Permissioned Blockchain Network Research Articles

FARMER TO CONSUMER – AN ONLINE SUPPLY CHAIN PROCESS SYSTEM USING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Globally, the mango industry is one of the largest industrial sectors – also considered the backbone industry of the country’s agriculture sector. This sector mobilizes key industrial activities of many economies, such as agriculture, production, handling, storage, logistics, certification, and packing of a variety of mangoes (e.g., with over 1,500 varieties, of which at least 30 are grown commercially in Pakistan). From local, regional, and national, to international levels, many businesses in this sector are involved in extensive mango supply networks fulfilling the demands of many consumers and markets (e.g., B2B, B2C, etc.) locally worldwide. Currently, 43% of total farmers in Pakistan are smallholder farmers, as they possess less than 2.6 hectares of land. Intermediaries dominate the entire supply chain in Pakistan, due to which small to average farmers face several challenges. This can be avoided by developing a user-friendly system to link farmers directly to the market or consumers. The proposed system identifies the gaps in the process model of Pakistan’s mango supply chain system. It creates a platform to link farmers directly to the market or consumers through a seamless online system using blockchain technology for performing reliable transactions using smart contracts. The proposed system is implemented through Ethereum, a permissioned blockchain network using Smart Contracts. It is a distributed ledger accessible to participants of the supply chain with permission to ensure the trust and authenticity of the information. By using this system, the farmers will attain increased profit through direct access to retailers, consumers, and the international market.

Insurechain : Empowering You with Block Chain Insurance

The integration of blockchain technology into health insurance represents a transformation towards a secure, efficient, and patient-centered system. This content introduces a novel approach to insurance by utilizing blockchain data distribution, smart contracts, and privacy measures. The primary objective is to enhance application efficiency while safeguarding health information. The system operates on a permissioned blockchain network and employs smart contracts to enforce rules and ensure the verification process. The decentralized nature of blockchain guarantees data integrity, fraud prevention, and preserves patient privacy through encryption technology. Collaboration is facilitated through information systems that enable effective communication among stakeholders. Proof of concept demonstrates superior data security, accelerated data processing, and increased patient control over medical data. These findings underscore the immense potential of blockchain to revolutionize health insurance in alignment with the global trend towards digital transformation and patient empowerment.

Automated calibration and DCC generation system with storage in private permissioned Blockchain network

Digital technologies proven their usefulness in instrumentation and measurements since many years, becoming a “must have”. The use of microprocessors and microcontrollers in measuring instruments became a common practice, bringing the advantage of signal and information processing at the instrument level, digital interfaces, remote control, software update and calibration. Thus, the instrument can be calibrated and verified being connected in an automated calibration system which can carry all the process without the operator interference and to generate in the end the calibration certificate. The paper presents the possibility of joining the automated calibration system and creation of a Digital Calibration Certificate (DCC) with the Blockchain technology for storing and validation. As benefits there are the traceability of the DCC, the impossibility of altering the information and the preservation of the full history in the digital walle

A lower approximation based integrated decision analysis framework for a blockchain-based supply chain

Organizations and their supply chains generate vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, popularly known as Big Data. This paper proposes a framework in the prescriptive analytics category of big data analytics (BDA) and is especially relevant for organizations on a permissioned blockchain network. The framework integrates the concepts of Artificial intelligence (Case-based reasoning, Interval-valued rough fuzzy set theory, and Value closeness relation algorithm) and blockchain to help decision-makers make accountable and conformable decisions. The framework comprises five stages - the first three stages generate the decisions, while the last two stages enable validation and communication of decisions. Its application is demonstrated on an organizational dataset with 20 supply chain KPIs. The numerical example shows how the organization's business strategy can translate to framework parameters resulting in varying outputs. The proposed framework is compared with the rough set approach through sensitivity analysis, highlighting the differences. The concept of L-Graphs is proposed to facilitate the visual display of prescribing decisions, which can help decision-makers make optimal decision choices. The framework has several unique features: (i) it is one of the first decision-making frameworks proposed for a blockchain-based supply chain that can be a part of the BDA toolbox of an organization; (ii) it uses concepts of artificial intelligence; (iii) the optimal decisions are proposed based on analysis of multicriteria; (iv) it uses multiple approaches to validate the decision rules on blockchain.

