Popular Blockchain Platforms Research Articles

MEchain—A novel mode to improve blockchain's real‐time and throughput

AbstractBlockchain trilemma is a considerable obstacle for today's decentralized systems. It is hard to achieve a perfect balance among decentralization, security, and scalability. Many popular blockchain platforms sacrifice scalability to preserve decentralization and security, resulting in low speed, reduced throughput, and poor real‐time performance (the time from transaction initiation to confirmation). Currently, there are several technologies, such as sharding, directed acyclic graph technology, sidechains, off‐chain state channels etc., that aim to improve throughput and real‐time performance. However, most of these solutions compromise the core feature of blockchain, which is decentralization, and introduce new security risks. In this paper, the authors propose a novel method, called MEchain, based on the Proof of Time Series Algorithm. MEchain consists of two models: the multi‐chain model and the elastic‐chain model. The authors’ experimental results show that these two models can enhance real‐time performance and throughput to a higher level in the industry.

VM Matters: A Comparison of WASM VMs and EVMs in the Performance of Blockchain Smart Contracts

Beyond an emerging popular web applications runtime supported in almost all commodity browsers, WebAssembly (WASM) is further regarded to be the next-generation execution environment for blockchain-based applications. Indeed, many popular blockchain platforms such as EOSIO and NEAR have adopted WASM-based execution engines. Most recently, WASM has been favored by Ethereum, the largest smart contract platform, to replace the state-of-the-art EVM. However, whether and how well current WASM outperforms EVM on blockchain clients is still unknown. This article conducts the first measurement study to understand the performance on WASM VMs and EVM for executing smart contracts for blockchain-based applications. To our surprise, the current WASM VM does not provide expected satisfactory performance. The overhead introduced by WASM is really non-trivial. Our results shed the light on challenges when deploying WASM in practice, and provide insightful implications for improvement space.

Blockchain for finance: A survey

AbstractAs an innovative technology for enhancing authenticity, security, and risk management, blockchain is being widely adopted in trade and finance systems. The unique capabilities of blockchain, such as immutability and transparency, enable new business models of distributed data storage, point‐to‐point transactions, and decentralized autonomous organizations. Here, the authors focus on blockchain‐based securities trading, in which blockchain technology plays a vital role in financial services as it ultimately lifts trust and frees the need for third‐party verification by using consensus‐based verification. The 12 most popular blockchain platforms are investigated and 6 platforms that are related to finance are elaborated on, seeking to provide a panorama of securities trading practices. Meanwhile, this survey provides a comprehensive summary of blockchain‐based securities trading applications. Numerous practical applications of blockchain‐based securities trading are gathered and they are categorized into four distinct categories. For each category, a typical example is introduced and how blockchain contributes to solving the key problems faced by FinTech companies and researchers explained. Finally, interesting observations are provided ranging from mainstream blockchain‐based financial institutions to security issues of decentralized finance applications, aiming to picture the current blockchain ecosystem in finance.

A Comprehensive Performance Analysis of a Hyperledger Fabric-powered Blockchain Network for Cross-Border Fund Transfers

Ample acceptance of Blockchain Technology in today's business world has increased number of use cases tremendously beyond cryptocurrencies for which it was originally developed. Hyperledger Fabric, as an enterprise-grade permissioned Blockchain platform, offers a secure and scalable infrastructure for diverse applications, including financial services. Since performance evaluation of the platform play major role in acceptability of the technology for various applications, in this research article we are presenting a comprehensive performance analysis of the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain platform with the help of standard benchmarking tool-Hyperledger Caliper for Cross-Border Fund Transfer (CBFT) application and results are validated using existing queuing theory based theoretical model for Hyperledger Fabric. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the most popular Blockchain platform's performance under various workloads and network conditions. By capturing the interactions between network participants and consensus mechanisms, we have presented latency analysis along with the insights into the platform's scalability and efficiency. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of Blockchain technology and aids in the design of more efficient and robust Blockchain-based applications.

