Blockchain Design Research Articles

Blockchain Design for Securing Supply Chain Management in Coffee Retailer Network

Blockchain is a trusted distributed ledger shared across the business processes. Blockchain technology focuses on automating tasks in a distributed environment. Proving as one of the effective platforms, it helps in mapping the physical commodities to the digital ledger. A digital ledger is like an electronic register for storing the transactions that are taking place among various commodities. The physical commodities include suppliers, manufacturers, exporters, consumers and distributors wherein the distributor plays a major role in determining the product standards. To this end, this paper presents a Blockchain design for securing Supply Chain Management (SCM) in Coffee Retailer Network (CRN). The proposed design made with the view that it further be implemented with smart contracts to establish a private or consortium Blockchain application for the asset tracking processes in the coffee retailer network. The proposed model can bring transparency, sustainability and efficiency in asset tracking.

Research on Block Chain Service Composition Strategy Based on Big Data

With the proposal of China’s new infrastructure strategy, big data, artificial intelligence and 5G networks are bound to get further rapid development, and the Internet of Things, as a key component, is also getting more and more extensive attention and in-depth research. Wireless sensor network is an important part of the development of the Internet of Things, which is widely used in military, transportation, industry and daily life. Therefore, the security of wireless sensor network is particularly important. Due to the limited resources such as energy, storage and space, existing heavyweight security authentication methods are not suitable for wireless sensor networks. Based on the block chain design idea, a lightweight wireless sensor network security authentication model is proposed to solve the data security problem of wireless sensor network terminal. The model divides the sensor network into two layers: global network and local network. The local network adopts asymmetric encryption for centralized security authentication. The global network uses directed acyclic graph (DAG) and Tangle technology to construct the account books, and uses the key nodes and random walk method to verify the consistency.

Developing an Effective Graph Based Block Chain Framework

Blockchain’s decentralized characteristic is recognized as a potential technology to deliver secure and safe resources. However, the existing blockchain networks cannot fulfil the transaction given the limited bandwidth for practical application demand. In this article, the cubic design of the conventional public blockchain is strengthened with the Directed Graph Probabilistic model. In the current structure, blocks of the lightweight structure are ordered in grades and width. We develop protocols to position newly created blocks in order to make them more effective and secure. It increases confidentiality and time for authentication of transactions in contrast with standard blockchain protocols and enjoys the accuracy and liveliness of blockchain. This paper introduces two potential methods for targeting opposition parties and we also show that the procedure against them is safe and stable. Experiments will generate three hundred inputs every second that is 64 times the output of Bitcoin’s transaction. This time Bitcoin’s production will hit 27 times its Ethereum’s.

Design and actualization of Blockchain and IoT based Logistics system

Design and actualization of Blockchain and IoT based Logistics system

Design of Blockchain based e-Voting System for Vote Requirements

Voting refers to the submission of an election or an opinion on a specific matter by expressing an intention on the ballot to a certain place. The existing voting method has the burden of counting time and cost. For this reason, research has been conducted to introduce an e-voting system. However, despite the advantages of e-voting, it is not widely used due to the risk of manipulation of voting results and various requirements. Recently, in order to reduce the risk of data manipulation, research is being conducted to apply the blockchain, a technology that guarantees data integrity, to e-voting. Blockchain guarantees the integrity of data, but has a weakness in secrecy. This paper applies the critical encryption technique to the blockchain and satisfies the requirements for voting such as verifiability, anonymity, fairness, non-reusability, competence, safety, transparency, and non-ticketing. We propose a system design and implementation method. The proposed blockchain-based e-voting system provides voter anonymity by issuing a voter certificate based on a blockchain address. The e-voting election monitoring committee generates a threshold group encryption key, and the proposed blockchain-based e-voting system guarantees confidentiality by a threshold group encryption algorithm during the voting process. The voting result is encrypted through a homomorphic encryption algorithm and stored in the blockchain. Thus, the released voting results ensure safety, confidentiality, transparency, and non-vote ticketing. In addition, the proposed blockchain-based e-voting system guarantees the unity and competence of voting through the blockchain’s smart contract.

Design and Hardware Implementation of a Simplified DAG-Based Blockchain and New AES-CBC Algorithm for IoT Security

Recently, to enhance the security of the Internet of Things (IoT), research on blockchain-based encryption algorithms has been actively conducted. However, because blockchains have complex structures and process large amounts of data, there are still many difficulties in using the conventional blockchain-based encryption algorithms in an IoT system that must have low power consumption and be ultra-lightweight. In this study, to address these problems (1) we simplified the conventional Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based blockchain structure, and (2) we proposed a new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) algorithm with enhanced security by periodically changing the secret key and initialization vector (IV) in the conventional AES-CBC encryption algorithm. Because the DAG, which is the conventional blockchain structure, randomly transmits data to multiple blocks, there may be overlapping blocks, and the quantity of transmitted data is not limited; thus, the time and power consumption for encryption and decryption increase. In this study, a simplified DAG was designed to address these problems so that packets can be transmitted only to three blocks, without overlapping. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed in this paper, an IoT system consisting of 10 clients and one server was implemented in hardware, and an experiment was conducted. Through the experiment, it was confirmed that when the proposed AES-CBC algorithm was used, the time taken and the amount of power consumed for encryption and decryption were reduced by about 20% compared to the conventional AES-CBC algorithm.