Design of Proof-of-Stake PBFT Algorithm for IoT Environments

Blockchain ledgers are being increasingly used in Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) applications. However, Proof of Work consensus is unsuitable in an IoV setting, which is why other paradigms need to be investigated. In this work we integrate Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus technique with multiple entry Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance voting in a permissioned blockchain network. We introduce several PoS classes based on combination of initial stake and truthfulness of voting. We also describe a differentiated medium access approach similar to Enhanced Distribution Function (EDCA). Using a Semi Markov Process-based model, we derive the probability of reaching consensus and highlight the impact of the populations of individual stake/priority classes on achieving consensus. Our results show the impact of numbers of nodes from classes with different voting behavior on consensus probability. Results also show differentiation through the number of blocks linked per second, success probability in leadership application and delay in leader selection for node belonging to certain class. These values show how much revenue a node from given class can collect from its clients depending on initial stake and voting behavior.

Towards the Development of a Blockchain System for Philippine Government Processes for Enhanced Transparency and Verifiability

There are cases of corruption and fraud within the Philippine government that have gone under the radar, often due to a lack of transparency and verifiability. The objective of this study is to prototype a blockchain network that can run a government process as a decentralized application such that it can enhance transparency and verifiability in the public sector. This can be accomplished by identifying a government process that would be converted into a decentralized application. One of these processes would be converted into a decentralized application. Afterwards, a blockchain framework should be identified — one which can create a public permissioned blockchain network. This framework can be used to design and implement the prototype blockchain network which the decentralized application can run on. The final prototype constitutes of smart contracts deployed on an Ethereum test network with a web frontend to easily interact with it. Mechanisms of the application that are deemed necessary to transparency and verifiability of the system are also identified. Finally, the variable cost of the system and possible limitation is explored in the paper. In this regard, the prototype offers a foundation with which other decentralized applications can follow and build upon. This is to promote transparency and verifiability within and among government processes.

On Designs of Decentralized Reputation Management for Permissioned Blockchain Networks

On Designs of Decentralized Reputation Management for Permissioned Blockchain Networks

Implementing a multichain framework using hyperledger for supply chain transparency in a dynamic partnership: A feasibility study

As an emerging technology, blockchain is appealing because it ensures authenticity and legitimacy of business activities, improves traceability of products, and enhances supply chain transparency (SCT), thus strengthening trust and confidence among partners. Although academicians and practitioners agree that information sharing is imperative to improve SCT, it is unclear whether and how organizations can take advantage of blockchain technology to manage information sharing when collaborating with partners and competitors in a dynamic supply chain while maintaining privacy and confidentiality. In this study, we attempt to address this issue by building multiple assets and chains with multiple processes, facilitating data aggregation, and maintaining information confidentiality. To achieve these objectives, this study proposes a multi-asset, multichain framework and builds a permissioned blockchain network using Hyperledger Fabric. By constructing “channels” under the proposed framework, this study demonstrates that firms can share information privately and confidentially with partners and competitors in a supply chain and simultaneously improve SCT. Overall, the results obtained from the proof-of-concept analysis suggest that the proposed framework outperforms the public blockchain in terms of information sharing and SCT perspectives.

Trust-Based Permissioned Blockchain Network for Identification and Authentication of Internet of Smart Devices: An E-Commerce Prospective

The Internet of Things refers to billions of devices around us connected to the wireless internet. These IoT devices are memory-constrained devices that can collect and transfer data over the network without human assistance. Recently, IoT is materialized in retail commerce, transforming from recognition service to post-purchase engagement service. IoT examples in retail commerce are smart refrigerators, smart speakers, smart washing machines, smart automobiles, and automatic re-purchase of groceries using RFID tags. Despite the rise, one of the significant inconveniences slowing rapid adaption is the “security” of these devices, which are vulnerable to various attacks. One such attack is Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks targeting offline or online sensitive data. Hence, a lightweight cryptographic mechanism needs to establish secure communication among IoT devices. This paper presents the solution to secure communication among IoT devices using a permissioned blockchain network. Specifically, in this work, we proposed a mechanism for identifying and authenticating the smart devices using the Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) protocol. This proposed work uses permissioned blockchain infrastructure, which acts as a source of trust that aids the authentication process using ECC cryptosystem. In addition, lightweight Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) technology is also used to securely store the device’s keys. Using this technology, the private keys need not be stored anywhere, but it is generated on the fly from the trusted zone whenever the private key is required.

