Validation Of Transactions Research Articles

Blockchain Financial Statements: Innovating Financial Reporting, Accounting, and Liquidity Management

The complexity and interconnection within the financial ecosystem demand innovative solutions to improve transparency, security, and efficiency in financial reporting and liquidity management, while also reducing accounting fraud. This paper presents Blockchain Financial Statements (BFS), an innovative accounting system designed to address accounting fraud, reduce data manipulation, and misrepresentation of company financial claims, by enhancing availability of the real-time and tamper-proof accounting data, underpinned by a verifiable approach to financial transactions and reporting. The primary goal of this research is to design, develop, and validate a blockchain-based accounting prototype—the BFS system—that can automate transformation of transactional data, generated by traditional business activity into comprehensive financial statements. Incorporating a Design Science Research Methodology with Domain-Driven Design, this study constructs a BFS artefact that harmonises accounting standards with blockchain technology and business orchestration. The resulting Java implementation of the BFS system demonstrates successful integration of blockchain technology into accounting practices, showing potential in real-time validation of transactions, immutable record-keeping, and enhancement of transparency and efficiency of financial reporting. The BFS framework and implementation signify an advancement in the application of blockchain technology in accounting. It offers a functional solution that enhances transparency, accuracy, and efficiency of financial transactions between banks and businesses. This research underlines the necessity for further exploration into blockchain’s potential within accounting systems, suggesting a promising direction for future innovations in tamper-evident financial reporting and liquidity management.

Secure data access using blockchain technology through IoT cloud and fabric environment

AbstractIn the current landscape, staying abreast of the latest technological advancements is a formidable challenge, especially given the deluge of data inundating the internet. The realization has dawned that effectively managing the surge in emerging data necessitates the integration of multiple technologies. In pursuit of this objective, the Internet of Things (IoT), renowned for its sensor‐based data capture capabilities, is frequently coupled with blockchain technology to ensure secure data storage and access. This amalgamation, in turn, leverages the cloud environment when data volume surpasses a machine's processing capacity, thus mitigating infrastructure and maintenance costs. This study endeavors to optimize data storage within the blocks of the blockchain (BCT) by storing an index that points to the actual data. This innovative approach not only conserves storage space but also enhances operational efficiency. Furthermore, it simplifies the task of identifying malicious or faulty nodes deployed at different locations for data capture within the prescribed time frame. To exemplify this implementation, a case study is presented, focusing on securing user votes through the creation of contracts. The results showcased underscore the preference for a permissioned blockchain, such as Fabric, over a permissionless one, like Ethereum, particularly in the context of security considerations. The findings reveal that as the number of operations (in this case, votes cast) increases, Ethereum's performance deteriorates, while Fabric exhibits exceptional robustness. Additionally, the study analyzes sensor data simulated via IoT nodes before and after the application of security algorithms to underscore the significance of the proposed Secure Cloud‐Based Blockchain (SCB2) model. The analysis encompasses various facets, including the creation, validation, and computation times of transactions and blocks within a node, and positions the model favorably in comparison to existing literature.

Self-Healing Secure Blockchain Framework in Microgrids

Blockchain has recently been depicted as a secure protocol for information exchange in cyber-physical microgrids. However, it is still found vulnerable to consensus manipulation attacks. These stealth attacks are often difficult to detect as they use kernel-level access to mask their actions. In this paper, we firstly build a trusted and secured peer-to-peer network mechanism for physical DC microgrids’ validation of transactions over Distributed Ledger. Secondly, we leverage from a physics-informed approach for detecting malware-infected nodes and then recovering from stealth attacks using a self-healing recovery scheme augmented into the microgrid Blockchain network. This scheme allows compromised nodes to adapt to a reconstructed trustworthy signal in a multi-hop manner using corresponding measurements from the reliable nodes in the network. Additionally, recognizing the possible threat of denial-of-service attacks and random time delays (where information sharing via communication channels is blocked), we also integrate a model-free predictive controller with the proposed system that can locally reconstruct an expected version of the attacked/delayed signals. This supplements the capabilities of Blockchain, enabling it to detect and mitigate consensus manipulation attempts, and network latencies.

