Blockchain Paradigm Research Articles

The role of blockchain in auditing processes: A review and future perspectives

This review paper critically examines the transformative impact of blockchain technology on auditing processes. Through a comprehensive analysis of existing literature, it elucidates how blockchain can enhance audit quality, mitigate fraud, ensure data veracity, and navigate the complex landscape of regulatory compliance and ethical considerations. The review highlights the early stages of blockchain adoption in auditing and the evolving nature of the technology, emphasizing the need for further empirical research and case studies. It also underscores the importance of regulators, auditors, and technology experts collaborating to develop comprehensive guidelines and standards for responsible blockchain integration. The paper contributes to the academic discourse by bridging the gap between traditional auditing methodologies and the emerging blockchain paradigm, offering valuable insights for auditors, regulatory bodies, policymakers, and organizations.

Blockchain-based governance models in e-government: a comprehensive framework for legal, technical, ethical and security considerations

Purpose This study aims to evaluate blockchain as an e-government governance model. It assesses its alignment with legal frameworks, emphasizing robustness against disruptions and adherence to existing laws. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores blockchain’s potential in e-government, focusing on legal, ethical and governance aspects. It conducts an in-depth analysis of blockchain’s integration into data governance, emphasizing legal compliance and resilient security protocols. Findings The study comprehensively evaluates blockchain’s implementation, covering privacy, interoperability, consensus mechanisms, scalability and regulatory alignment. It highlights governance’s critical role in ensuring legal compliance within blockchain paradigms. Research limitations/implications Ethical and legal concerns arising from blockchain adoption remain unresolved. The study underscores how blockchain challenges its core principles of anonymity and decentralization in e-government settings. Practical implications The framework outlined offers potential for diverse technological environments, albeit raising ethical and legal queries. It emphasizes governance’s pivotal role in achieving legal compliance in blockchain adoption. Social implications Blockchain’s impact on legal and ethical facets necessitates further exploration to align with its core principles while addressing governance in e-government settings. Originality/value This study presents a robust framework for assessing blockchain’s viability in e-government, emphasizing legal compliance, despite ethical and legal intricacies that challenge its fundamental principles.

Exploring the Digital Transformation of Enterprise Finance Based on the Finance Sharing Model

Abstract Blockchain is one of the key technologies for the digital transformation of corporate finance because it satisfies the requirements of enterprise financial sharing with its features of contract execution, openness and transparency, decentralized distributed ledger, traceability, and non-tampering. In order to support business digital transformation under the financial sharing model, blockchain technology is used in this study, along with an analysis of the internal and external factors influencing enterprise financial digital transformation. In order to guarantee data security and enhance the processing efficiency of the financial sharing center, the Byzantine fault-tolerant RAFT algorithm is adopted as the private chain’s consensus algorithm, and PBFT is adopted as the federated chain’s consensus algorithm. These decisions are based on the compatible architecture of blockchain technology and the characteristics of financial sharing. The financial sharing center’s effects are assessed in relation to Enterprise A’s blockchain-based financial activity application system. According to Enterprise A’s cash flow statistics, paid employee compensation fell in 2018 from 2.943 billion to 2.864 billion. The audit and accounting industry may streamline procedures, expedite processing, lower labor and time expenses, and achieve favorable outcomes by utilizing the financial shared service model under the blockchain paradigm.

Using Trust Measures to Optimize Neighbor Selection for Smart Blockchain Networks in IoT

The blockchain paradigm is currently modifying all the major Internet of Things (IoT) application domains, giving the opportunity of constructing decentralized environments in which trustful and anonymous activities can be efficiently performed. Blockchain proposes an approach which assures data saved on a distributed ledger would be continuously synchronized and in such a way the ledger will remain consistent. The distributed ledger has the responsibility to maintain a higher level of consistency. Given a connected network, the Optimum Neighbor Selection (ONS) of paths can be obtained by finding the Minimum Spanning Tree of the network. However, none of past approaches proposed in the literature to construct ONS considered the problem of having nodes with low levels of reliability in the network and even malicious or fraudulent nodes, that is a situation very common in an IoT environment. In this paper, we propose an optimized blockchain ONS algorithm, called Trust-based ONS (TONS), which allows the miners to communicate with a globally-optimized selection of neighbors. The algorithm can also guarantee that these nodes are the most reliable miners. We also describe an experimental simulation campaign we have performed to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach.