LBSV: Lightweight Blockchain Security Protocol for Secure Storage and Communication in SDN-Enabled IoV

The development of modern software-defined networking (SDN) solutions brings new opportunities in Internet-of-Vehicles (IoVs). However, the autonomous nature of the vehicular environment leads to unpredictable security vulnerabilities and reliability issues. The high computation overhead and storage requirements also pose a significant challenge in message dissemination. To overcome these issues, we introduce a lightweight blockchain-based security protocol for secure communication and storage in SDN-enabled IoV, known as LBSV. The LBSV is a permissioned blockchain network that uses the proposed modified practical byzantine fault tolerance (mPBFT) consensus algorithm. Additionally, the SDN-enabled network exploits the blockchain framework and schedules different procedures. The secure message dissemination is achieved through various cryptographic functions (i.e., elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and the secure hash algorithm (SHA256)). The security analysis shows that the LBSV withstands various cyberattacks regarding message dissemination privacy. The experimental results show that LBSV provides high performance with 85% less computational cost, 55% less storage and communication overhead and 90% less consensus delay compared with state-of-the-art schemes.

Towards a Blockchain-Based Peer-to-Peer Energy Marketplace

Blockchain technology is used as a distributed ledger to store and secure data and perform transactions between entities in smart grids. This paper proposes a platform based on blockchain technology and the multi-agent system paradigm to allow for the creation of an automated peer-to-peer electricity market in micro-grids. The use of a permissioned blockchain network has multiple benefits as it reduces transaction costs and enables micro-transactions. Moreover, an improvement in security is obtained, eliminating the single point of failure in the control and management of the platform along with creating the possibility to trace back the actions of the participants and a mechanism of identification. Furthermore, it provides the opportunity to create a decentralized and democratic energy market while complying with the current legislation and regulations on user privacy and data protection by incorporating Zero-Knowledge Proof protocols and ring signatures.

A Flexible Permission Ascription (FPA)-Based Blockchain Framework for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading With Performance Evaluation

With the proliferation of smart grid and deregulation of the energy market, a wide variety of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading systems have emerged. Common challenges for designing such systems include prosumers’ privacy and security threats. To this end, Blockchain-based solutions have gained a lot of attention, though most existing solutions have either employed permissionless blockchain, which is far from pragmatic for a P2P energy trading system with peers permitted to join or leave the network at their whim; or relatively secure yet inefficient permissioned blockchains. Hence, this article presents a flexible permissioned ascription (FPA) scheme that uses on-chain and off-chain permissioning scheme via <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Orion</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Metamask</i> wallet. It also employs contract permissioning through a JavaScript based chain code deployed over Hyperledger Besu (an Ethereum based permissioned Blockchain network) with istanbul byzantine fault tolerant (IBFT) 2.0 consensus algorithm. Additionally, the proposed framework is emulated for development of a working prototype for a P2P energy trading system. Its performance evaluation has been conducted and monitored with Grafana, Prometheus, Hyperledger Caliper, and Kibana for parameters such as latency, throughput, success rate, CPU time, block time, block behind time, memory usage, garbage collection (GC) time, and performance of the validator nodes. The latency of IBFT 2.0 was found five times lesser than that of Ethereum and two times lesser than HF RAFT and KAFKA under varying conditions. Also, the measured throughput was 1.5 times higher than RAFT and Kafka and three times higher than that of Ethereum. The average block confirmation time measured is 5–6 s. The GC usage measured very less, i.e., 0.5–0.8%, with the proposed framework. It has been observed that the proposed energy-trading framework provides an efficient performance for deploying, transferring, and querying the energy transaction to a P2P energy-trading Blockchain network when compared with other consensus mechanisms.

