Permissioned Blockchain Technology Research Articles

Streamlining supply chains: An efficiency-driven permissioned blockchain framework for data reduction

In the ever-evolving landscape of supply chain management, the quest for efficiency has become paramount. This abstract explores a groundbreaking solution that combines the power of permissioned blockchain technology with innovative data reduction strategies to redefine how supply chains operate. Traditional supply chain systems often grapple with data overload, causing delays, inaccuracies, and operational inefficiencies. However, this abstract presents a promising approach that unleashes efficiency by harnessing the capabilities of a permissioned blockchain. Through data reduction techniques tailored to the needs of supply chain management, this approach streamlines the flow of information while maintaining security and trust among participants. This paper seeks into the technical foundations of permissioned blockchains, highlighting their suitability for supply applications where confidentiality and controlled access are imperative. Furthermore, it examines various data reduction methodologies, emphasizing their role in minimizing redundant data, optimizing communication, and enabling real-time decision-making. The impact of this innovative approach on supply chain stakeholders is profound. It reduces data related bottlenecks, enhances transparencies, and fosters collaboration among participants. Additionally, it provides a scalable framework adaptable to diverse supply chain ecosystems. As supply chain efficiency becomes increasingly important in our interconnected world, this permissioned blockchain-driven data reduction strategy offers a compelling vision for the future. It promises to unlock a new era of streamlined operations, cost savings, and improved customer satisfaction, ultimately shaping the next generation of supply chain management.

A Blockchain-Powered Traffic Management System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The increasing popularity and usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has brought about new challenges in airspace management. With the number of drones expected to grow even further in the coming years, there is an urgent need for an autonomous traffic management system (TMS) that can safely and effectively manage drone traffic in the airspace. It is critical that this TMS be built with principles of the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) triad. In this paper, a traffic management system for UAVs is presented that takes advantage of a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. The TMS provides a decentralized and secure method to manage and deconflict drone flight paths, allowing for safe navigation in crowded airspaces. Through a series of simulated experiments, we demonstrated the system’s capabilities in handling path creation, multiple conflict resolutions, and large numbers of drones. Simulated tests showed that the proposed system was able to handle deconfliction of 1000 drones inside of a one square kilometer, and returned calculated paths for drones in 60 to 2000 ms with up to 100 deconflictions. The Hyperledger Fabric powered traffic management system showcased the potential to leverage permissioned blockchain technology in improving drone traffic management.

Blockchain Based Decentralized Healthcare Network to Share Electronic Medical Records

Over 172 ransomware attacks on US healthcare organizations since 2016 have cost over $157 million total and disrupted care for over 70% of patients impacted, prompting healthcare CIOs to declare cyberattacks as one of the most devastating healthcare issues today. Furthermore, lack of interoperability of patient data between healthcare providers prevents patients from exploring care outside their provider’s network. Though hospitals utilize electronic health records (EHR), data formats remain fragmented and non-interoperable, leaving patients to be responsible for transporting their own data between providers or insurance plans. Permissioned blockchain technology can solve both these issues due to its inherent transparency, immutability and data sharing capabilities. Therefore, I developed a decentralized application called HyperEHRbase that would allow patients to control their own health records and share them with different healthcare providers. My application extends an open-source OpenEHR implementation called ehrbase. Unlike ehrbase, my application writes health records into a Hyperledger blockchain, not a centralized database. The blockchain network is designed to work as a decentralized healthcare network, allowing patients and healthcare providers to mutually exchange data. Patients can register to the healthcare network using their personal devices and voluntarily grant multiple healthcare providers access to their medical records. Doctors and other care providers can also register to the network and access information shared by patients. This system secures electronic healthcare records in an immutable blockchain and makes them interoperable using the OpenEHR standard. Patients will also have control over their data, which is a significant improvement over the current healthcare system.