Accelerating block lifecycle on blockchain via hardware transactional memory

The processing of block lifecycles is essential to the efficiency of a blockchain, which consists of four steps: creation, execution, consensus, and validation. The permissionless blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the performance bottleneck of consensus protocols. With recent advances in consensus protocols, the execution and validation of transactions have become the new performance bottleneck.We propose a novel framework, called FastBlock, to speed up the execution and validation steps by introducing fine-grained concurrency. Our early design of FastBlock supported three key modules: (1) a symbolic execution-based analyzer that automatically identifies minimal atomic sections in each transaction; (2) a concurrent execution step that executes possibly conflicting transactions in parallel using hardware transactional memory; (3) a concurrent validation step that introduces a happen-before relation to deterministically re-execute transactions.The improved FastBlock presented in this article supports the nonce mechanism to schedule concurrent transactions from the same account. Moreover, we empirically study the impact of concurrency on Ethereum except for performance and shed light on potential optimizations of FastBlock. Finally, we implemented FastBlock and then evaluated the performance of FastBlock. Our result shows that the FastBlock outperforms state-of-art solutions significantly in performance: the execution step and validation step speed up to 3.0x and 2.3x on average over the original serial model, respectively, with eight concurrent threads. In addition, we evaluated the impact of the nonce mechanism, and the result shows that the performance loss caused by this mechanism is acceptable in practice.

Cloud-Based Architecture for Production Information Exchange in European Micro-Factory Context

In a constantly changing world, information stands as one of the most valuable assets for a manufacturing site. However, exchanging information is not a straightforward process among factories, and concerns regarding the trustability and validation of transactions between various stakeholders have emerged within the context of micro-factories. This work presents an architecture designed to enable information exchange among heterogeneous stakeholders, taking advantage of the cloud infrastructure. It was designed to enable the use of several tools, connected through a middleware system deployed on the cloud. To demonstrate the potential of this architecture, a platform was instantiated, and two use cases—designed to accurately represent real manufacturing sites—were implemented.

A survey on blockchain sharding

As a promising technology, blockchain has found widespread application in numerous decentralized systems. However, the scalability problem of blockchain has drawn considerable criticism. Sharding, an effective technology, offers a solution to enhance blockchain scalability by enabling parallel validation and confirmation of transactions or new block generation. Although extensive research has been conducted on sharding, the existing literature still lacks a thorough review on its current state of arts with comprehensive analysis and evaluation. In this paper, we propose a series of evaluation criteria regarding scalability, applicability, and reliability. Additionally, we classify the cutting-edge sharding schemes based on blockchain type and sharding techniques. We then provide a comprehensive overview of these existing schemes by analyzing their respective advantages and disadvantages according to the proposed criteria. At the end of the survey, we highlight open issues and suggest future research directions based on the results of our meticulous analysis.

TiQuE: Improving the Transactional Performance of Analytical Systems for True Hybrid Workloads

Transactions have been a key issue in database management for a long time and there are a plethora of architectures and algorithms to support and implement them. The current state-of-the-art is focused on storage management and is tightly coupled with its design, leading, for instance, to the need for completely new engines to support new features such as Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP). We address this challenge with a proposal to implement transactional logic in a query language such as SQL. This means that our approach can be layered on existing analytical systems but that the retrieval of a transactional snapshot and the validation of update transactions runs in the server and can take advantage of advanced query execution capabilities of an optimizing query engine. We demonstrate our proposal, TiQuE, on MonetDB and obtain an average 500x improvement in transactional throughput while retaining good performance on analytical queries, making it competitive with the state-of-the-art HTAP systems.

The mediator and moderator roles of perceived cost on the relationship between organizational readiness and the intention to adopt blockchain technology

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is expected to revolutionize the world of trusted transactions. Through a combination of cryptographic techniques, a distributed, shared, and immutable ledger, consensus validation of transactions, and a financial audit trail, blockchain is poised to do for businesses what the Internet did for communication. With its promise of reducing cost, time, friction, and fraud in business transactions and ensuring trust, identity management, and reputation management, companies around the world are now contemplating their transition to blockchain versions of themselves. However, the cost of implementing such technology and its effect on the readiness of the organization to adopt blockchain has not been fully explored yet. This study examines the mediation and moderation roles of the perceived cost on the relationship between organization readiness and the intention to adopt blockchain. Data was collected from blockchain experts and Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used as the analytical tool to test all of the framework hypotheses. To investigate the potential managerial implications of this topic, Importance-Performance Map Analysis (IPMA) was utilized. The findings reveal that perceived cost is not a mediator; rather, it moderates the relationship between the TRI (Technology Readiness Index) enablers and the TRI inhibitors with the intention to adopt blockchain. In terms of importance, the empirical data analysis through IPMA revealed that the enablers construct is the most important factor, while perceived cost has the highest performance on the intention to adopt blockchain. With this discovery, our findings are expected to aid decision-makers in prioritizing and improving the enabling aspects required for the successful adoption of blockchain technology.

