Private Blockchain Research Articles

Ensuring Zero Trust IoT Data Privacy: Differential Privacy in Blockchain using Federated Learning

Ensuring Zero Trust IoT Data Privacy: Differential Privacy in Blockchain using Federated Learning

Secure and Transparent Mobility in Smart Cities: Revolutionizing AVNs to Predict Traffic Congestion Using MapReduce, Private Blockchain, and XAI

Secure and Transparent Mobility in Smart Cities: Revolutionizing AVNs to Predict Traffic Congestion Using MapReduce, Private Blockchain, and XAI

Environmental factors of sustainable development in China and Hong Kong

This article discusses China has become the second largest issuer of green bonds in the world after the United States. The authors carried out an analysis The Green Bond Index shows relatively good results due to its long–term outlook and high creditworthiness, as well as related industry factors. In recent years, China’s green bond market has developed rapidly and has now become the second largest green bond market in the world after the United States. Understanding the reasons that contributed to the growth and excellent market performance can help investors determine whether to include Chinese green bonds in their investment portfolios and how. The Hong Kong government has announced the successful placement of tokenized “green” bonds in the amount of HK$ 800 million (about $101.7 million). A press release from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) states that this is the world's first tokenized “green” bond issued by the government. "Green" bonds are debt securities that are issued to attract investment in projects related to improving the environmental situation. The issue of tokens was made by HSBC bank on a private blockchain. Subsequent payments of coupon income, settlements on transactions on the secondary market and redemption of bonds will also be carried out in digital form. For the tokenization of bonds, the Goldman Sachs GS DAP bank platform was used, and settlements on bonds are carried out by the Central Clearing System for Debt Instruments (CMU) HKMA. Tokenization of “green” bonds with a yield of 4.05% and a maturity of 1 year is one of the pilot projects announced by the Hong Kong government as part of the virtual asset market development plan.

Confidential Transaction Balance Verification by the Net Using Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs

One of the main trends for the monitoring and control of business processes is to implement these processes via private blockchain systems. These systems must ensure data privacy and verifiability for the entire network here denoted by ‘Net’. In addition, every business activity should be declared to a trusted third party (TTP), such as an Audit Authority (AA), for tax declaration and collection purposes. We present a solution for a confidential and verifiable realization of transactions based on the Unspent Transaction Output (UTxO) paradigm. This means that the total sum of transaction inputs (incomes) $In$ must be equal to the total sum of transaction outputs (expenses) $Ex$, satisfying the balance equation $In=Ex$. Privacy in a private blockchain must be achieved through the encryption of actual transaction values. However, it is crucial that all participants in the network be able to verify the validity of the transaction balance equation. This poses a challenge with probabilistically encrypted data. Moreover, the inputs and outputs are encrypted with different public keys. With the introduction of the AA, the number of different public keys for encryption can be reduced to two. Incomes are encrypted with the Receiver’s public key and expenses with the AA’s public key. The novelty of our realization lies in taking additively-multiplicative, homomorphic ElGamal encryption and integrating it with a proposed paradigm of modified Schnorr identification providing a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZKP) using a cryptographically secure h-function. Introducing the AA as a structural element in a blockchain system based on the UTxO enables effective verification of encrypted transaction data for the Net. This is possible because the proposed NIZKP is able to prove the equivalency of two ciphertexts encrypted with two different public keys and different actors. This integration allows all users on the Net to check the UTxO-based transaction balance equation on encrypted data. The security considerations of the proposed solution are presented.

Aid decision on blockchain project: public vs private

Blockchain technology has become a reality and its experimentation promises a future of innovative and beneficial technology. In almost all fields, this technology has seduced the actors because of its potentialities, namely traceability, transparency, security, immutability, etc. However, setting up such a technology adapted to one's needs is far from being a classic project. Indeed, a technical and organizational decision support is very important during a blockchain project to measure its actions and anticipate the risks. In this paper, we will focus on the choice of the public or private blockchain according to technical, functional criteria, and a decision aid module based on the Fuzzy method is proposed to do so. The results obtained prove the effectiveness of our approach used in this paper.