Trusted distributed marketplace for virtual passive optical network sharing

Infrastructure sharing has always been a core aspect of telecommunications networks, especially in the access. The move towards resource-demanding services, which are part of the 5G evolution, further exacerbates its necessity, as the cost of ownership is often not matched by an increase in revenue. In parallel, the recent emergence of network function virtualization is creating new business opportunities and business models that challenge conventional centralized network ownership. In this work, we address the issue of optical access network sharing, addressing the challenging scenario of the untrusted broadband market. We propose, for the first time, to our knowledge, a distributed market scheme for capacity sharing that makes use of permissioned blockchain technology in multi-tenant passive optical networks. The blockchain is used as a verification mechanism that runs in parallel to shared, market-based capacity scheduling operations. To study the feasibility and performance of the proposed verification layer, we have developed a smart contract (chaincodes) using the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain platform that solves the high transaction cost and energy consumption concerns associated with permissionless blockchain solutions used in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Permissioned Blockchain-based Trustworthy Edge Storage Scheme for Smart Grid

Background: With the development of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud/edge computing, a large number of edge devices in the smart grid accomplish information interconnection and generate massive amounts of data. On the one hand, smart grids need to obtain a large amount of grid data from edge terminal devices. On the other hand, edge computing also brings some security threats. Therefore, edge data security faces major challenges. Objective: In order to ensure the security of data in the edge computing environment of the smart grid, we propose an edge data storage scheme (BlockSE) for the smart grid edge computing environment. Method: BlockSE combines permissioned blockchain and smart contract technology to achieve secure storage of data on edge. We adapted ring signature technology to achieve privacy preserving of participating nodes. To allocate the storage resources of edge servers fairly and transparently, we designed a storage resource allocation algorithm based on the smart contract, whereby edge devices can obtain storage resources fairly according to demand. Results: Simulation experiments were performed; the results show the effectiveness of the proposed BlockSE scheme. Conclusion: This paper focused on data security in the smart grid's edge computing environment and proposed a secure storage scheme for edge data based on permissioned blockchain. The evaluation shows the safety, effectiveness, and practicability of the proposed BlockSE scheme.

Combating Copycats in the Supply Chain with Permissioned Blockchain Technology

The phenomenon of copycats is common in a wide range of industries. Recently, to indicate product authenticity and combat copycats, many brand name companies (BNCs) have started selling products through retailers. These BNCs deploy a scalable protocol that is integrated into a permissioned blockchain technology (PBT) platform. We examine how PBT combats copycats in the supply chain and how it benefits BNCs. Although PBT implementation helps novice customers identify product authenticity and the real quality of products, that is, to take advantage of a quality disclosure effect, we show that, if and only if the number of novice customers is large enough, then selling through a PBT retailer can effectively combat copycats. Thus, PBT increases the profit of the BNC, consumer surplus, social welfare, and reduces the profit of a copycat. Moreover, conventional wisdom tells us that PBT ensures supply chain transparency and motivates a firm to improve its product quality. However, the BNC reduces the quality of its products when using PBT, because an improvement in product quality is not profitable if consumers can distinguish between genuine and imitation products. Furthermore, we extend the model by considering the case where the BNC itself implements PBT. Without the double marginalization effect, even if the number of novice customers is small, blockchain technology may exist in the market (the BNC self‐implements). In addition, if the unit production cost of a genuine product is large enough, social welfare increases when production cost increases.

Renewable Energy Certificate Trading via Permissioned Blockchain

With the continuous advancement of the green certificate trading mechanism, information verification needs to span multiple departments, which causes the application process cumbersome and human errors. In order to solve problems of cumbersome issuance process of the renewable energy certificate (REC) and the inflexible pricing mechanism, in this paper, a hybrid REC trading system was proposed based on an permissioned blockchain technology (BT), which combined advantages of the BT and the continuous double auction (CDA). The operation process of the system was introduced in detail, and the view change protocol in the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm was revised according to the characteristics of the system to improve the system stability. The continuous double auction rule was also introduced in the system. And corresponding bidding strategies were designed to maximize the revenue of users (buyer and seller) and transaction probability. The simulation experiment proves that the bidding mechanism can flexibly adjust the REC price according to the supply and demand relationship. At the same time, the effectiveness and feasibility of trading rule and bidding strategy were also verified.

Blockchain Technology, Inter-Organizational Relationships, and Management Accounting: A Synthesis and a Research Agenda

SYNOPSIS Blockchain technology is increasingly emerging as an important organizational phenomenon, especially for collaboration across firm boundaries. Over the past three decades, accounting scholars have shown significant interest in management accounting and control mechanisms that are used by actors to sustain inter-organizational relationships. We outline fundamental technical features and limitations of permissioned blockchain technology and analytically propose blockchain as an empirical concept with implications for management accounting practices that underpin inter-organizational collaboration, trust, control, and information exchange. Particular focus of the analysis is on the interplay between the technical capabilities of blockchain technology and inter-organizational management control procedures. Based on this analysis, we develop a series of propositions that theorize how these procedures affect the way in which blockchain is enacted in IORs, and how they are affected by blockchain in turn. The paper concludes with a research agenda for accounting scholars and offers directions for further research.