Reliable and Sustainable Product Evaluation Management System Based on Blockchain

To facilitate the consumers’ online shopping, it is very necessary to build a reliable and sustainable product evaluation management (PEM) system to store, secure, and retrieve the evaluation data of products. To this end, we propose a novel PEM system based on blockchain technologies. In this PEM system, the evaluation data of products including evaluation scores and comments are stored in the interplanetary file system (IPFS), and then the data hash addresses are returned and stored on the blockchain. Then, the retrieval of evaluation data is implemented by designing and deploying smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Since it is almost impossible to change any data stored in blockchain and IPFS, the proposed PEM system can protect the comment data from intentional or unintentional modifications. Moreover, the proposed PEM system allows users to efficiently and reliably retrieve the relevant evaluation data of a certain product by a given query keyword with the increase of data stored on the blockchain. In addition, to achieve high sustainability, the proposed system also contains an economic incentive mechanism, which is beneficial to form a virtuous circle in online shopping. The proposed system is simulated on the popular blockchain platform, i.e., Ethereum with Solidity programming language. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed PEM system achieves desirable usability, reliability, and sustainability.

World State Attack to Blockchain Based IoV and Efficient Protection With Hybrid RSUs Architecture

Blockchain technology is developing rapidly and has been widely applied in the field of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to solve trust and security problems. However, due to the high security requirements in IoV scenarios, the security threats of blockchain itself become a big challenge for its applications in IoV. As the largest distributed platform supporting smart contract, Ethereum becomes one of the popular blockchain platforms that has been applied in IoV applications. In Ethereum, the local world state (stored on Road Side Units (RSUs) in IoV) is applied to facilitate account query and transaction verification. However, previous works showed that the local database can be easily tampered, so attackers may issue invalid transactions based on the modified world state, which is not acceptable for IoV applications. In this paper, the success probability and expected time for such an attack are first analyzed theoretically, including the effect of portion of tampered RSUs and the number of required confirmation blocks. Then experiment evaluation verifies the correctness of the theoretical analysis and shows that the attack would succeed with a higher probability within a shorter time when the local database on more RSUs are attacked. On the contrary, increasing of confirmation blocks can effectively reduce the success probability of a single attack and extend the confirmation time of the invalid transaction. Finally, efficient attack detection and recovery methods are proposed based on a novel hierarchical architecture with hybrid RSUs, and the effectiveness and complexity are verified by theoretical analysis and experiments.

A Systematic Comparison between the Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platforms for Attribute-Based Access Control in Smart Home IoT Environments.

Despite the lack of blockchain systems being utilized in modern IoT environments, the prevalence of blockchain technology is increasing, due to its high level of security and accountability. The integration of blockchain technology and access control in a decentralized system for smart home networks is a promising solution to this issue. This paper compares the implementation of attribute-based access control (ABAC) with two popular blockchain platforms, Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, for a smart home internet of things (IoT) environment. We present a comprehensive summary of access-control and blockchain-access-control methods, to provide the necessary background for this study. Additionally, we present an original ABAC smart contract for Ethereum, and the modification of a pre-existing Hyperledger Fabric ABAC smart contract, for this comparison. Through the simulation of both implementations, the advantages and limitations will be considered, to determine which is better suited for a smart home IoT environment.

BLOCKCHAIN BASED E-VOTING SYSTEM

Elections are a critical component of democracy, and their integrity is essential to ensuring a fair and just society. Traditional voting systems have a number of flaws, including a lack of transparency, vulnerability to tampering, and the possibility of human error. Blockchain technology has gained attention in recent years for its potential to address these issues while also improving election security and transparency. This research paper describes the design and implementation of a blockchain-based e-voting system. The proposed system uses a distributed ledger to record votes securely and transparently, making it difficult for anyone to manipulate or alter the results. The system safeguards voter anonymityand prevents double voting. The system uses Ethereum, a popular blockchain platform, and smart contracts to automate the voting process. Smart contracts handle vote counting and tallying, which eliminates the need for centralised authority. By requiring a majority of network nodes to agree on the validity of each transaction, a consensus algorithm ensures thesystem's security. The proposed blockchain-based electronic voting system outperforms traditional voting systems in terms of transparency, security, and efficiency. Because of the system's design, it is easy to integrate with existing election processes, making it a viable option for future adoption. Both Simply Voting and Election Buddy provide secure and customizable online voting services for businesses, blockchain-based e-voting systems offer distinct advantages in terms of security, transparency, and decentralisation.[21][22]