Two-layered blockchain-based admission control for secure UAV networks

The frequent replacement requirement of UAVs for recharging outputs an extreme number of messaging for admission control of end-users. There are many studies that try to optimize the network capacity in an energy-efficient manner. However, they do not consider the security of data and control channels, which is the urgent requirement of 5G. Blockchain handles secure systems. However, the high numbered transactions in blockchain may cause bottlenecks while considering computational delay and throughput of end-user. In UAVs, a high percentage of battery is consumed for computational tasks instead of communication tasks. Therefore, to handle security by considering the computational needs, this paper proposes a novel two-layered blockchain-based admission control in UAV networks. It has two layers named as side-chain for UAVs and off-chain for end-users building in a decentralized manner. In the former one, the data bearer of end-users is protected by the side-chain of each transaction which is signed by admitted end-users and UAVs. Here, each transaction includes a unique transaction id, nonce value, IMSI of the user, RNTI of UAV, signed data, and hash value. In the latter one, the off-chain is built by signing admission contracts between users in a decentralized manner and the Merkle tree is constructed for the off-chain where the root hash is only stored in a side-chain. Then, the number of transactions that should be validated is extremely decreased. Moreover, PoS is used for the validation of transactions where the validator is selected randomly instead of the competition requirement as in PoW. A novel blockchain-based admission control algorithm isolates readmission control of end-users to 5G core-side during UAV replacement. According to performance evaluation, the proposed approach serves end-users by 64.2% better QoS than the conventional one during UAV replacement. Moreover, it keeps edge delay in acceptable range by using Merkle tree and PoS.

A Nuanced perspective on blockchain technology and healthcare

The advantages of blockchain technology are numerous and its applications in healthcare industry are still under-estimated. In a context of increasing number of applications in healthcare sector it is important to adopt this technology in a way that is not at the origin of health issues for human beings. This short article discusses the potential side effects of a blockchain based healthcare industry that could mainly be due to the increasing needs in electricity for validation of all blockchain-based transactions\\records. This note explains how and why this aspect could eventually generate some crypto-damages and ultimately might generate health issues. The aim of this essay is to provide some thoughts on the way blockchain technology could (or could not) be implemented to ensure a real sustainable, ethical and consistent healthcare system.

Tuxedo

Proof-of-Work~(PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time~$\mathbbI $ between blocks for validating smart contracts present in transactions. In such systems, block validation and PoW mining are typically performed sequentially, the former by CPUs and the latter by ASICs. A trivial increase in validation time~$(τ)$ introduces the popularly known Verifier's Dilemma, and as we demonstrate, causes more forking and hurts fairness. Large τ also reduces the tolerance for safety against a Byzantine adversary. Solutions that offload validation to a set of non-chain nodes (a.k.a. off-chain approaches) suffer from trust and performance issues that are non-trivial to resolve. In this paper, we present Tuxedo, the first on-chain protocol to theoretically scale τ/\mathbbI \approx 1$ in PoW blockchains. The key innovation in Tuxedo is to perform CPU-based block processing in \em parallel to ASIC mining. We achieve this by allowing miners to delay validation of transactions in a block by up to ζ blocks, where ζ is a system parameter. We perform security analysis of Tuxedo considering all possible adversarial strategies in a synchronous network with maximum end-to-end delay Δ and demonstrate that Tuxedo achieves security equivalent to known results for longest chain PoW Nakamoto consensus. Our prototype implementation of Tuxedo atop Ethereum demonstrates that it can scale τ without suffering the harmful effects of naïve scaling up of τ/\mathbbI $ in existing blockchains.