Blockchain Privacy and Self-regulatory Compliance: Methods and Applications

Blockchain Privacy and Self-regulatory Compliance: Methods and Applications

ОПТИМІЗАЦІЯ БІЗНЕС-ПРОЦЕСІВ УКРАЇНСЬКИХ КОМПАНІЙ НА ОСНОВІ БЛОКЧЕЙН-ТЕХНОЛОГІЇ

The key foundations of the blockchain technology, which determine the resistance of the systems built on it to external interference and the ability to work in an aggressive external environment, are considered. The first fundamental basis of the blockchain is the hash function. Its role is to create a unique digital fingerprint of each block of the network, and it also facilitates the use of other key solutions in the blockchain architecture. The second basis of the blockchain is its use of a "private-public key" pair, which allows you to ensure the signature of certain data, for example, transactions in crypto networks, as well as guaranteed verification of the authenticity of this data. The third basis of the blockchain is its construction in the form of a chain of blocks, the connection between which is ensured by including the hash function of the previous block to the next block. The fourth basis of the blockchain is the use of specialized consensus algorithms that ensure the correct addition of new blocks to the network. The fifth foundation of the blockchain, which ensures its protection, is the distributed architecture, that is, the decentralization of this network. In order to substantiate the choice of optimal blockchain-based systems for solving the problems of improving the efficiency of business processes at the level of individual companies, four types of blockchain were analyzed. The first of them - public - is the most common due to its use in cryptocurrency networks, which historically became the first powerful impetus for the development of blockchain technology. However, for application in the business processes of individual companies, at the time of the research, the private type of blockchain is more widely used, despite the presence of some significant shortcomings. Partial elimination of the shortcomings of the private blockchain ensures the use of two more types - the hybrid blockchain and the most modern blockchain of the "consortium" type.

Використання блокчейну першого рівня LTO Network для автоматизації міжорганізаційних бізнес-процесів

The article is devoted to the consideration of blockchain technology as a means of automating inter-organizational business processes. It is noted that the digitalization and automation of internal business processes bring significant benefits in terms of increasing productivity and reducing costs. However, organizations face difficulties when trying to obtain such benefits for inter-organizational processes, partly due to a lack of trust. This paper considers a blockchain approach to address this problem. Bitcoin has demonstrated how blockchain can provide a distributed system without the need for trust through cryptography and decentralization. LTO extends this approach with a decentralized workflow engine for ad-hoc collaboration. Information is exchanged between participants through private event chains for each process and hashed on a public blockchain. This hybrid approach allows organizations to comply with data protection requirements and avoid scalability issues typical of blockchain projects. The advantages of LTO live contracts over Ethereum smart contracts are discussed. Live contracts do not contain values directly, but describe the interaction between the parties, unlike the cryptographic "boxes" of smart contracts. Modeling live contracts as finite state machines allows visualizing them in the form of a flowchart. Alternative modeling techniques such as Petri nets and BPMN are discussed. The article describes a scenario-based approach to defining a workflow containing states, actions, participants, assets, and embedded data objects. The features of data objects, participant identifiers, process execution and its adaptability are detailed. The author explains the operation of a private event chain as an ad-hoc private blockchain that ensures the consistency of the process state between nodes. Methods of ensuring data privacy are discussed. The second part of the article is devoted to the global public blockchain LTO to confirm information from private event chains. The consensus algorithm is explained based on the importance of token ownership and its use to prevent abuse. Optimizations, such as the NG protocol and aggregation blocks, are discussed to scale with a large number of transactions. The last part describes the architecture of the platform and its components: microservices, application layers, container orchestration. The platform makes it easy to digitalize and automate inter-organizational interactions using live contracts on the blockchain.

NephroCAGE-German-Canadian Consortium on AI for Improved Kidney Transplantation Outcome: Protocol for an Algorithm Development and Validation Study.