Performance evaluation of permissioned blockchains for financial applications: The ConsenSys Quorum case study

Given the availability of several blockchain technologies in permissioned contexts, blockchain application designers have to cope with the increasing complexity of choosing which technology and consensus algorithm best fit a specific use case. However, the lack of a standard framework allowing to assess the scalability of permissioned blockchain platforms and to compare performances and features of consensus algorithms makes the development of a sensible evaluation a costly and difficult time-consuming problem. Throughout this article, we propose a practical scalability and applicability evaluation of the Quorum blockchain and its consensus algorithms. Although we apply our evaluation workflow to a financial use case, we define a methodology that can be generalized to any permissioned blockchain technology. We leverage Hyperledger Caliper as a benchmarking tool, and Docker as a deployment tool, making our analysis easy to be repeated, cross-platform, and cost-effective.

Securing Data Sharing from the Sky: Integrating Blockchains into Drones in 5G and Beyond

5G and beyond (B5G) networks significantly promote the popularity and ubiquity of drones by providing high-throughput and low-latency communication. In B5G drone networks, data sharing among drones has great potential to improve and enrich civilian and commercial applications, such as surveillance monitoring. Nevertheless, a series of security challenges arise such as data privacy leakage due to the lack of reliable centralized supervision. In this article, we employ the permissioned blockchain technology to propose a decentralized data management system. The permissioned blockchain deployed at pre-selected ground base stations is particularly suitable and practical for ensuring efficient peer-to-peer data sharing in B5G drone networks. However, the ground base stations working as miners are widely deployed without strong security protection, which may be compromised to produce maliciously manipulated results during the block verification in the permissioned blockchain. Hence, the miner selection is crucial for the permissioned blockchain-based B5G drone networks. We therefore introduce credit as a metric and propose a secure credit-based miner selection scheme using a four-weight subjective logic model. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed schemes are effective for secure data sharing in permissioned blockchain-based B5G drone networks.

B-FERL: Blockchain based framework for securing smart vehicles

The ubiquity of connecting technologies in smart vehicles and the incremental automation of its functionalities promise significant benefits, including a significant decline in congestion and road fatalities. However, increasing automation and connectedness broadens the attack surface and heightens the likelihood of a malicious entity successfully executing an attack. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain based Framework for sEcuring smaRt vehicLes (B-FERL). B-FERL uses permissioned blockchain technology to tailor information access to restricted entities in the connected vehicle ecosystem. It also uses a challenge–response data exchange between the vehicles and roadside units to monitor the internal state of the vehicle to identify cases of in-vehicle network compromise. In order to enable authentic and valid communication in the vehicular network, only vehicles with a verifiable record in the blockchain can exchange messages. Through qualitative arguments, we show that B-FERL is resilient to identified attacks. Also, quantitative evaluations in an emulated scenario show that B-FERL ensures a suitable response time and required storage size compatible with realistic scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate how B-FERL achieves various important functions relevant to the automotive ecosystem such as trust management, vehicular forensics and secure vehicular networks.

Special Equipment Safety Supervision System Architecture Based on Blockchain Technology

With the use of the traditional safety supervision system of special equipment, the job burnout of supervision participants and other supervision problems emerge endlessly, which leads to the supervision for the prevention of safety accidents being greatly weakened. In recent years, the significance of introducing new technology to improve the original supervision system for safety accident prevention has been constantly growing. In this paper, based on the current situation of China’s special equipment safety supervision, we summarize several specific requirements for improving the supervision system, namely efficient accident responsibility tracing, more transparent, more efficient data sharing, and integrating more functions. On this basis, we have designed a new system architecture, by introducing the permissioned blockchain technology, which can meet all the improvement requirements and adapt to the technical features of safety supervision work. The extensibility design of the system architecture can meet the new requirements in future work. The design idea of the system architecture can not only be used in the field of special equipment, but can also be used for reference by other fields with safety supervision requirements.