Impact of Forecasting Models Errors in a Peer-to-Peer Energy Sharing Market

The use of energy sharing models in smart grids has been widely addressed in the literature. However, feasible technical solutions that can deploy these models into reality, as well as the correct use of energy forecasts are not properly addressed. This paper proposes a simple, yet viable and feasible, solution to deploy energy management systems on the end-user-side in order to enable not only energy forecasting but also a distributed discriminatory-price auction peer-to-peer energy transaction market. This work also analyses the impact of four energy forecasting models on energy transactions: a mathematical model, a support-vector machine model, an eXtreme Gradient Boosting model, and a TabNet model. To test the proposed solution and models, the system was deployed in five small offices and three residential households, achieving a maximum of energy costs reduction of 10.89% within the community, ranging from 0.24% to 57.43% for each individual agent. The results demonstrated the potential of peer-to-peer energy transactions to promote energy cost reductions and enable the validation of auction-based energy transactions and the use of energy forecasting models in today’s buildings and end-users.

Design of a Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Platform Using Multilayered Semi-Permissioned Blockchain

A secured and scalable Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading platform can facilitate the integration of renewable energy and thus contribute to building sustainable energy infrastructure. The decentralized architecture of blockchain makes it a befitting candidate to actualize an efficient P2P energy trading market. However, for a sustainable and dynamic blockchain-based P2P energy trading platform, few critical aspects such as security, privacy and scalability need to be addressed with high priority. This paper proposes a blockchain-based solution for energy trading among the consumers which ensures the systems’ security, protects users’ privacy, and improves the overall scalability. More specifically, we develop a multilayered semi-permissioned blockchain-based platform to facilitate energy transactions. The practical byzantine fault tolerant algorithm is employed as the underlying consensus for verification and validation of transactions which ensures the system’s tolerance against internal error and malicious attacks. Additionally, we introduce the idea of quality of transaction (QoT)—a reward system for the participants of the network that eventually helps determine the participant’s eligibility for future transactions. The resiliency of the framework against the transaction malleability attack is demonstrated with two uses cases. Finally, a qualitative analysis is presented to indicate the system’s usefulness in improving the overall security, privacy, and scalability of the network.

Efficient Decentralized Sharing Economy Model based on Blockchain Technology: A Case Study of Najm for Insurance Services Company

Blockchain is an emerging technology that is used to address ownership, centrality, and security issues in different fields. The blockchain technology has converted centralized applications into decentralized and distributed ones. In existing sharing economy applications, there are issues related to low efficiency and high complexity of services. However, blockchain technology can be adopted to overcome these issues by effectively opening up secure information channels of the sharing economy industry and other related parties, encouraging industry integration and improving the ability of sharing economy organizations to readily gain required information. This paper discusses blockchain technology to enhance the development of insurance services by proposing a five-layer decentralized model using Ethereum platform. The Najm for Insurance Services Company in Saudi Arabia was employed in a case study for applying the proposed model to effectively solve the issue of online underwriting, and to securely and efficiently enhance the verification and validation of transactions. The paper concludes with a review of the lessons learned and provides suggestions for blockchain application development process.

Tangle 2.0 Leaderless Nakamoto Consensus on the Heaviest DAG

We introduce the theoretical foundations of the Tangle 2.0, a probabilistic leaderless consensus protocol based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) called the Tangle. The Tangle naturally succeeds the blockchain as its next evolutionary step as it offers features suited to establish more efficient and scalable distributed ledger solutions. Consensus is no longer found in the longest chain but on the heaviest DAG, where PoW is replaced by a stake- or reputation-based weight function. The DAG structure and the underlying Reality-based UTXO Ledger allow parallel validation of transactions without the need for total ordering. Moreover, it enables the removal of the intermediary of miners and validators, allowing a pure two-step process that follows the \emph{propose-vote} paradigm at the node level and not at the validator level. We propose a framework to analyse liveness and safety under different communication and adversary models. This allows providing impossibility results in some edge cases and in the asynchronous communication model. We provide formal proof of the security of the protocol assuming a common random coin.