Bayesian network based vulnerability detection of blockchain smart contracts

Ethereum is one of the popular Blockchain platform. The key component in the Ethereum Blockchain is the smart contract. Smart contracts (SC) are like normal computer programs which are written mostly in solidity high-level object-oriented programming language. Smart contracts allow completing transactions directly between two parties in the network without any middle man or mediator. Modification of the smart contracts are not possible once deployed into the Blockchain. Thus smart contract has to be vulnerable free before deploying into the Blockchain. In this paper, Bayesian Network Model was designed and constructed based on Bayesian learning concept to detect smart contract security vulnerabilities which are Reentrancy, Tx.origin and DOS. The results showed that the proposed BNMC (Bayesian Network Model Construction) design is able to detect the severity of each vulnerability and also suggest the reasons for the vulnerability. The accuracy of the proposed BNMC results are improved (accuracy 8% increased for both Reentracy and Tx.origin, 6% increased for DOS), compared with traditional method LSTM. This proposed BNMS design and implementation is the first attempt to detect smart contract vulnerabilities using Bayesian Networks.

Blockchain-Based Secure Authentication with Improved Performance for Fog Computing.

Advancement in the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing has escalated the number of connected edge devices in a smart city environment. Having billions more devices has contributed to security concerns, and an attack-proof authentication mechanism is the need of the hour to sustain the IoT environment. Securing all devices could be a huge task and require lots of computational power, and can be a bottleneck for devices with fewer computational resources. To improve the authentication mechanism, many researchers have proposed decentralized applications such as blockchain technology for securing fog and IoT environments. Ethereum is considered a popular blockchain platform and is used by researchers to implement the authentication mechanism due to its programable smart contract. In this research, we proposed a secure authentication mechanism with improved performance. Neo blockchain is a platform that has properties that can provide improved security and faster execution. The research utilizes the intrinsic properties of Neo blockchain to develop a secure authentication mechanism. The proposed authentication mechanism is compared with the existing algorithms and shows that the proposed mechanism is 20 to 90 per cent faster in execution time and has over 30 to 70 per cent decrease in registration and authentication when compared to existing methods.

Scaling analysis of the Telegram Open Network blockchain project

Blockchain systems are always distributed but differ greatly in resolutions, sizes, roles, transparency, types of participants, and the way transactions are handled. The decentralized structure offers inalienable security benefits, but with a large number of participants faces the problem of limited scaling. Sharding is suggested to solve this problem. Sharding is a way to divide consensual workload and transactions into several nodes. Effective application of sharding requires a lot of detail and work in terms of architecture and system implementation. As was found in the process of the work, in order to achieve significant results in scaling the blockchain system through sharding, it is necessary that the blockchain project is based on several blockchains simultaneously (i.e. had a multi-blockchain architecture) and provides infrastructure for fast and reliable messaging between them (i.e. strongly interconnected). The Telegram Open Network (TON) and its component TON Blockchain are considered an example of such a project.
 This work provides a comparative analysis of the most popular blockchain platforms (Bitcoin and Ethereum) with the implementations of TON Blockchain ideas (The Open Network and Everscale) on three parameters: system bandwidth (measured at transactions per second, abbreviated TPS), the average time of a new block’s appearance in the network and projected bandwidth in TPS.