DecChain: A decentralized security approach in Edge Computing based on Blockchain

Security in edge computing paradigms has become a major concern in recent times due to the integral role it plays in the framework of edge computing. Privacy-preserving and data security challenges are among the many concerns impeding the goal of making data storage available and processing at the edge of the network quite difficult to implement. Authenticated users must be the only ones with access to their respective stored data which are protected against any form of intruder manipulation. Most authentication schemes proposed and implemented in edge computing and other paradigms use a trusted entity to initialize the authentication process between edge servers and prospective users. Servers and users are expected to register with the trusted party first before they are able to subsequently authenticate one another. The presence of the trusted party presents scalability issues as well as the threat of having a single point of failure which may threaten the availability of the entire network.In this paper, we present a fully decentralized approach to solving this problem by eliminating the public trusted entity within the network framework termed DecChain. In DecChain we employ some notable principles of permissioned blockchain technology in the rollout and authentication of elements within the network. Authenticated users within our proposed framework would not have to sign in to every service provider to be authenticated to access a service or resource. Security experiments and the deployment of our scheme are carried out to evaluate the performance of DecChain. The results show our scheme is secured and achieves the intended purpose efficiently.

Blockchain Technology, Inter-Organizational Relationships and Management Accounting: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

From their origins in cryptocurrencies, blockchains are increasingly emerging as an important organizational phenomenon, especially for collaboration across firm boundaries. Over the past several decades, accounting scholars have shown significant interest in management accounting and control mechanisms that are used to sustain these inter-organizational relationships (IORs). This paper outlines fundamental technical features and limitations of permissioned blockchain technology and analytically proposes it as an empirical concept with implications for management accounting practices that underpin inter-organizational collaboration, trust, control, and information exchange. Particular focus of the analysis is on the interplay between the technical capabilities of blockchain and inter-organizational management control procedures. The analysis is distilled into a series of theoretical propositions that illustrate how these procedures affect the way in which blockchain is enacted in IORs, and how they are affected by blockchain themselves. The paper concludes with a research agenda for accounting scholars and offers directions for future research.

A Permissioned Blockchain Based Feature Management System for Assembly Devices

With the increasing spread and adoption of electronics and software as integral parts of all kinds of physical devices, such devices are becoming controlled by their embedded software. Correspondingly, the manufacturing business has started the transition from selling hardware to selling features (e.g. “insane mode” and “ludicrous mode” in Tesla Model S). Consequently, a trustworthy system to automate such a process becomes essential. This article introduces a permissioned blockchain-based feature management system for assembly devices. Firstly, it leverages software licensing technology to control assembly devices’ features. Secondly, by recording the license ownership transaction data in a permissioned blockchain, the approach (1) takes advantage of blockchain’s trust mechanism and its distributed nature to improve the trustworthiness of the feature management system, and (2) adopts the permissioned blockchain technology to ensure that the license transactions are only visible and applicable to authenticated actors. We further describe an implementation, a proof-of-concept evaluation focusing on functionality and performance, as well as a security analysis.

Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving ID-as-a-Service Provisioning in Vehicular Cloud Computing

Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is composed of multiple distributed vehicular clouds (VCs), which are formed on-the-fly by dynamically integrating underutilized vehicular resources including computing power, storage, and so on. Existing proposals for identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) are not suitable for use in VCC due to limited computing resources and storage capacity of onboard vehicle devices. In this paper, we first propose an improved ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme. Utilizing the improved CP-ABE scheme and the permissioned blockchain technology, we propose a lightweight and privacy-preserving IDaaS architecture for VCC named IDaaSoVCC. It realizes lightweight and privacy-preserving access control of vehicles’ personally identifiable information (PII) in a large distributed vehicular cloud system. Security analysis demonstrates the security features of IDaaSoVCC, most notably forward secrecy, confidentiality and identity information privacy. Meanwhile, we verify that IDaaSoVCC is feasible and practical in a large distributed VC system through extensive simulations.

A blockchain based Trusted Persistent Identifier system for Big Data in Science

Abstract A stable reference of Internet resources is crucial not only to identify a resource in a trustworthy and certified way but also to guarantee continuous access to it over time. The current practice in scientific publication as the use of a Persistent Identifier (PID) like a DOI or Handle, is becoming attractive also for the datasets. In fact, in the era of Big Data, the aspects of replicability and verification of the scientific result are paramount. In this paper we verify the functional feasibility of permissioned blockchain technology as a tool to implement a Trustworthy Persistent Identifier (T-PID) system for datasets in the scientific domain.