Recent advances in hardware and software enabled the use of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for analysis of complex data in a wide range of daily-life use cases. We aim to explore the benefits of applying AI to a specific use case in transplant nephrology: risk prediction for severe posttransplant events. For the first time, we combine multinational real-world transplant data, which require specific legal and technical protection measures. The German-Canadian NephroCAGE consortium aims to develop and evaluate specific processes, software tools, and methods to (1) combine transplant data of more than 8000 cases over the past decades from leading transplant centers in Germany and Canada, (2) implement specific measures to protect sensitive transplant data, and (3) use multinational data as a foundation for developing high-quality prognostic AI models. To protect sensitive transplant data addressing the first and second objectives, we aim to implement a decentralized NephroCAGE federated learning infrastructure upon a private blockchain. Our NephroCAGE federated learning infrastructure enables a switch of paradigms: instead of pooling sensitive data into a central database for analysis, it enables the transfer of clinical prediction models (CPMs) to clinical sites for local data analyses. Thus, sensitive transplant data reside protected in their original sites while the comparable small algorithms are exchanged instead. For our third objective, we will compare the performance of selected AI algorithms, for example, random forest and extreme gradient boosting, as foundation for CPMs to predict severe short- and long-term posttransplant risks, for example, graft failure or mortality. The CPMs will be trained on donor and recipient data from retrospective cohorts of kidney transplant patients. We have received initial funding for NephroCAGE in February 2021. All clinical partners have applied for and received ethics approval as of 2022. The process of exploration of clinical transplant database for variable extraction has started at all the centers in 2022. In total, 8120 patient records have been retrieved as of August 2023. The development and validation of CPMs is ongoing as of 2023. For the first time, we will (1) combine kidney transplant data from nephrology centers in Germany and Canada, (2) implement federated learning as a foundation to use such real-world transplant data as a basis for the training of CPMs in a privacy-preserving way, and (3) develop a learning software system to investigate population specifics, for example, to understand population heterogeneity, treatment specificities, and individual impact on selected posttransplant outcomes. DERR1-10.2196/48892.

Blockchain privacy and regulatory compliance: Towards a practical equilibrium

We study Privacy Pools, a novel smart contract-based privacy-enhancing protocol. The protocol introduces a mechanism for users to reveal certain properties of their transaction without having to reveal the transaction itself. The core concept involves allowing users to publish a zero-knowledge proof, demonstrating that their funds (do not) originate from known (un-)lawful sources, without publicly revealing their entire transaction history. This is achieved by proving membership in custom association sets, which are designed to demonstrate compliance with regulatory frameworks or social consensus. We illustrate how this mechanism can create a separating equilibrium between compliant and non-compliant withdrawals. Our work describes the technical underpinnings, incentives, and broader implications of this mechanism, highlighting how Privacy Pools-like protocols can create more private yet compliant blockchain transactions.

Enhanced Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance via Dynamic Hierarchy Management and Location-Based Clustering.

Blockchain is a distributed database technology that operates in a P2P network and is used in various domains. Depending on its structure, blockchain can be classified into types such as public and private. A consensus algorithm is essential in blockchain, and various consensus algorithms have been applied. In particular, a non-competitive consensus algorithm called PBFT is mainly used in private blockchains. However, there are limitations to scalability. This paper proposes an enhanced PBFT with dynamic hierarchy management and location-based clustering to overcome these problems. The proposed method clusters nodes based on location information and adjusts the dynamic hierarchy to optimize consensus latency. As a result of the experiment, the proposed PBFT showed significant performance improvement compared to the existing typical PBFT and Dynamic Layer Management PBFT (DLM-PBFT). The proposed PBFT method showed a processing performance improvement rate of approximately 107% to 128% compared to PBFT, and 11% to 99% compared to DLM-PBFT.