Federated Learning and Blockchain-Enabled Intelligent Manufacturing for Sustainable Energy Production in Industry 4.0

Intelligent manufacturing under Industry 4.0 assimilates sophisticated technologies and artificial intelligence for sustainable production and outcomes. Blockchain paradigms are coined with Industry 4.0 for concurrent and well-monitored flawless production. This article introduces Sustainable Production concerned with External Demands (SP-ED). This method is more specific about energy production and the distribution for flawless and outage-less supply. First, the energy demand is identified for internal and external users based on which sustainability is planned. Secondly, Ethereum blockchain monitoring for a similar production and demand satisfaction is coupled with the production system. From two perspectives, the monitoring and condition satisfaction processes are validated using federated learning (FL). The perspectives include demand distribution and production sustainability. In the demand distribution, the condition of meeting the actual requirement is validated. Contrarily, the flaws in internal and external supply due to production are identified in sustainability. The failing conditions in both perspectives are handled using blockchain records. The blockchain records reduce flaws in the new production by modifying the production plan according to the federated learning verifications. Therefore, the sustainability for internal and external demands is met through FL and blockchain integration.

BlockEdge: A Privacy-Aware Secured Edge Computing Framework Using Blockchain for Industry 4.0

Edge computing has its application in a lot of areas now, but with the increasing popularity and benefits, it suffers from some challenges such as data privacy and security. Intruder attacks should be prevented and only authentic users should have access to data storage. Most of the authentication techniques apply some trusted entity to undergo the process. Users and servers both have to be registered in the trusted entity to get permission of authenticating other users. In this scenario, the entire system depends on a single trusted entity; so, a single point of failure can cause the failure of the total system, and scalability issues are there also. To address these issues remaining in the existing systems, in this paper, a decentralized approach has been discussed which is capable of eliminating the concept of a single trusted entity by introducing a blockchain paradigm in edge computing where every time a user or server wants to enter the system, it does not have to register itself manually, but the authentication process is carried out throughout the scheme automatically. Experimental results and performance analysis prove that the proposed architecture is definitely beneficial and it outperforms the existing ones in the concerned domain.

Reference Architecture for Blockchain-Native Distributed Information System

The blockchain paradigm and its application of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) are now enabling technologies for the worldwide development of trustworthy and decentralized solutions. DLT offers enormous potential to accommodate the intricate architectural patterns of individual Distributed Information Systems (DIS). Despite its immense potential, the current research effort is not focused on deploying DLT inside the DIS area. We identified sixteen essential DIS Architectural Properties (APs) that offer issues for DIS system architects using Grounded Theory. Then, we assessed the capabilities of the major DLT platform and highlighted its prospects and limits with regard to supporting DIS APs. Using the meta-analysis research technique, we demonstrated that DLT might serve as a development platform for a blockchain-native DIS (BN-DIS) that enables design and development processes. A BN-DIS utilizes DLT infrastructure and blockchain design principles to expand internationally, support thousands of distributed nodes, and employ DIS APs unique to the Blockchain. Lastly, we give a case study illustrating how DLT handles DIS APs in a real-world context, giving empirical proof of the DLT’s efficacy in servicing DIS APs.

A New Signature-Based Blockchain Paradigm: Foreseeable Impact on Healthcare Applications

Blockchain is a promising technology that has the potential to revolutionize the healthcare sector's conventional IT infrastructure from centralized, isolated, and small-scale systems to decentralized, distributed, and highly scalable systems, resulting in a remarkable improvement in the quality of service, thereby eliminating expensive administrative inefficiencies. One of the most important challenges of the healthcare system is to maintain consistent patient data as well as unified files amongst numerous applications and programs. So, any attack or loss of data integrity and repudiation can lead to a wide range of potentially catastrophic repercussions, including inappropriate treatment, data theft, etc. As a result, a model is required that not only allows convenient data storage, access, and retrieval but also enables a transparent and traceable environment for verifying the integrity and authenticity of patient data. The work presented in this article is an integration of digital signature and blockchain technology. Here, a digital signature technique based on Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) is used which is an efficient method to achieve non-repudiation and mitigate Sybil attack. Furthermore, the integrity of data is ensured by the underlying blockchain technology. This advancement will enable the healthcare sector to achieve scalable improvement over the present system.