Tuxedo: Maximizing Smart Contract Computation in PoW Blockchains

Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time (I) between blocks for validating smart contracts present in transactions. In such systems, block validation and PoW mining are typically performed sequentially, the former by CPUs and the latter by ASICs. A trivial increase in validation time (τ) introduces the popularly known Verifier's Dilemma, and as we demonstrate, causes more forking and hurts fairness. Large τ also reduces the tolerance for safety against a Byzantine adversary. Solutions that offload validation to a set of non-chain nodes (a.k.a. off-chain approaches) suffer from trust and performance issues that are non-trivial to resolve. In this paper, we present Tuxedo, the first on-chain protocol to theoretically scale τ/I ≈1 in PoW blockchains. The key innovation in Tuxedo is to perform CPU-based block processing in parallel to ASIC mining. We achieve this by allowing miners to delay validation of transactions in a block by up to ζ blocks, where ζ is a system parameter. We perform security analysis of Tuxedo considering all possible adversarial strategies in a synchronous network with maximum end-to-end delay Δ and demonstrate that Tuxedo achieves security equivalent to known results for longest chain PoW Nakamoto consensus. Our prototype implementation of Tuxedo atop Ethereum demonstrates that it can scale τ without suffering the harmful effects of naive scaling up of τ/I in existing blockchains

Proof-of-Reputation: An Alternative Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain Systems

Blockchains combine other technologies, such as cryptography, networking, and incentive mechanisms, to enable the creation, validation, and recording of transactions between participating nodes. A consensus algorithm is used in a blockchain system to determine the shared state among distributed nodes. An important component underlying any blockchain-based system is its consensus mechanism, which principally determines the performance and security of the overall system. As the nature of peer-topeer(P2P) networks is open and dynamic, the security risk within that environment is greatly increased mostly because nodes can join and leave the network at will. Thus, it is important to have a system that can check against malicious behaviour. In this work, we propose a reputation-based consensus mechanism for blockchain-based systems, Proof-of-Reputation(PoR) where the nodes with the highest reputation values eventually become part of a consensus group that determines the state of the blockchain.

PROOF-OF-REPUTATION: AN ALTERNATIVE CONSENSUS MECHANISM FOR BLOCKCHAIN SYSTEMS

Blockchains combine other technologies, such as cryptography, networking, and incentive mechanisms, to enable the creation, validation, and recording of transactions between participating nodes. A consensus algorithm is used in a blockchain system to determine the shared state among distributed nodes. An important component underlying any blockchain-based system is its consensus mechanism, which principally determines the performance and security of the overall system. As the nature of peer-topeer(P2P) networks is open and dynamic, the security risk within that environment is greatly increased mostly because nodes can join and leave the network at will. Thus, it is important to have a system that can check against malicious behaviour. In this work, we propose a reputation-based consensus mechanism for blockchain-based systems, Proof-of-Reputation(PoR) where the nodes with the highest reputation values eventually become part of a consensus group that determines the state of the blockchain.

Blockchain management and machine learning adaptation for IoT environment in 5G and beyond networks: A systematic review

Keeping in view of the constraints and challenges with respect to big data analytics along with security and privacy preservation for 5G and B5G applications, the integration of machine learning and blockchain, two of the most promising technologies of the modern era is inevitable. In comparison to the traditional centralized techniques for security and privacy preservation, blockchain uses decentralized consensus algorithms for verification and validation of different transactions which are supposed to become an integral part of blockchain network. Starting with the existing literature survey, we introduce the basic concepts of blockchain and machine learning in this article. Then, we presented a comprehensive taxonomy for integration of blockchain and machine learning in an IoT environment. We also explored federated learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning algorithms usage in blockchain based applications. Finally, we provide recommendations for future use cases of these emerging technologies in 5G and B5G technologies.

Preventing the bitcoin Double Spend using Transaction Hash and Unspent Transaction Output

The red-hot crypto currency is a bitcoin which occupies first position in the capital investment of financial world which is assaulted by various factors like wallet attacks, network attacks, mining attacks and double spending attacks. Double spending is the major attack in which the attacker tries to cheat the network nodes and use the same coin for more than one set of transactions. Of this the original transaction identification from the set of transactions is a challenging one. In this paper we propose a solution for identifying the primary transaction from the set of double spended or multi spended transactions. The proposed approach finds the authentic transaction from the list of double spended transactions using transaction hash value, which is primarily used for every transaction in the Bitcoin network. Transaction hash value is used as transaction identifier for each bitcoin transaction. By comparing the transaction hash value with the existing pool of unconfirmed input pool, transhash pool and utxopool one can identify the genuine transaction from the flawed transaction list. The firsthand transaction is then added to the Confirmed input pool which is then entered into the newly added block of the blockchain. This architecture will prevent the double spend of bitcoin further in the network which facilitates the network nodes as well as minimize the miners task for verification and validation of transaction.