Enhancing computational scalability in Blockchain by leveraging improvement in consensus algorithm

Accommodating an increasing number of users in the Blockchain network has moved to the forefront of discussion. It is also evident that without jeopardizing the data security in Blockchain, it is of indispensable need to devise an appropriate method for improving the scalability trait of Blockchain. In this article, we have proposed a consensus method that is having the potential to improve the scalability of the Private Blockchain. The system, at first, mitigates latency arising from kernel schedulers, ensuring that the application consistently has access to an available core for transaction processing. Secondly, the committee system alleviates the network's workload, preventing spurious transactions from monopolizing network resources and impeding its efficiency. Extensive experimentation is made by considering various scenarios of transaction with CPU isolation and application sticking to core 2 with varied priority. Based on the number of transactions performed per second, the proposed system is compared with different existing consensus mechanisms working in various types of Blockchains. Also, a detailed discussion is presented on the critical analysis of the adopted research mechanism. Overall, the proposed systems outperforms to other systems in various parameters of blockchain network scalability.

Interoperability in Blockchain: A Survey

This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive survey on blockchain interoperability, where interoperability is defined as the ability of blockchains to flexibly transfer assets, share data, and invoke smart contracts across a mix of public, private, and consortium blockchains without any changes to the underlying blockchain systems. Analyzing the vast landscape of both research papers and industry projects, we classify the existing works into five categories, namely, (1) sidechains, (2) notary schemes, (3) hashed time lock contracts (HTLC), (4) relays, and (5) blockchain agnostic protocols. We analyze the existing works under a taxonomy that consists of system and safety characteristics, such as decentralization, direction of communication, locking mechanism, verification mechanism, trust, safety, liveness, and atomicity. Different from other surveys, we are the first to evaluate the performance of some representative interoperability approaches between Bitcoin and Ethereumcovering sidechains, notary schemes, and HTLCs. Even though the performance of cross-chain transactions is low (typically fewer than 10 transactions per second), the main reason is the underlying blockchain ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g.</i> , Bitcoin and Ethereum) and not the interoperability approach. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and possible research directions inblockchain interoperability. For example, we identify challenges in interoperability acrosspermissioned and permissionless blockchains, in interacting with scripting blockchains, in security and privacy.

Blockchain-based Distributed Financial Trust Evaluation System and Operation Mechanism

The functioning of the present-day financial system relies on the movement of funds and information. DeFi (Decentralized Finance), utilising blockchain technology, possesses the capability to establish autonomous and trustworthy smart contracts that do not require the involvement of intermediaries for escrow and auditing purposes. This results in the creation of a financial system that is characterised by its openness and transparency, devoid of any form of identity-based discrimination, and accessible to all individuals. The utilisation of a private blockchain system facilitates enhanced efficiency, while concurrently ensuring the attainment of privacy and security objectives. Moreover, such a system aligns more closely with prevailing regulatory standards. The Coalition Chain has the characteristic of a scale-free network, with its nodes following a power law distribution. This work aims to investigate credit governance from the standpoint of group behaviour and provide optimisation solutions accordingly.

Ensuring transparency, confidentiality, and deterrence of political influence in journalism using IPFS, private, public, and semi-public blockchains

Ensuring transparency, confidentiality, and deterrence of political influence in journalism using IPFS, private, public, and semi-public blockchains

Blockchain-based biometric identity management

In recent years, face biometrics recognition systems are a wide space of a computer usage which is mostly employed for security purpose. The main purpose of the face biometrics recognition system is to authenticate a user from a given database. Due to the widespread expansion of the surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology, a robust face recognition system required. The recognition system needs to store a large number of training samples in any storage unit, that time hackers can access and control that data. So, Protecting and managing sensitive data is essential object. This requires a technique that preserve the privacy of individuals, maintain data integrity, and prevent information leakage. The storage of biometric templates on centralized servers has been associated with potential privacy risks. To address this issue, we have developed and implemented a proof-of-concept facial biometric identification system that uses a private Blockchain platform and smart contract technology. So, the proposed approach is presented a secure and tamper-proof from data breaches as well as hacks with data availability, by using the Blockchain platform to store face images. This paper aims to utilize Blockchain technology to identify individuals based on their biometric traits, specifically facial recognition system makes it tamper-proof (immutable) ensuring security. The system consists of enrolment and authentication phases. Blockchain technology uses peer-to-peer communication, cryptography, consensus processes, and smart contracts to ensure the security. The proposed approach was tested on two popular datasets: CelebFaces Attributes (CelebA) and large-scale face UTKFace datasets. The experimental results indicate that the system yields highly performance outcomes, as evidenced by the Equal Error Rate (EER) values of 0.05% and 0.07% obtained for the CelebA and UTKFace datasets, respectively. The system was compared to three baseline methods and scored the lowest Equal Error Rate.