A rendezvous block‐based authentication framework for service‐level security in decentralized cloud resources

AbstractCloud services are distributed from manifold sources with autonomous security procedures. The conventional authentication methods result in asynchronous security towards multi‐resource access and sharing. This provides volatile authentication for sequential service sessions. For alleviating this issue, a Rendezvous Block‐based Authentication Framework (RBAF) is proposed. This framework is backboned with a blockchain paradigm that differentiates authentication based on rendezvous and asynchronous attributes. The modifications in initial and final attributes are observed, intended for training, and supplanted with service‐dependent authentications. In the different sessions, attribute‐based authentication and agreed end‐to‐end security are administered using agreed keys that are valid within the sessions. This key generation is modified using the new session and user attributes based on learning recommendations. The ledger paradigm records the session and its associated attributes for different training instances, based on which service flexibility is ensured. The proposed framework's performance is verified using the metrics service distribution ratio, false rate, session uptime, and service delay.

A Lightweight and Attack-Proof Bidirectional Blockchain Paradigm for Internet of Things

Diverse technologies, such as machine learning and big data, have been driving the prosperity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the ubiquitous proliferation of IoT devices. Consequently, it is natural that IoT becomes the driving force to meet the increasing demand for frictionless transactions. To secure transactions in IoT, blockchain is widely deployed since it can remove the necessity of a trusted central authority. However, the mainstream blockchain-based IoT payment platforms, dominated by Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithms, face several major security and scalability challenges that result in system failures and financial loss. Among the three leading attacks in this scenario, double-spend attacks and long-range attacks threaten the tokens of blockchain users, while eclipse attacks target Denial of Service. To defeat these attacks, a novel bidirectional-linked blockchain (BLB) using chameleon hash functions is proposed, where bidirectional pointers are constructed between blocks. Furthermore, a new committee members auction (CMA) consensus algorithm is designed to improve the security and attack resistance of BLB while guaranteeing high scalability. In CMA, distributed blockchain nodes elect committee members through a verifiable random function. The smart contract uses Shamir’s secret-sharing scheme to distribute the trapdoor keys to committee members. To better investigate BLB’s resistance against double-spend attacks, an improved Nakamoto’s attack analysis is presented. In addition, a modified entropy metric is devised to measure eclipse attack resistance across different consensus algorithms. Extensive evaluation results show the superior resistance against attacks and demonstrate high scalability of BLB compared with current leading paradigms based on PoS and PoW.

BCSDN-IoT: Towards an IoT security architecture based on SDN and Blockchain

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to create a digital world where any information system can expose, discover, understand and consume data and services for analysis, diagnosis, decision support and task automation in various domains such as healthcare, transportation, energy, industry, agriculture, etc. Faced with this diversity of applications and rapid evolution, infrastructures must be able to achieve high levels of security and confidentiality while being open, sustainable, and agile to adapt to the multiple requirements of applications. To meet these needs, new paradigms are emerging. These include the Software Defined Networks (SDN) paradigm, which offers the ability to dynamically program different applications and devices to provide end-to-end service chains. In parallel, the Blockchain paradigm is increasingly used in the Internet of Things, making distributed transactions between connected objects such as financial transactions or "smart contracts" possible. Although the combination of these two paradigms (Blockchain/SDN) is a major issue for the success of the Internet of Things, paving the way for new business models and management/control of communication networks, there is not yet a specified/formalized architecture allowing the use of the "Blockchain" in SDN. In this research, a new architecture for a system combining blockchain and SDN for IoT security is proposed

Decision Making using the Blockchain Proof of Authority Consensus

As the modern world migrates towards an interconnected environment, be it financially, socially, or industrially, the need for distributed systems has become paramount. Emergent paradigms need decentralized solutions to better handle the single point of failure problem, one example is given by the Internet of Things (IoT), in which devices need to be connected to a central hub to function, or the secure decision making process. Blockchain comes with the solution that overcomes some of the shortcomings in existing systems and provides a secure alternative when designing decentralized systems. This paper proposes a decision making system based on the Proof of Authority consensus protocol enabled by the blockchain paradigm.

Proposed Business Scheme for Small and Medium Architectural Consultant Using Blockchain Paradigm (Case Study: Studio Kano)

Developments in Indonesia are growing along with the increase in population. The high demand both in architecture and construction is an excellent opportunity for architectural business. Unfortunately, the development was not supported by proper preparation of financial allocations. As a result, many projects were delayed or even stalled. Moreover, this problem has negative impacts on various parties, such as architects and contractors.
 This paper formulates a new architectural business scheme for Studio Kano as a newcomer architectural consultant who often experiences problems during the process. The majority of this problem is due to the client's financial condition and causes a difference between the results and the initial design. At first, Studio Kano needs to increase the company's productivity and minimize disruption in project development, especially from the financial issues, by analyzing the company's current business situation using two analytical approaches; Business Process Analysis and Value Proposition.
 The finding from conducted analysis determines a new architectural business scheme for Studio Kano using the Blockchain paradigm. It will underpin to maintain its design characteristics, maximize productivity, and minimize project development disruption, especially in payment issues.

