Permissioned Blockchain Research Articles

Blockchain-based governance models for COVID-19 digital health certificates: A legal, technical, ethical and security requirements analysis

This paper analyses the requirements of a blockchain-based data governance model for COVID-19 digital health certificates. Recognizing a gap in the existing literature, this paper aims to answer the research question “To what extent does a blockchain-based governance model for COVID-19 digital health certificates in the EU meet the relevant legal, technical, ethical and security requirements?” This paper identifies the required standards and develops a novel framework to determine the viability of blockchain as a governance model. The results of our evaluation indicate that while a private permissioned blockchain can meet the requirements to some degree, the governance element is key to legal compliance; legal risks and ethical implications remain unresolved with the use of blockchain. The paper also found that this model comes with the loss of the main advantages of blockchain – decentralization and anonymity. This evaluation framework may be used in other contexts and for assessing other technologies.

An Analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) on the Use of Blockchain Technology in Islamic Banking in Indonesia

The background of this research is to find out the use cases of blockchain technology and what types of blockchain which are suitable in the implementation of sharia banking institutions, as well as to find out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the use of blockchain in Islamic banking, especially if it is applied in banking sharia in Indonesia. Qualitative descriptive research was used as research method in this research, with library research approach and some data were obtained from published reports and journals and they were also found on the internet based on the theme of research. If this study classified according to FC Dane theory, which also included in exploratory research, namely research that was conducted to find the cause and effect of an event or events. The object of this study was blockchain technology and the research subject was Islamic banking in Indonesia. The data analysis technique which was used here was the theory of Miles and Huberman method which consisted of data reduction, presentation of data, and conclusion. The results of this research showed that the blockchain with permissioned blockchain type and which was more specifically private permissioned blockchain was the right type to be applied in Islamic banking because it was in line with the regulations related to Islamic banking in Indonesia, with various consideration for applications in the form of smart contract, digital currency, cloud storage, remittances, and smart sukuk. Meanwhile, the scopes of division which implemented the applications were categorized based on 3 (three) fields, namely the payment sector, trade finance sector, and regulatory compliance. Based on various considerations in SWOT analysis method, then this technology was very possible to be implemented in sharia banking in Indonesia with the aim of achieving common interests.

Linking permissioned blockchain to Internet of Things (IoT)-BIM platform for off-site production management in modular construction

Traditionally, construction managers were considered more experienced in project management than off-site production management, although the latter is gaining importance with the renaissance of modular construction worldwide. Various Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled Building Information Modelling (BIM) platforms have been developed to facilitate production management by providing better information visibility, traceability, and a more collaborative working environment. Nevertheless, by and large, existing platforms suffer from two shortcomings: (a) the ‘single point of failure’ problem of IoT networks and (b) how to guarantee the provenance of BIM modifications from multi-sources. This research aims to develop a blockchain-enabled IoT-BIM platform (BIBP) for off-site production management in modular construction (OPM-MC) that can overcome the shortcomings. A design science research method is adopted to develop a three-layer BIBP system architecture. The system architecture is implemented and then compared with the existing IoT-enabled BIM platform. It was found that BIBP can avoid a single point of failure in IoT networks and ensure the provenance of BIM modifications with reduced storage costs in OPM-MC. The system architecture developed in our study can help the industry advance beyond the rhetoric to develop practical blockchain-enabled IoT-BIM applications. Future works are recommended to fine-tune the platform and test and evaluate it in various scenarios.

Reinforcing SLA Consensus on Blockchain

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Service Level Agreements (SLAs) assessment constitutes the de facto area of interest and applications in the public cloud infrastructure. However, the domination of colossal corporations tends to monopolize the way metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measured and determined, leading to governed environments where the clientele is unable to obtain accurate and unbiased assessment of SLAs. Leaning toward SLA self-assessment, this paper provides a fair SLA consensus approach with innate transparency and privacy by leveraging permissioned blockchains that are equipped with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). The SLA assessment intelligence is performed inside enclaved smart contracts isolated from the on-chain entities views. The result constitutes a permissioned blockchain ecosystem where the IaaS and their clientele commonly agree on all the respective SLA monitoring and computation rules beforehand, as defined in any SLA assessment process, while the SLA consensus scheme constantly audits the SLA metrics based on these pre-approved regulations.