ISmart: Protecting Smart Contract Against Integer Bugs

Blockchain technology is known as a decentralized, distributed ledger that records digital asset. It has been applied in numbers of aspects of society, including finance, judiciary and commerce. Ethereum is referred to as the next generation decentralized application platform. It is one of the most popular blockchain platforms that supports smart contracts. Smart contract is a set of codes that sored on blockchain and can be called and created as turing-complete programs running on the blockchain. Developers use smart contracts to build decentralized applications (Dapp) which has widely used cryptocurrency related project. As smart contracts become more popular and more valuable, they are faced with more risk of being hacked. As a result that smart contracts cannot be modified once deployed on the blockchain, it is a great challenge to fix and update deployed vulnerable contract which can lead to a huge loss of cryptocurrency and financial disorder. In this paper, we focus on Integer Bugs in Ethereum Smart Contracts and present ISmart, which protects deployed smart contracts against attacks caused by Integer Bugs. We implemented ISmart based on go-ethereum, a Ethereum client written in Go, by adding a simplified taint analysis component. In our preliminary, ISmart can prevent attacks accurately with little runtime overhead.

Blockchain-based decentralized reputation system in E-commerce environment

With the rapid development of E-commerce, more and more people are used to shopping online, in which the reputation scores of sellers play an important role in helping consumers purchase satisfactory products. However, in the existing E-commerce environments, the reputation scores of users (including sellers and buyers) are centrally computed and stored on a centralized cloud server, which might make errors or even engage in fraud and forgery. To address this issue, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized reputation system (BC-DRS) in the E-commerce environment, i.e., online shopping. In this system, the product information including product descriptions and comments is stored in the interplanetary file system (IPFS) and the corresponding address is returned, and the returned address and the reputation scores of users are stored on the blockchain. The reputation evaluation is implemented by designing and deploying a smart contract on the blockchain. Different from the traditional centralized reputation systems (CRSs), the proposed BC-DRS can protect the product information and users reputation scores from intentional and unintentional modifications, since it is very hard to change any data stored in the blockchain and IPFS. Also, as the reputation scores of users are computed and updated by all the ratings of their transactions weighted by the practical transaction factors, it is effective to resist the common attacks, i.e., unfair rating and collusion. In addition, this system also contains a monetary incentive mechanism for the evaluation, which is helpful to form a virtuous circle in online shopping. The proposed BC-DRS is simulated on the popular blockchain platform, i.e., Ethereum with Solidity language. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed BC-DRS has desirable usability and reliability.

QiOi: Performance Isolation for Hyperledger Fabric

This paper investigates the performance interference of blockchain services that run on cloud data centers. As the data centers offer shared computing resources to multiple services, the blockchain services can experience performance interference due to the co-located services. We explore the impact of the interference on Fabric performance and develop a new technique to offer performance isolation for Hyperledger Fabric, the most popular blockchain platform. First, we analyze the characteristics of the different components in Hyperledger Fabric and show that Fabric components have different impacts on the performance of Fabric. Then, we present QiOi, component-level performance isolation technique for Hyperledger Fabric. The key idea of QiOi is to dynamically control the CPU scheduling of Fabric components to cope with the performance interference. We implement QiOi as a user-level daemon and evaluate how QiOi mitigates the performance interference of Fabric. The evaluation results demonstrate that QiOi mitigates performance degradation of Fabric by 22% and improves Fabric latency by 2.5 times without sacrificing the performance of co-located services. In addition, we show that QiOi can support different ordering services and chaincodes with negligible overhead to Fabric performance.

Cybersecurity Enhancement through Blockchain Training (CEBT) – A serious game approach

Blockchain technology is increasingly finding traction in diverse areas such as finance, supply-chain management, and cloud services because of its ability to provide robust cybersecurity inherent in its system of having decentralized data storage. The rising complexity in the architecture of popular blockchain platforms create barriers to correct adoption of the technology. It becomes imperative that pedagogical tools are inducted in the blockchain ecosystem to address this perceived or real impediments for the uptake of the technology. We propose one of the first such pedagogical tool for training in blockchain using an adversarial sandbox adaptive serious game approach for students and technology professionals. We further propose use of AI to enhance NPC interactivity based on player’s responses. We plan to evaluate this serious game on a subjective metrics that is based on a game experience questionnaire.

Reducing Smart Contract Runtime Errors on Ethereum

A variety of applications can be implemented on blockchains by writing smart contracts, but failed transactions caused by runtime errors waste computation, storage, and fees. In this article, we propose a new way to reduce runtime errors on Ethereum, a popular blockchain platform.