Enabling Secure and Efficient Decentralized Storage Auditing With Blockchain

As a promising alternative solution to cloud storage, decentralized storage networks (DSN) are widely anticipated to develop continuously and reshape the storage market share in the foreseeable future. In particular, one of the most important research problems is how to enforce the quality of service (QoS) in the context of storage solutions. Despite plenty of auditing-related works in the context of cloud storage, none of them can be directly applied to the decentralized storage paradigm. The challenges of designing a feasible storage auditing framework emanate from two aspects: 1) security problems unique to the decentralized settings and 2) performance overhead due to on-chain operations. In this article, we first put forward a basic storage auditing framework that satisfies the security and efficiency requirements, and outperforms the existing approaches. We also identify a critical and overlooked security problem that would compromise the integrity of storage auditing solutions in the blockchain paradigm. With our refined storage auditing design based on customized zero knowledge protocols, we propose a convenient mitigation solution in our revised security model. The evaluation results confirm that our solution would only incur a 10–15 percent increase in the overall auditing costs for common usage scenarios, compared to the basic design.

IoT Data Qualification for a Logistic Chain Traceability Smart Contract.

In the logistic chain domain, the traceability of shipments in their entire delivery process from the shipper to the consignee involves many stakeholders. From the traceability data, contractual decisions may be taken such as incident detection, validation of the delivery or billing. The stakeholders require transparency in the whole process. The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the blockchain paradigms helps in the development of automated and trusted systems. In this context, ensuring the quality of the IoT data is an absolute requirement for the adoption of those technologies. In this article, we propose an approach to assess the data quality (DQ) of IoT data sources using a logistic traceability smart contract developed on top of a blockchain. We select the quality dimensions relevant to our context, namely accuracy, completeness, consistency and currentness, with a proposition of their corresponding measurement methods. We also propose a data quality model specific to the logistic chain domain and a distributed traceability architecture. The evaluation of the proposal shows the capacity of the proposed method to assess the IoT data quality and ensure the user agreement on the data qualification rules. The proposed solution opens new opportunities in the development of automated logistic traceability systems.

Lightweight Blockchain Framework using Enhanced Master-Slave Blockchain Paradigm: Fair Rewarding Mechanism using Reward Accuracy Model

Blockchains have become the prominent technology for logging records within a secured platform. However, the biggest challenge in existing blockchain technologies is unnecessary wastage of resources, such as electricity, due to network traffic and inefficient reward mechanisms during the blockchain mining process. To overcome this, we introduce a lightweight blockchain framework to reduce the cost of computationally intensive mining processes and network traffic while fairly rewarding concurrent miners. The proposed framework divides the traditional blockchain into two layers: master node(s) and slave agents (SAs). We develop mechanisms to (i) compute the reward accuracy of successful miners considering the significant factors of time taken to identify a number used only once (nonce) and their reward success rate history, (ii) ensure the reliability of new transactions with an equivalent proof of work consensus, (iii) handle SAs who identify a nonce value at the same time as other SAs while rewarding successful miners fairly, (iv) analyze the fairness of the reward accuracy model by catering to a successful miner who failed to receive a success reward to compensate for costs spent on the mining process and network traffic, and (v) reduce electricity usage and scalability problems during the integration of the blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) by subdividing the blockchain into separate shards. We find that a lower weight percentage of the time taken to identify a nonce has a more significant effect on reward accuracy than does a higher weight percentage. Further, our results show that the time taken to identify a nonce has a higher dependence on reward accuracy than on the effect of the reward success rate history. We compare our algorithm with the existing algorithms and found the same algorithm complexity O(N) in the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. We determine the break-even point to compensate for the cost of the mining process and network traffic. Consequently, we enable the possibility of compensation for a successful blockchain miner who failed to be granted a reward. This motivates miners to verify and validate new transactions before a new transaction is added to the blockchain. We also adopt an adversary model to obtain the fraction of participating master nodes and SAs that must be compromised by the adversaries to compromise our Master–Slave blockchain (MSB). In this study, we use an electronic healthcare system to illustrate how the proposed MSB works. However, our MSB could be applied in many fields, including the IoT, supply chain management, energy, and commodity transactions.