Enhancing blockchain security through natural language processing and real-time monitoring

We describe implementing and testing a security monitoring system for Blockchain-based applications by performing Log Analysis through natural language processing (NLP) techniques and enabling queries via REST API. The study focuses on the Hyperledger Fabric framework, a highly reliable and scalable open-source software platform for private blockchains. The real-time monitoring system aims to detect and prevent attack scenarios on the network structure and smart contracts, such as DDOS, Sybil, and Eclipse. The vulnerability analysis is extended to inspecting Docker containers to detect network-based attacks. Although the case study focuses on Hyperledger Fabric, the techniques used are general and applicable to all Blockchain-based systems and fulfill the need to provide adequate monitoring capabilities for blockchain implementations.

HealthBlock: A Blockchain-IoT Fusion for Secure Healthcare Data Exchange

Managing healthcare data while ensuring its security and privacy is critical to providing quality care to patients. However, traditional approaches to healthcare data sharing have limitations, including the risk of data breaches and the lack of privacy-preserving mechanisms. This research paper proposes a novel hybrid blockchain-IoT approach for privacy-preserving healthcare data sharing that addresses these challenges. Our system incorporates a private blockchain for protected and tamper-proof data sharing, with privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy and homomorphic encryption to protect patient data. IoT devices are utilized to collect and transmit real-time data, equipped with privacy-preserving mechanisms such as data anonymization and secure transmission protocols. Our approach achieved an accuracy rate of 98% for access control and a 99.6% success rate for data privacy protection. Furthermore, our proposed system demonstrated improved data storage and retrieval performance, with a data storage overhead reduction of up to 86% and a data retrieval time reduction of up to 81%. These results indicate the potential of our approach to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of healthcare data management, contributing to improved patient care outcomes.

Survey on Document Storage and Verification System using Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology promises to be hugely trending and empowering in financial domain computing applications. The digital economy is becoming an integral part of modern life. So as the use of the digital world increases there are more chances of decrease is the security level. So more the use of digitization more the frauds and less the security. In some cases of personal data, leakage has brought back into the focus the security issues with the different identity sharing mechanisms. A customer is expected to provide his identity for authentication by different agencies. So the KYC process deals with the identification of the user. And in turn, provides the required security. The KYC procedures which are used by the banks are completely dependent on the encryption which is slow and it can lead to the loss of customer details to other theirs party financial institutions. This system can be efficient by using Blockchain technology, which has the potential to automate a lot of manual processes and it is also resistant to hacks of any sort. The immutable blockchain block and its distributed ledger is the perfect complement to the process of KYC. With the addition of smart contacts, fraud detection can be automated. For KYC identity details storage we can make use of any types of KYC. So, the banks can develop a shared private blockchain within the bank premise and the same can be used for verifying the documents. This allows the user to get control of their sensitive documents and also makes it easier for banks to obtain the documents they need for compliance

Privacy and Security of Blockchain in Healthcare: Applications, Challenges, and Future Perspectives

Blockchain offers a cutting-edge solution for storing medical data, carrying out medical transactions, and establishing trust for medical data integration and exchange in a decentralized open healthcare network setting. While blockchain in healthcare has garnered considerable attention, privacy and security concerns remain at the center of the debate when adopting blockchain for information exchange in healthcare. This paper presents research on the subject of blockchain’s privacy and security in healthcare from 2017 to 2022. In light of the existing literature, this critical evaluation assesses the current state of affairs, with a particular emphasis on papers that deal with practical applications and difficulties. By providing a critical evaluation, this review provides insight into prospective future study directions and advances.