blockchain technology. Using the ciphertext-policy attributed-based encryption algorithm and the Fabric network to build a platform may optimize the amount of data available while maintaining privacy security. Considering the augmentation of information interaction during the auction process brought about by blockchain, the learning behavior of bidding firms is introduced to investigate the impact of blockchain on ETS auction. In particular, implementing smart contracts can provide a swift and automatic settlement. The simulation results of the proposed system demonstrate the following: (1) fine-grained access is possible with a second delay; (2) the average annual compliance levels increase by 2% when bidders’ learning behavior is considered; and (3) the blockchain network can process more than 350 reading operations or 7 writing operations in a second.

MQTT and blockchain sharding: An approach to user-controlled data access with improved security and efficiency

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has raised security concerns, including MQTT protocol-based applications that lack built-in security features and rely on resource-intensive Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. This paper presents an approach that utilizes blockchain technology to enhance the security of MQTT communication while maintaining efficiency. This approach involves using blockchain sharding, which enables higher scalability, improved performance, and reduced computational overhead compared to traditional blockchain approaches, making it well-suited for resource-constrained IoT environments. This approach leverages Ethereum blockchain's smart contract mechanism to ensure trust, accountability, and user privacy. Specifically, we introduce a shard-based consensus mechanism that enables improved security while minimizing computational overhead. We also provide a user-controlled and secured algorithm using Proof-of-Access implementation to decentralize user access control to data stored in the blockchain network. The proposed approach is analyzed for usability, including metrics such as bandwidth consumption, CPU usage, memory usage, delay, access time, storage time, and jitter, which are essential for IoT application requirements. The analysis demonstrated that the approach reduces resource consumption, and the proposed system outperforms TLS and existing blockchain approaches in these metrics, regardless of the choice of the MQTT broker. Additionally, thoroughly addressing future research directions, including issues and challenges, ensures careful consideration of potential advancements in this domain.

Machine learning and blockchain technologies for cybersecurity in connected vehicles

AbstractFuture connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) must be secured against cyberattacks for their everyday functions on the road so that safety of passengers and vehicles can be ensured. This article presents a holistic review of cybersecurity attacks on sensors and threats regarding multi‐modal sensor fusion. A comprehensive review of cyberattacks on intra‐vehicle and inter‐vehicle communications is presented afterward. Besides the analysis of conventional cybersecurity threats and countermeasures for CAV systems, a detailed review of modern machine learning, federated learning, and blockchain approach is also conducted to safeguard CAVs. Machine learning and data mining‐aided intrusion detection systems and other countermeasures dealing with these challenges are elaborated at the end of the related section. In the last section, research challenges and future directions are identified.This article is categorized under: Commercial, Legal, and Ethical Issues > Security and Privacy Technologies > Machine Learning Technologies > Internet of Things

Video Blockchain: A Decentralized Approach for Secure and Sustainable Networks with Distributed Video Footage from Vehicle-Mounted Cameras in Smart Cities

In this paper, we explore video blockchain for establishing connectivity among vehicles in a smart city through utilizing blockchain technology. By leveraging intelligent vehicular systems that provide location-based visualization through multiple deployed cameras in vehicles, we expand the scope of collecting video surveillance data for observation, thereby enhancing overall situational awareness. We utilize the decentralized nature of blockchain to implement a vehicle-based surveillance system across a smart city. To ensure reliability, the integration of two cryptographic functions, hashing and signing, with the blockchain is employed. This integration ensures secure and tamper-proof solutions for the existing intelligent surveillance system. In this paper, our primary focus is on combining blockchain technology to achieve sustainable and robust smart solutions for intelligent vehicular distributed video networks while eliminating the need for third-party intermediaries. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed video blockchain approach. The results indicate that this innovative framework provides enhanced security, privacy, and scalability for intelligent vehicular distributed networks in smart cities, paving the way for a connected and efficient urban environment.

A Blockchain Approach for Migrating a Cyber-Physical Water Monitoring Solution to a Decentralized Architecture

Water is one of the most important resources in our lives, and because of this, the interest in water management systems is growing constantly. A primary concern regarding urban water distribution is how to build robust solutions to facilitate water monitoring flows with the support of consumer involvement. Crowdsensing solutions contribute to the involvement in social platforms for increased awareness about the importance of water resources based on incentives and rewards. Blockchain is one of the technologies that has become increasingly popular in the last few years. The possibility of using this architecture in such different sectors while integrating emerging concepts, such as crowdsensing, the Internet of Things, serious gaming, and decision support systems, offers a lot of alternatives and approaches for designing modern applications. This paper aims to present how these technologies can be combined in order to migrate the functionalities of a water distribution management system from a centralized architecture to a decentralized one by leveraging blockchain technologies. The proposed application was designed to facilitate incident reporting flows in public water distribution networks. The proposed solution was to migrate the rewarding mechanisms using the Ethereum infrastructure. The novelty of this solution is determined by the introduction of this decentralized approach into the architecture and also by increasing customer interest by offering tradeable rewards and dynamic subscription discounts. This results in a new decentralized architecture that allows for more transparent interactions between the water provider and clients and increases customer engagement to contribute to water reporting flows.