Blockchain Assisted Secure Data Sharing Model for Internet of Things Based Smart Industries

Industrial Internet of Things is focused to improve the performance of smart factories through automation and scalable functions. IoT paradigm, information and communication technology, and intelligent computing are assimilated as a single entity for industrial automation, optimization, sharing and security, and scalability. In a view of the security requirement in smart industry data sharing through IoT, this article introduces a blockchain-assisted secure data sharing (BSDS) model. This model is responsible for administering inbound and outbound security in data acquisition and dissemination. The inbound acquisition is first classified using recurrent learning to identify adverse sequences in data dissemination. In the outbound security measure, end-to-end authentication based on the blockchain information of reputation and sequence differentiation is engaged. The blockchain paradigm controls the data gathering and dissemination instances through the classification and integrity verification in both the industry and processing terminals. For this purpose, the functions of the blockchain are riven for data gathering and monitoring in the smart industry whereas integrity and sequence verification is performed by the nonmining blockchain terminal in the processing environment. The integrated security measures are capable of maximizing the response rate by confining false alarm progression, failure rate, and time delay. Statistical analysis shows that the BSDS achieves a 5.67% high response rate and reduces the failure rate by 2.14%. Further, it achieves 3.12%, maximizes response rate by 6.63%, and reduces delay by 11.91%, respectively.

A Survey of Decentralizing Applications via Blockchain: The 5G and Beyond Perspective

Trusted third parties (TTPs) are frequently used for serving as an authority to issue and verify transactions in applications. Although the TTP-based paradigm provides customers with convenience, it causes a whole set of inevitable problems such as security threats, privacy vulnerabilities, and censorship. The TTP-based paradigm is not suitable for all modern networks, e.g., 5G and beyond networks, which are been evolving to support ubiquitous, decentralized, and autonomous services. Driven by the vision of blockchain technologies, there has been a paradigm shift in applications, from TTP-based to decentralized-trust-based. Decentralized applications (DApps) with blockchains promise no trust on authorities, tackling the key challenges of security and privacy problems. A main thrust of blockchain research is to explore frameworks and paradigms for decentralizing applications, fostering a number of new designs ranging from network architectures to business models. Therefore, this paper provides a compact and concise survey on the state-of-the-art research of decentralizing applications with blockchain in the 5G and beyond perspective. We provide four burning 5G and beyond challenges and discuss five aspects of motivation for decentralizing applications with blockchain. Then, we define nine fundamental modules of blockchains and explain the potential influence of these modules on decentralization in depth. We also discuss the interrelation between decentralization and some desired blockchain properties. Particularly, we present the capabilities of blockchain for decentralizing applications through reviewing DApps for 5G and beyond. We clearly distinguish three blockchain paradigms and discuss how developers to make right choices for 5G and beyond. Finally, we highlight important learned lessons and open issues in applying blockchain for decentralizing applications. Lessons learned and open issues from this survey will facilitate the transformation of centralized applications to DApps.

An Implementation Framework for a Blockchain Based Trial Tax

Blockchain technology represents one of the most promising introductions in the technological scenario. Despite the growing interest from both the general public and the scientific community in this regard, there is a lack of strategies capable of guiding, under a technical and managerial perspective, the introduction of blockchain technology within existing business processes. Inspired by the main software engineering methodologies, which currently do not include specific techniques to coexist with blockchain paradigm, in this article, we propose an innovative blockchain implementation framework, which provides for a series of tools and strategies able to exploit the benefits arising from its integration within public administration business models while reducing related risks of introduction. In order to assess the framework operational effectiveness, we also test its application in the development of a blockchain based system allowing the conduct of telematic trial tax in order to make its execution safer, faster and cheaper.

Blockchain Paradigm for Healthcare: Performance Evaluation

Electronic health records (EHRs) have become a popular method to store and manage patients’ data in hospitals. Sharing these records makes the current healthcare data management system more accurate and cost-efficient. Currently, EHRs are stored using the client/server architecture by which each hospital retains the stewardship of the patients’ data. The records of a patient are scattered among different hospitals using heterogeneous database servers. These limitations constitute a burden towards a personalized healthcare, when it comes to offering a cohesive view and a shared, secure and private access to patients’ health history for multiple allied professionals and the patients. The data availability, privacy and security characteristics of the blockchain have a propitious future in the healthcare presenting solutions to the complexity, confidentiality, integrity, interoperability and privacy issues of the current client/server architecture-based EHR management system. This paper analyzes and compares the performance of the blockchain and the client/server paradigms. The results reveal that notable performance can be achieved using blockchain in a patient-centric approach. In addition, the immutable and valid patients’ data in the blockchain can aid allied health professionals in better prognosis and diagnosis support through machine learning and artificial intelligence.