Research on Application of Computer Big Data Technology in Blockchain Computing

Blockchain originated in 2009, it was the underlying “ledger” recording technology of Bitcoin. After several years of development and improvement, it has gradually become a distributed, decentralized, and trustless technical solution. In the past two years, blockchain has become a new decentralized distributed computing paradigm. We apply blockchain technology into cloud computing, using the former’s security mechanism to improve the latter’s secure storage and secure computing performance. This is a promising research topic. The paper mainly discusses the design and implementation of blockchain from a technical prospect, it summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the blockchain, and it also analyzes the possible application scenarios.

A Trusted and Privacy-Preserving Internet of Mobile Energy

The rapid growth in distributed energy sources on power grids leads to increasingly decentralised energy management systems for the prediction of power supply and demand and the dynamic setting of an energy price signal. Within this emerging smart grid paradigm, electric vehicles can serve as consumers, transporters, and providers of energy through two-way charging stations, which highlights a critical feedback loop between the movement patterns of these vehicles and the state of the energy grid. This paper proposes a vision for an Internet of Mobile Energy (IoME), where energy and information flow seamlessly across the power and transport sectors to enhance the grid stability and end user welfare. We identify the key challenges of trust, scalability, and privacy, particularly location and energy linking privacy for EV owners, for realising the IoME vision. We propose an information architecture for IoME that uses scalable blockchain to provide energy data integrity and authenticity, and introduces one-time keys for public EV transactions and a verifiable anonymous trip extraction method for EV users to share their trip data while protecting their location privacy. We present an example scenario that details the seamless and closed loop information flow across the energy and transport sectors, along with a blockchain design and transaction vocabulary for trusted decentralised transactions. We finally discuss the open challenges presented by IoME that can unlock significant benefits to grid stability, innovation, and end user welfare.

Dividend or No Dividend in Delegated Blockchain Governance: A Game Theoretic Analysis

Delegated blockchain governance is the frontier of blockchain design issues that is to improve the scalability of blockchain networks. Delegated proof of stake (DPoS) blockchains such as EOS must select a few super nodes for transaction verification. In particular, the blockchain community has debated recently on whether dividend should be allowed when electing super nodes, which might be considered as unethical or unfair, leading to an open research topic and a new research gap that has theoretical value for both academia and industry. In this paper, we build a theoretical framework to study how dividend affects user decisions and welfare in a DPoS blockchain. Based on game theory, we propose a three-player Hotelling model with two policies to study the behaviors of voters and candidates. We first use a static game analysis to show that the benefits of dividend for voters and for candidates vary with the size of reward and there exists an interval, in which the zero dividend policy would be good for the welfare of both candidates and voters. Then, we use an evolutionary game analysis to examine the process dynamics of super node selection, we find that the campaign strategy of candidates has to do with the size of platform reward given to the candidates by the blockchain platform. Especially in the asymmetric case, we find that higher level of platform reward turns to benefit candidates with large number of votes even more. Our findings are instrumental for designing dividend policies in DPoS blockchains and can stimulate more potential research in blockchain governance.

CoinPrune: Shrinking Bitcoin’s Blockchain Retrospectively

Popular cryptocurrencies continue to face serious scalability issues due to their ever-growing blockchains. Thus, modern blockchain designs began to prune old blocks and rely on recent snapshots for their bootstrapping processes instead. Unfortunately, established systems are often considered incapable of adopting these improvements. In this work, we present CoinPrune, our block-pruning scheme with full Bitcoin compatibility, to revise this popular belief. CoinPrune bootstraps joining nodes via snapshots that are periodically created from Bitcoin's set of unspent transaction outputs (UTXO set). Our scheme establishes trust in these snapshots by relying on CoinPrune-supporting miners to mutually reaffirm a snapshot's correctness on the blockchain. This way, snapshots remain trustworthy even if adversaries attempt to tamper with them. Our scheme maintains its retrospective deployability by relying on positive feedback only, i.e., blocks containing invalid reaffirmations are not rejected, but invalid reaffirmations are outpaced by the benign ones created by an honest majority among CoinPrune-supporting miners. Already today, CoinPrune reduces the storage requirements for Bitcoin nodes by two orders of magnitude, as joining nodes need to fetch and process only 6 GiB instead of 271 GiB of data in our evaluation, reducing the synchronization time of powerful devices from currently 7 h to 51 min, with even larger potential drops for less powerful devices. CoinPrune is further aware of higher-level application data, i.e., it conserves otherwise pruned application data and allows nodes to obfuscate objectionable and potentially illegal blockchain content from their UTXO set and the snapshots they distribute.