Fundamental theory on multiple energy resources and related case studies

Herein, I methodically optimize a distributed energy resource in terms of the production, management, utilization, and/or transaction of renewable energies during the deployment process. I deliver a theoretical mathematical model that allows users to visualize three critical output functions of their energy preference, including output power, energy economy, and carbon footprint. The model delivers three eigenstates derived by a power utility matrix (PUM) model. PUM transforms three-input parameters (3i) into three-output functions (3o) through 3i3o-transformation. It is ubiquitous, and its systematic characterization is discussed. Moreover, I discover a mathematical conversion relationship translating energy generation to carbon emissions. Various case-studies demonstrate the optimal energy resource utilization. Furthermore, an energy blockchain approach is employed for microgrid design, development, and carbon reduction. Finally, the authors demonstrate the energy–matter conversion relationship that improves carbon emissions for energy production, reducing the beta factor of carbon emissions to 0.22 kg/kilowatt hour for carbon peak and to zero for carbon neutrality.

KYC Verification Using Blockchain Approach

Abstract: Know Your Customer (KYC) verification is a critical process for businesses to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and mitigate the risks of financial crimes such as money laundering and identity theft. Traditional KYC processes often involve cumbersome paperwork, lengthy procedures, and privacy concerns. However, the emergence of blockchain technology offers a promising solution to enhance the efficiency, transparency, and security of the KYC verification process. This abstract presents an overview of a blockchain-based approach to KYC verification. By leveraging the decentralized nature of blockchain, this approach enables the secure sharing and verification of customer identity information across multiple organizations without compromising data privacy. The use of cryptographic techniques ensures the integrity and immutability of customer data, while smart contracts automate and streamline the KYC process, reducing manual effort and associated costs

Enabling Efficient Deduplication and Secure Decentralized Public Auditing for Cloud Storage: A Redactable Blockchain Approach

Public auditing and data deduplication are integral considerations in providing efficient and secure cloud storage services. Nevertheless, the traditional data deduplication models that support public auditing can endure the enormous waste of storage and computation resources induced through data redundancy and repeated audit work by multiple tenants on trusted third-party auditor (TPA). In this work, we introduce blockchain-based secure decentralized public auditing in a decentralized cloud storage with an efficient deduplication model. We employ blockchain to take on the task of centralized TPA, which also mitigates the implications of malicious blockchain miners by using the concept of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Specifically, we employ the idea of redactability for blockchain to handle often neglected security issues that would adversely affect the integrity of stored auditing records on blockchain in decentralized auditing models. However, the proposed model also employs an efficient deduplication scheme to attain adequate storage savings while preserving the users from data loss due to duplicate faking attacks. Moreover, the detailed concrete security analysis demonstrates the computational infeasibility of the proposed model against proof-of-ownership, duplicate faking attack (DFA), collusion attack, storage free-riding attack, data privacy, and forgery attack with high efficiency. Finally, the comprehensive performance analysis shows the scalability and feasibility of the proposed model.

A novel blockchain architecture with mutable block and immutable transactions for enhanced scalability

Blockchain is a distributed ledger based technology that stores and processes data without a central point of control. The growing number of blockchain-based transactions has increased the demands for scalability and storage solutions. To address these challenges, we introduce a new modified blockchain approach called mutable block with immutable transaction (MBIT), which quantifies unspent coins by storing user-specific transactions in a block using a trapdoor cryptographic hash function. New transactions are added to the user-specific block without altering the existing transactions, which guarantees transaction immutability, consistency, and security. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with current models, the MBIT blockchain model reduces both verification and confirmation times. Additionally, we analyzed the storage overhead of a node and wallet import time of the proposed model.

GDPR compliance verification through a user-centric blockchain approach in multi-cloud environment

With cloud-hosted web applications becoming ubiquitous, the security risks presented for user personal data that is migrated to the cloud are at an all-time high. When using a cloud-hosted web application, users only ever interact with web interfaces of the web applications and are usually completely unaware of how their data is distributed amongst the multiple cloud service providers that the web application uses, making it difficult to verify the lawful use and ownership of personal data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seeks to empower users to gain better control over their personal data. Blockchain-based approaches have risen in popularity over the recent years to tackle the challenge of verifying GDPR compliance in multi-cloud environments. By deploying smart contracts on the blockchain, we can create transparent and immutable logs of data processes in the hopes of automating GDPR compliance verification. However, the existing works are still limited to provide a user-centric compliance verification. To this end, we propose a user-centric, blockchain-based framework for data management in a cloud environment where all GDPR-relevant data operations take place on the blockchain through well-defined smart contracts.

State-of-the-Art Research in Blockchain of Things for HealthCare.