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.

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.

T-DSES: A Blockchain-powered Trusted Decentralized Service Eco-System

Existing Web service eco-systems are typically managed in a centralized manner, which hinders their further development due to inherent disadvantages such as trust issues, interest disputes, value separation and so on. The recently emerged blockchains provide distributed ledgers that enable parties who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states, which provide a natural solution. Based on the INKchain, which is an open-source permissioned blockchain mechanism extending the Hyperledger Fabric, this paper proposes Trusted Decentralized Service Eco-System (T-DSES). T-DSES achieves not only fundamental functionalities of conventional systems, but also offers mechanisms to stimulate participants to bring trustworthiness to the whole system. The trustworthiness of T-DSES is realized by three strategies: reliable information of services and mashups, reliable records of participants’ rights, and reliable measurement of participants’ contributions. A customized token “SToken” is created to act as the media of value circulation. In this paper, the overall framework and detailed design of T-DSES are presented, especially including how to utilize Kubernetes to establish a cloud-based environment. A tailored Web front-end ensures the usability of operations. Over real-world data from ProgrammableWeb.com, analyses and experiments have been conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the presented approach.

Real-Time Bidding Model of Cryptocurrency Energy Trading Platform

Blockchain technology provides a comprehensive solution to user access and energy trading for distributed energy Internet. Achieving market-based pricing, increasing the earnings of energy suppliers, attracting foreign capital and facilitating the upgrade of solar and wind energy are pressing issues. Drawing on the practices of centralised exchanges and blockchain cryptocurrency, the author designed the Cryptocurrency Energy Trading Platform (CETP), dividing the permissioned blockchain into the Energy Blockchain Platform (EBP) and the Energy Cryptocurrency Exchange (ECE). The frequently used real-time bidding scenario and the seldom-used power-using scenario are separated from each other. A market welfare model for real-time bidding is established and verified. With Energy Blockchain Cryptocurrency (EBC) as the trading medium, the platform allows external bidders to get involved in the bidding and transactions, which not only attracts the social capital to be used in the development of energy Internet but also helps stabilise the energy market prices, thus, advancing the energy Internet.

Efficient and DoS-resistant Consensus for Permissioned Blockchains

Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs on a large scale on the Internet, these explicit committee nodes can be easily turned down by denial-of-service (DoS) or network partition attacks. Although recent studies proposed scalable BFT protocols that run on a larger number of committee nodes, these protocols’ efficiency drops dramatically when only a small number of nodes are attacked.In this paper, we propose a novel protocol named Eges that leverages hardware trusted execution environments (e.g., Intel SGX) to develop a new abstraction called “stealth committee”, which effectively hides a committee into a large pool of fake committee nodes. Eges selects a different stealth committee for each block and confirms the same blocks among all nodes with overwhelming probability. Our evaluation shows that Eges is the first efficient permissioned blockchain’s consensus protocol, which simultaneously satisfies two important metrics: (1) Eges can tolerate tough DoS and network partition attacks; and (2) Eges achieves comparable throughput and latency as existing fastest permissioned blockchains’ consensus protocols. Eges’s source code is available on http://github.com/hku-systems/eges.

Interoperable Permissioned-Blockchain with Sustainable Performance

Bitcoin is an innovative and path-breaking technology that has influenced numerous industries across the globe. It is a form of digital currency (cryptocurrency) that can be used for trading and has the potential to replace fiat money, where the underlying infrastructure is called Blockchain. The Blockchain is an open ledger that provides decentralization, transparency, immutability, and confidentiality. Blockchain can be used in enormous applications, such as healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, the IoT, and so forth. Most of the industrial applications rely on the permissioned blockchain. However, the permissioned blockchain fails in some aspects, such as interoperability among different platforms. This paper suggests a sustainable system to solve the interoperability issue of the permissioned blockchain by designing a new infrastructure. This work has been tested in ethereum and hyperledger frameworks, which obtained a success rate of 100 percent.