Secure and Privacy-Aware Blockchain Design: Requirements, Challenges and Solutions

During the last decade, distributed ledger solutions such as blockchain have gained significant attention due to their decentralized, immutable, and verifiable features. However, the public availability of data stored on the blockchain and its link to users may raise privacy and security issues. In some cases, addressing these issues requires blockchain data to be secured with mechanisms that allow on-demand (as opposed to full) disclosure. In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of blockchain privacy and security requirements, and detail how existing mechanisms answer them. We provide a taxonomy of current attacks together with related countermeasures. We present a thorough comparative analysis based on various parameters of state-of the-art privacy and security mechanisms, we provide recommendations to design secure and privacy-aware blockchain, and we suggest guidelines for future research.

Cryptocurrency Solutions to Enable Micropayments in Consumer IoT

The successful amalgamation of cryptocurrency and consumer Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices can pave the way for novel applications in machine-to-machine economy. However, the lack of scalability and heavy resource requirements of initial blockchain designs hinder the integration, and it is unclear how consumer devices will be adopting cryptocurrency. Therefore, in this article, we critically review the existing integration approaches and cryptocurrency designs that strive to enable micropayments among consumer devices. We identify and discuss solutions under three main categories; direct integration, payment channel network, and new cryptocurrency design. The first approach utilizes a full node to interact with the payment system. Offline channel payment is suggested as a second-layer solution to solve the scalability issue and enable instant payment with low fee. New designs converge to semicentralized scheme and focus on lightweight consensus protocol that does not require high computation power. We evaluate the pros and cons of each of these approaches and then point out future research challenges. Our goal is to help researchers and practitioners to better focus their efforts to facilitate micropayment adoptions.

A Novel Classified Ledger Framework for Data Flow Protection in AIoT Networks

The edge computing node plays an important role in the evolution of the artificial intelligence-empowered Internet of things (AIoTs) that converge sensing, communication, and computing to enhance wireless ubiquitous connectivity, data acquisition, and analysis capabilities. With full connectivity, the issue of data security in the new cloud-edge-terminal network hierarchy of AIoTs comes to the fore, for which blockchain technology is considered as a potential solution. Nevertheless, existing schemes cannot be applied to the resource-constrained and heterogeneous IoTs. In this paper, we consider the blockchain design for the AIoTs and propose a novel classified ledger framework based on lightweight blockchain (CLF-LB) that separates and stores data rights at the source and enables a thorough data flow protection in the open and heterogeneous network environment of AIoT. In particular, CLF-LB divides the network into five functional layers for optimal adaptation to AIoTs applications, wherein an intelligent collaboration mechanism is also proposed to enhance the across-layer operation. Unlike traditional full-function blockchain models, our framework includes novel technical modules, such as block regenesis, iterative reinforcement of proof-of-work, and efficient chain uploading via the system-on-chip system, which are carefully designed to fit the cloud-edge-terminal hierarchy in AIoTs networks. Comprehensive experimental results are provided to validate the advantages of the proposed CLF-LB, showing its potentials to address the secrecy issues of data storage and sharing in AIoTs networks.

A decision support system for the uses of lightweight blockchain designs for P2P computing

Peer-to-peer networking is a disseminated architecture application which partition the workload among peers. The peers are distributed with equal privileges pertaining the equipotent application. The peers are making portion of their resources including disk storage, processing power, bandwidth, which is in a straight line available to the participants of the network deprived of central management by host. The decision support system in the design of peer-to-peer computing based on lightweight blockchain plays an important role for the smooth activities of the peer-to-peer computing. Early decision making in peer-to-peer computing for the lightweight blockchain can save time, cost, bandwidth, effort, and other resources. A flawless system is the dire need for enhancing the computation efficiency of the peer-to-peer computing. The aim of the proposed research is to offer a decision support system for the uses of lightweight blockchain design for peer-to-peer computing. The SuperDecisions tool was used to plot the hierarchy of situations of the uses of blockchain for the design of peer-to-peer computing. The system enhance the early decision making for the uses of lightweight blockchiarn for effective peer-to-peer computing. The results of the proposed study elaborates the significant use of lightweight blockchain against peer-to-peer computing.