Secure and transparent pharmaceutical supply chain using permissioned blockchain network

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a secure and transparent pharmaceutical supply chain system using a permissioned blockchain network. This work focuses on (i) Enhancing the security of origin information across the supply chain with proper identification and authentication among the supplier, distributor, and other members of the system, (ii) Secure storing of the Supply Drugs Information (SDI) in the blockchain in a distributed manner, (iii) Traceability and transparent sharing of information across supply chain system. This proposed work also performs automatic transactions between suppliers and the distributors, tracking the provenance, adequate verification, and reducing supply chains’ risk. The proposed system has been implemented using Hyperledger fabric and evaluated using Hyperledger Calliper to test its performance. Finally, we analyzed the proposed work's performance in terms of throughput, transaction latency, and network load. The results have shown that better transaction processing power and security than other existing systems of the blockchain.

Efficient Onboarding and Management of Members in Permissioned Blockchain Networks Utilizing TLS Certificates

Consortia blockchain networks face the issue of expanding their systems to new members. Onboarding processes are often cumbersome, as they require identifying the new participant, manually setting up rights, exchanging key material, and adding information about the new member to the consensus smart contract. Besides that, these processes are time-consuming and scale poorly. Identifying the members might be faulty as the pre-existing members might be deceived by malicious parties claiming to be someone else. This paper proposes a novel methodology to allow the onboarding of new parties without time-intensive off-chain processes. We establish identities of new consortia members by utilizing TLS certificates bound to publicly known domain names. With this identity scheme in place, the network operators can define rules such as only specific parties are allowed to join the network, e.g., only owners of *.edu domains. This methodology scales well, provides for extensive ruling and monitoring, and helps consortia blockchains to grow faster.

Verifiable Authentication and Issuance of Academic Certificates Using Permissioned Blockchain Network

Fake certificates pose a severe problem in today's world; they vouch for an individual's false skillset and put an organization's reputation at risk. Moreover, the existing verification process is performed in a centralized manner, often too cumbersome and time-consuming to the end-user, lacking transparency in the educational institutions' Issuance of certificates. Of-late, blockchain is a promising technology that provides transparent, secure, and reliable features, which offers solutions to the education sector. This paper provides the solution to the educational certification problem by employing the blockchain network. We proposed a permissioned blockchain network that identifies, authenticates the Issuer, adequate verification, securely shares academic records to the recipients, and stores the certificate credentials in the blockchain in a distributed manner.

Privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing using blockchain

The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has caused widespread panic and global initiatives are geared towards treatment and limiting its spread. With technological advancements, several mechanisms and mobile applications have been developed that attempt to trace the physical contact made by a person with someone who has been tested COVID-19 positive. While designing these apps, user's privacy has been an afterthought and has resulted in mass violations of privacy of the public and the patients. A total of 32 countries have designed apps and rely on them as a strategy to flatten the pandemic curve. Along with lack of privacy, these methodologies are centralized, where they are fully controlled by the government and the healthcare providers. Owing to these and many other concerns, people are hesitant in the adoption of these technologies. This paper presents a detailed analysis of user tracking apps belonging to 32 countries, thus demonstrating that they collect personal data and are a gross violation of user privacy. This paper presents a novel architecture for the efficient, effective and privacy-preserving contact tracing of COVID-19 patients using blockchain. The proposed architecture preserves the privacy of individuals and their contact history by encrypting all the data specific to an individual using a privacy-preserving Homomorphic encryption scheme and storing it on a permissioned blockchain network. The contacts made with a COVID-19 positive patient are identified by performing search queries directly over the Homomorphic encrypted data stored in the blocks. Therefore, only those contacts that are suspected to be COVID-19 positive may be decrypted by the healthcare professional or government for further contact tracing/diagnosis and COVID-19 testing; thereby leading to enhanced privacy.

A privacy-preserving design for sharing demand-driven patient datasets over permissioned blockchains and P2P secure transfer.

Sharing patient datasets curated by health institutions is critical for the advance of monitoring, surveillance and research. However, patient data is sensitive data and it can only be released under certain conditions and with previous explicit consent. Privacy preserving data sharing provides techniques to distribute datasets minimizing the risk of identification of patients. However, the sharing of datasets is typically done without considering the needs or requests of data consumers. Blockchain technologies provide an opportunity to gather those requests and share and assemble datasets using privacy-preserving methods as data and requirements on anonymity match. The architecture and design of such a solution is described, assuming an underlying permissioned blockchain network where providers such as healthcare institutions deal with consent, patient preferences and anonymity guarantees, playing a mediator role to a network of organizations.