Understanding (Mis)Behavior on the EOSIO Blockchain

EOSIO has become one of the most popular blockchain platforms since its mainnet launch in June 2018. In contrast to the traditional PoW-based systems (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), which are limited by low throughput, EOSIO is the first high throughput Delegated Proof of Stake system that has been widely adopted by many decentralized applications. Although EOSIO has millions of accounts and billions of transactions, little is known about its ecosystem, especially related to security and fraud. In this paper, we perform a large-scale measurement study of the EOSIO blockchain and its associated DApps. We gather a large-scale dataset of EOSIO and characterize activities including money transfers, account creation and contract invocation. Using our insights, we then develop techniques to automatically detect bots and fraudulent activity. We discover thousands of bot accounts (over 30% of the accounts in the platform) and a number of real-world attacks (301 attack accounts). By the time of our study, 80 attack accounts we identified have been confirmed by DApp teams, causing 828,824 EOS tokens losses (roughly $2.6 million) in total.

Studying gas exceptions in blockchain-based cloud applications

Blockchain-based cloud application (BCP) is an emerging cloud application architecture. By moving trust-critical functions onto blockchain, BCP offers unprecedented function transparency and data integrity. Ethereum is by far the most popular blockchain platform chosen for BCP. In Ethereum, special programs named smart contracts are often used to implement key components for BCP. By design, users can send transactions to smart contracts, which will automatically lead to code execution and state modification. However, unlike regular programs, smart contracts are restricted in execution by gas limit, i.e., a form of runtime resource. If a transaction uses up all available gas, an out of gas exception (OG) will trigger, reverting state until right before that transaction.In this work, we study the out of gas exceptions (or gas exceptions in short) on Ethereum empirically for the very first time. In particular, we collect exception transactions using an instrumented Ethereum client. By investigation, we found gas exceptions stand out in terms of both occurrences and losses. Moreover, we focused on individual contracts and transactions, aiming at discovering and identifying common causing factors triggering these exceptions. At last, we also investigate existing tools in preventing gas exceptions. Our results suggest further research and study in this direction.

Understanding (Mis)Behavior on the EOSIO Blockchain

EOSIO has become one of the most popular blockchain platforms since its mainnet launch in June 2018. In contrast to the traditional PoW-based systems (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), which are limited by low throughput, EOSIO is the first high throughput Delegated Proof of Stake system that has been widely adopted by many decentralized applications. Although EOSIO has millions of accounts and billions of transactions, little is known about its ecosystem, especially related to security and fraud. In this paper, we perform a large-scale measurement study of the EOSIO blockchain and its associated DApps. We gather a large-scale dataset of EOSIO and characterize activities including money transfers, account creation and contract invocation. Using our insights, we then develop techniques to automatically detect bots and fraudulent activity. We discover thousands of bot accounts (over 30% of the accounts in the platform) and a number of real-world attacks (301 attack accounts). By the time of our study, 80 attack accounts we identified have been confirmed by DApp teams, causing 828,824 EOS tokens losses (roughly \$2.6 million) in total.

Wi-Fi-Dependent Consensus Mechanism for Constrained Devices Using Blockchain Technology

Consensus mechanisms are at the core of any Distributed Ledger Technology. They define how transactions are validated and verified, how the network resolves conflicts and protects against malicious intent, and how multiple devices on a distributed network with no central authority arrive at the same global view of the ledger. Experience with the consensus mechanisms employed in popular blockchain platforms have warranted years of research into more scalable and energy-efficient consensus mechanisms for a green society using constrained devices. Most of the “high-security” consensus mechanisms require the use of computational resources which are simply not available to devices with a constrained nature. Hence, the presence and activity of these devices do not contribute to the security of the ledger, irrespective of how numerous they are on the network. In this paper, we propose a novel consensus scheme, fully dependent on WiFi technology, suitable for constrained devices. Whilst in traditional Blockchain consensus mechanisms, constrained devices do not add to the security of the ledger, the security of our consensus mechanism increases with the number of connected devices.