PolyShard: Coded Sharding Achieves Linearly Scaling Efficiency and Security Simultaneously

Today's blockchain designs suffer from a trilemma claiming that no blockchain system can simultaneously achieve decentralization, security, and performance scalability. For current blockchain systems, as more nodes join the network, the efficiency of the system (computation, communication, and storage) stays constant at best. A leading idea for enabling blockchains to scale efficiency is the notion of sharding: different subsets of nodes handle different portions of the blockchain, thereby reducing the load for each individual node. However, existing sharding proposals achieve efficiency scaling by compromising on trust - corrupting the nodes in a given shard will lead to the permanent loss of the corresponding portion of data. In this paper, we settle the trilemma by demonstrating a new protocol for coded storage and computation in blockchains. In particular, we propose PolyShard: “polynomially coded sharding” scheme that achieves information-theoretic upper bounds on the efficiency of the storage, system throughput, as well as on trust, thus enabling a truly scalable system. We provide simulation results that numerically demonstrate the performance improvement over state of the arts, and the scalability of the PolyShard system. Finally, we discuss potential enhancements, and highlight practical considerations in building such a system.

Cooperation Mechanism in Blockchain by Evolutionary Game Theory

In the blockchain network, to get rewards in the blockchain, blockchain participants pay for various forms of competition such as computing power, stakes, and other resources. Because of the need to pay a certain cost, individual participants cooperate to maintain the long‐term stability of the blockchain jointly. In the course of such competition, the game between each other has appeared invisibly. To better understand the blockchain design of cooperation mechanisms, in this paper, we constructed a game framework between participants with different willingness, using evolutionary game theory, and complex network games. We analyzed how the behavior of participants potentially develops with cost and payoff. We consider the expected benefits of participants for the normal growth of the blockchain as the major factor. Considering the behavior of malicious betrayers, the blockchain needs to be maintained in the early stage. Numerical simulation supports our analysis.

Hybrid Blockchain Design to Improve the Security of Education Administration Information System

Hybrid Blockchain Design to Improve the Security of Education Administration Information System

A comprehensive study of blockchain technology and its uses

Large data management is a major worry issue for academics in today's digital era. Several applications, such as big data, data analysis, image processing, and data mining, require large-scale data processing. The Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that securely saves data across many systems to allow peer-to-peer transactions by establishing a trustworthy source of truth and eliminating the need for so-called trust intermediaries. A blockchain is a method for creating distinct kinds of distributed databases made up of immutable blocks of data, each with a list of transactions and a peerless reference to the block before it. Blockchain-based applications are surfacing in a variety of areas, including reputation management, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and financial services, among others. This method uses a shared, distributed ledger to make recording transactions and monitoring assets in a corporate network simpler. We wanted to provide a close-up perspective of Blockchain technology in this paper. We also go through the basics of Blockchain design, how various Block chains vary, and how Blockchain operates. We believe that, given its rapid growth and development, Blockchain will soon become a very widespread and well-known phenomena.

Blockchain technology in supply chain management: insights from machine learning algorithms

Purpose This paper aims to retrieve key components of blockchain applications in supply chain areas. It applies natural language processing methods to generate useful insights from academic literature. Design/methodology/approach It first applies a text mining method to retrieve information from scientific journal papers on the related topics. The text information is then analyzed through machine learning (ML) models to identify the important implications from the existing literature. Findings The research findings are three-fold. While challenges are of concern, the focus should be given to the design and implementation of blockchain in the supply chain field. Integration with internet of things is considered to be of higher importance. Blockchain plays a crucial role in food sustainability. Research limitations/implications The research findings offer insights for both policymakers and business managers on blockchain implementation in the supply chain. Practical implications This paper exemplifies the model as situated in the interface of human-based and machine-learned analysis, potentially offering an interesting and relevant avenue for blockchain and supply chain management researchers. Originality/value To the best of the knowledge, the research is the very first attempt to apply ML algorithms to analyzing the full contents of blockchain-related research, in the supply chain sector, thereby providing new insights and complementing existing literature.

In Blockchain We Trust: Does Blockchain Itself Generate Trust?

ObjectivesThis study considers the affordance of users' perceived technological property of blockchains and investigates how users discover the possible actions that can be performed within blockchain media. With a focus on the role of trust, it analyzes how motivational affordances in blockchain media influence user experienceMethodsQualitative methods are used to obtain the depth of understanding and elicit the perspective of blockchain media. We then conduct a survey to analyze the affordance of trust in the acceptance of blockchain mediaResultsOur confirmed model indicates a heuristic dimension of trust regarding underlying ties to affective and technological affordances. These findings imply that cognitive heuristics affect users' decision making about privacy and security on blockchain media. These heuristics lead users to engage in uncertain and even risky transactions in blockchain media.ConclusionsDespite the exponential growth in blockchain development, there has been little attention paid on how technological innovations of blockchains can produce value in the media sector. Our findings provide a lens to understand the blockchain's usability problems by pairing heuristics to blockchain design and user experience principles.