Existing blockchain approaches exhibit a diverse set of dimensions, and on the other hand, IoT-based health care applications manifest a wide variety of requirements. The state-of-the-art analysis of blockchain concerning existing IoT-based approaches for the healthcare domain has been investigated to a limited extend. The purpose of this survey paper is to analyze current state-of-the-art blockchain work in several IoT disciplines, with a focus on the health sector. This study also attempts to demonstrate the prospective use of blockchain in healthcare, as well as the obstacles and future paths of blockchain development. Furthermore, the fundamentals of blockchain have been thoroughly explained to appeal to a diverse audience. On the contrary, we analyzed state-of-the-art studies from several IoT disciplines for eHealth, and also the study deficit but also the obstacles when considering blockchain to IoT, which are highlighted and explored in the paper with suggested alternatives.

Artificial intelligence and blockchain technology for secure smart grid and power distribution Automation: A State-of-the-Art Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated with Blockchain distributed ledger technology (BDLT) has become the most attractive research area in the domain of renewable energy and related power automations. However, the increased use of renewable energy-enabled devices raised various challenging problems, such as smart grid-based control management, power distribution, and automations. In this manner, the collaborative approach of blockchain, AI, and wireless sensor networks (WSN) provides a secure platform for control centers to estimate state, which helps to detect and analysis of bad data movement. There are various emerging issues in the field of Blockchain-AI in a renewable environment that poses a serious impact on the technological evaluation, for example, monitoring of contingency, optimal power flow, network reconfiguration, and the commitment of security-constrained units, and control auto-generation. So, in this paper, we perform a systematic review of the state-of-the-art integrated artificial intelligence and blockchain-enabled scheduling, management, optimization, privacy, and security of the smart grid and power distribution automation. One of the focusing aspects of this research is the real-time analysis of the physical layer of the smart grid. However, in this paper, we design a framework of a unified and abstracted state-space, in which the system analysis involves malicious attacks and maintain an effective generalized defense hierarchy in real-time. The current mechanism of analysis of smart grid-enabled physical layer-based malicious attacks is categorized into their associative and targeted components. Thus, we present three different pseudo-smart contracts and digital signatures with consensus policies; that provide an understanding of the new registry of renewable smart grids details, participating stakeholders and their roles, and an updated power distribution automation ledger. We then highlighted the list of emerging power distribution automation-related limitations along with the informational management approaches that present the existing state-of-the-art in this domain, including data-driven, target defense, computation, preservation, etc. Finally, we discuss open research issues and future directions of the smart grid and automation of power distribution security and privacy.

User privacy prevention model using supervised federated learning‐based block chain approach for internet of Medical Things

AbstractThis research focuses on addressing the privacy issues in healthcare advancement monitoring with the rapid establishment of the decentralised communication system in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). An integrated blockchain homomorphic encryption standard with an in‐build supervised learning‐based smart contract is designed to improvise personal data prevention. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has advanced in healthcare with the rapid establishment of decentralised communication systems. Distributed ledgers have resource constraints to leverage public, private, and hybrid blockchain transactions to facilitate heterogeneous operations. The authors propose a supervised learning strategy in healthcare to mitigate learning health‐related issues, improvise clinical monitoring, and ensure secure communication. The proposed approach handles the vast IoMT data by adopting blockchain for IoMT as (BIoMT) to preserve sensitive clinical information. It incorporates hybrid encryption techniques to improve patient and health records' privacy protection. BIoMT also maintains secured and sustainable supply chain management with a highly confidential decentralised framework using blockchain‐based smart contracts, which minimises data loss. Moreover, a framework is designed with a hybrid hashing that integrates a homomorphically encrypted algorithm to support a smart contract for decentralised applicability. The BIoMT approach is tested and compared with the relevant prevention mechanisms. The evaluation shows that the effects observed from the result analysis noted that the proposed method outperforms reliable prevention mechanisms compared to the existing approaches.

Platforms, blockchains and the challenges of decentralization

Abstract This commentary explores the feasibility of blockchain technologies (and cryptocurrencies) in contesting the power of centralized, corporate platforms. While proponents of blockchain and cryptocurrencies regularly proclaim their power to decentralize and counter corporate power, I am much more constrained in my assessment and note the significant challenges facing open blockchain approaches in competing with platforms. From this, I highlight three key areas in which blockchains may complicate platform operations, albeit in indeterminate ways. These include (i) closed, state-based blockchain systems focused on making back-office processes more efficient, (ii) the use of cryptocurrencies for platform-based transactions and (iii) providing digital objects with an element of “uniqueness” that makes them tradable in new ways. In the end, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are technologies like any others, providing affordances for some kinds of action over others but ultimately their embeddedness in practice and space shapes how they impact the organization and geography of economies, societies and regions.

A Hybrid Entropy and Blockchain Approach for Network Security Defense in SDN-Based IIoT

A Hybrid Entropy and Blockchain Approach for Network Security Defense in SDN-Based IIoT