A strong smartphone authentication model to control cellular network access using blockchain

In an era that requests facilitating access to most services by providing the online platforms, the need to own a small electronic device is increasing. The smartphone is the ideal choice for most people due to its multifunctionality. On the other hand, the rate of physical crimes on these devices raised, especially theft and counterfeiting. As a solution to mitigate these crimes, stolen or counterfeit devices are prevented from connecting to the cellular network, but is this solution effective in mitigating the problem? To answer this question, this paper conducts a comprehensive survey on the current solutions tackled the smartphone theft or counterfeit issues, and it provides a taxonomy classify the current solutions into three categories: manufacturers solutions, cellular service provider solutions, and third-party solutions. The proposed smartphone authentication model for cellular network authentication utilizes the permissioned Blockchain network and consists of three protocols, which are smartphone registration protocol, ownership transfer protocol, and cellular network authentication protocol. In order to overcome the two serious physical crimes (theft and counterfeiting), the paper identifies five main requirements that must be met in any cellular network authentication approach, namely ability to detect counterfeit IMEI, ability to identify the device owner, ability to block the service on the stolen/lost devices, less processing time, and acceptable performance. The comparisons with related solutions showed that the proposed work meets all the requirements to mitigate smartphone theft and counterfeiting crimes.

Designing a Permissioned Blockchain Network for the Halal Industry using Hyperledger Fabric with multiple channels and the raft consensus mechanism

Halal Supply Chain Management requires an assurance that the entire process of procurement, distribution, handling, and processing materials, spare parts, livestock, work-in-process, or finished inventory to be well documented and performed fit to the Halal and Toyyib. Blockchain technology is one alternative solution that can improve Halal Supply Chain as it can integrate technology for information exchange during the tracking and tracing process in operating and monitoring performance. This technology could improve trust, transparency, and information disclosure between supply chain participants since it could act as a distributed ledger and entitle all transactions to be completely open, yet confidential, immutable, and secured. This study uses a Blockchain Network with three channels and uses raft consensus algorithm in designing web interfaces and testing their capabilities. From the web interface, there were no failures in the validity test during the invoke test and the query test. In addition, the web interface was also successfully tested to thwart the formation of a block in case of data input errors from the user. The server can also do the process as a provider of information and validator for the web interface. From the results of simulations conducted on the Blockchain Network that was made, Blockchain’s transaction speed is fast and all the transaction is successfully transferred to other peers. Thus, Permissioned Blockchain is useful for Halal Supply Chain not just because it can secure transactions from some of the halal issues, but the transaction speed and rate to transfer data are very effective.

A Permissioned Blockchain Network for Security and Sharing of De-identified Tuberculosis Research Data in Brazil.

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease and is among the top 10 causes of death in the world, and Brazil is part of the top 30 high TB burden countries. Data collection is an essential practice in health studies, and the adoption of electronic data capture (EDC) systems can positively increase the experience of data acquisition and analysis. Also, data-sharing capabilities are crucial to the construction of efficient and effective evidence-based decision-making tools for managerial and operational actions in TB services. Data must be held secure and traceable, as well as available and understandable, for authorized parties. In this sense, this work aims to propose a blockchain-based approach to build a reusable, decentralized, and de-identified dataset of TB research data, while increasing transparency, accountability, availability, and integrity of raw data collected in EDC systems. After identifying challenges and gaps, a solution was proposed to tackle them, considering its relevance for TB studies. Data security issues are being addressed by a blockchain network and a lightweight and practical governance model. Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) and KoBoToolbox are used as EDC systems in TB research. Mechanisms to de-identify data and aggregate semantics to data are also available. A permissioned blockchain network was built using Kaleido platform. An integration engine integrates the EDC systems with the blockchain network, performing de-identification and aggregating meaning to data. A governance model addresses operational and legal issues for the proper use of data. Finally, a management system facilitates the handling of necessary metadata, and additional applications are available to explore the blockchain and export data. Research data are an important asset not only for the research where it was generated, but also to underpin studies replication and support further investigations. The proposed solution allows the delivery of de-identified databases built in real time by storing data in transactions of a permissioned network, including semantic annotations, as data are being collected in TB research. The governance model promotes the correct use of the solution.