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.

SPIN: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Sharing COVID-19 Pandemic Information across Nations

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many countries around the globe to put strict policies and measures in place in an attempt to control the rapid spread of the virus. These measures have affected economic activities and have impacted a broad range of businesses, such as international traveling, restaurants, and shopping malls. As COVID-19 vaccination efforts progress, countries are starting to relax international travel constraints and permit passengers from certain destinations to cross the border. Moreover, travelers from those destinations are likely required to provide certificates of vaccination results or negative COVID-19 tests before crossing the borders. Implementing these travel guidelines requires sharing information between countries, such as the number of COVID-19 cases and vaccination certificates for travelers. In this paper, we introduce SPIN, a framework leveraging a permissioned blockchain for sharing COVID-19 information between countries. This includes public data, such as the number of vaccinated people, and private data, such as vaccination certificates for individuals. Additionally, we employ cancelable fingerprint templates to authenticate private information about travelers. We analyze the framework from scalability, efficiency, security, and privacy perspectives. To validate our framework, we provide a prototype implementation using the Hyperledger Fabric platform.

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.

A decentralized framework for device authentication and data security in the next generation internet of medical things

Internet of Things (IoT) applications have gained a huge momentum and have spanned across all domains adding innovations to the prevailing solutions. The IoT networks generate enormous data comprising meteorological information, patient critical body parameters, finance, logistics, location of a tracking object, etc. Security for sensitive data,such as patient body critical parameters from an attached monitoring device, streaming over IoT networks is vital and is a need of the hour. Data integrity and user (or device) authentication are crucial for building a trust-worthy communication network among the peers in IoT networks. Most networks still employ specific software encryption algorithms that provide considerable data security. But quantum computing has proved the vulnerability of computationally vigorous cryptographic algorithms. A decentralized and scalable framework for device authentication and data security is proposed in this paper based on blockchain platform and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). An authentication protocol is developed using PUF-based cryptographic primitives. The PUF-based keys are hard to replicate and almost impossible to predict because of the randomness in the physical design and complex mathematical modeling of the system. Lightweight Smart contracts are used to facilitate role-based access control. Data privacy is preserved by storing the sensitive data off-chain. As a proof of concept, an IoT-based healthcare system based on Ethereum permissioned blockchain is developed using the proposed framework. The​ designed PUF exhibits 48.46% uniqueness and 2.38% reliability. A comparative analysis with existing similar models shows that the proposed approach is feasible and provides a scalable solution for device authentication and data security in resource-limited medical IoT networks.

MetaInfoChain: Bi‐layered blockchain consensus for metadata aggregation inIoTand cloud environments

AbstractInternet of Things (IoT) and cloud metadata have highly sensitive details and facts about data and objects; it usually holds confidential information about the data for which there are access restrictions. Hence, it forms the most abundant source of information about any digital object from which the actual data can be rebuilt or duplicated with the same level of originality. However, it appears to be an emerging threat vector in IoT and cloud environments. If a misfeasor acquires access to the metadata information, then there arises a security threat. This article proposes a novel method on a bifold layered blockchain network, referred to as MetaInfoChain, to enhance the integrity and access controllability of safe storage. By default, blockchain protects the data while a permissioned blockchain forms an access control layer over the core blockchain. The acquired instance, compute, and the unique credentials sign device metadata to enforce controllability and validated by minters and add it to the base layer of the MetaInfoChain. Subsequently, we propose a consensus attainment algorithm to build an unrefined block on a candidate block comprising metadata packages. Consequently, all the nodes receive an unrefined block replica, which can afford absolute integrity. The top layer of MetaInfoChain is sensible to generate tamper‐resistant metadata by executing hybrid PoS‐PoW tasks on the unrefined block, causing robust integrity. After accomplishing all the checks, it endorses the MetaInfoChain to append the block with 35% block time efficiency in the base layer with a 56% throughput hike.

Scalability improvement and analysis of permissioned-blockchain

Through the Bitcoin application, the innovative technology was miraculously launched in the markets, influencing numerous industries. Bitcoin is nothing but a form of digital currency (cryptocurrency) that can be used for trading in place of fiat money, where the underlying infrastructure is called Blockchain. The Blockchain is an open ledger that provides decentralization, transparency, immutability, and confidentiality. Blockchain can be used in massive, beneficial applications such as healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, the Internet of Things (IoT), etc. Most of the industrial applications rely on the permissioned Blockchain. However, the permissioned Blockchain fails in some aspects, such as scalability and throughput. This paper suggests a system to solve the scalability issue of permissioned Blockchain by incorporating data science techniques. The scalability analysis of the proposed solution is done in the hyperledger fabric framework with a variable number of transactions and results in scalability improvement.

PPChain: A Privacy-Preserving Permissioned Blockchain Architecture for Cryptocurrency and Other Regulated Applications

Existing (popular) blockchain architectures, including the widely used Ethereum and Hyperledger, are generally not designed to achieve conflicting properties such as anonymity and regulation, and transparency and confidentiality. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving permissioned blockchain architecture (PPChain) that permits one to also introduce regulation, where PPChain's architecture is modified from that of Ethereum. Specifically, we integrate the cryptographic primitives (group signature and broadcast encryption), and adopt practical byzantine fault tolerance consensus protocol with a validate-record separation mechanism, as well as removing the transaction fee and mining reward. To show the utility of PPChain, we provide qualitative security and privacy analysis, and performance analysis. We also explain how PPChain can be deployed in regulation applications, using cryptocurrency, food supply chain, and sealed-bid auctions as examples.

Security, Privacy, and Reliability in Digital Healthcare Systems Using Blockchain

According to the security breach level index, millions of records are stolen worldwide on every single day. Personal health records are the most targeted records on the internet, and they are considered sensitive, and valuable. Security and privacy are the most important parameters of cryptography and encryption. They reduce the availability of data on patients and healthcare to the appropriate personnel and ultimately lead to a barrier in the transfer of healthcare into a digital health system. Using a permission blockchain to share healthcare data can reduce security and privacy issues. According to the literature, most healthcare systems rely on a centralized system, which is more prone to security vulnerabilities. The existing blockchain-based healthcare schemes provide only a data-sharing framework, but they lack security and privacy. To cope with these kinds of security issues, we have designed a novel security algorithm that provides security as well as privacy with much better efficiency and a lower cost. Hence, in this research, we have proposed a patient healthcare framework that provides greater security, reliability, and authentication compared to existing blockchain-based access control.

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.

Blockchain-hosted Data Access Agreements for Remote Condition Monitoring in Rail

Advances in sensor technologies, remote authentication, and high bandwidth data networks mean that Remote Condition Monitoring (RCM) systems are now an essential 'Internet of Things' (IoT) resource for the efficient operation of railway infrastructure. However, the full potential of the big data generated by these systems has yet to be realized. RCM data within the industry is typically collected and used in silos, with limited possibility of exploitation across system boundaries. In 2013, the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), on behalf of the GB Rail industry, established a cross-industry research program, T1010, which aimed to build stronger cooperation between stakeholders and enable sharing of RCM data. Building on the outputs of T1010, this work explores the use of blockchains and smart contracts in the automation, in an auditable and tamper-proof way, of commercial agreements for RCM data transfers in rail. By removing the limitations of paper-based agreements, we aim to enable innovation in shared business processes and stimulate the market for RCM data in rail. Leveraging existing smart contract-based schemes for trading and sharing IoT data over blockchain networks, we identify suitable methods for the enforcement of agreements, and ensure fair cost attribution between stakeholders, without a Trusted Third Party. The outline of a blockchain-based RCM data audit framework is presented, appropriate data access agreements and accounting models are specified in detail, and three permissioned blockchain platforms (Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, and Iroha) have been analysed for their suitability for implementation. Finally, the paper outlines planned future work around validation of the tools based on two industrial use cases: monitoring systems for unattended overhead line equipment and axle bearings.