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Application of Blockchain Technology to Prevent
The Potential of Plagiarism in Scientific Publication
Andi
Magister Teknologi Informasi
Department
STMIK Mikroskil Medan
174212038@students.mikroskil.ac.id
Ronsen Purba
Magister Teknologi Informasi
Department
STMIK Mikroskil Medan
ronsen@mikroskil.ac.id
Roni Yunis
Sistem Informasi Department
STMIK Mikroskil Medan
roni-yunis@mikroskil.ac.id
Abstract—Blockchain is an emerging technology that has
many potential applications. The blockchain contains a certain
and verifiable record of every single transaction ever made. In
this paper, we introduce the application for the prevention of
potential plagiarism based on decentralized architecture and a
public-key cryptosystem, such that no need for a trusted third
party. We use the SHA-256 hash function and Elliptic Curve
Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to digital signing. The
results show that any attempt to plagiarize a submitted paper
will violate the rules. The transmission of a paper is also
encrypted through the use of complex cryptographic principles
and security algorithms such that nobody can see or alter the
paper. Even the reviewer is unable to change the paper because
by doing such action the blockchain will report the violation.
Keywords—blockchain technology, plagiarism potential
prevention, proof of work,
I. INTRODUCTION
Blockchain is a decentralized and transparent
technology that does not use third parties in the process of
recording or exchanging data [1]. Each recorded data will be
inserted into a block that is secured using cryptography and
associated with the previous block to form a chain.
Nakamoto [2] introduced the concept of the first blockchain
application applied to digital currencies, namely Bitcoin.
One of the important characteristics of blockchain is that it
is immutable, which is almost impossible to change or
delete part or the whole block in the chain. If there is a
change in data on the block, then the cryptographic hash
value of the entire network will also change, which means
that one must be able to solve cryptographic hash values
from all networks on the blockchain [3]. The distributed
consensus and anonymity are two important characteristics
of blockchain technology [4].
Blockchain technology has grown from version 1.0 to
3.0. Blockchain 1.0 refers to digital currencies, Blockchain
2.0 associated with smart contracts, and Blockchain 3.0 is
used for digital society [5]. The Blockchain 3.0 refers to
new technologies that are still in the development stage,
which can be applied in various fields, such as health [6],
the food sector [7], and most recently in electronic voting
[8]. In addition to these fields, the Blockchain can also be
applied in scientific publications. In the field of scientific
publications, the problem that cannot be solved is the
process of sending texts and peer reviews because they still
have insecure mechanisms and dishonesty from the
individuals (third parties) involved. Both of these cause the
possibility of data leakage, theft of ideas, changes in
evidence of plagiarism and the taking of scientific works
belonging to others which have the potential to act
plagiarism.
Gipp [9] introduced CryptSubmit which is an
architectural system of sending scientific publications that
record scientific copyright works on the Blockchain network
before being sent to reviewers to prevent the risk of
plagiarism. Meanwhile, Pozi [10] proposes a blockchain-
based framework for calculating scientific writer's
contributions such that publication information can be
accessed transparently. However, the results of the two
studies still lack because they only focus on recording
copyright through timestamping. Information on scientific
works such as the title, content, and source of citation is not
included in the proposed model so that if the plagiarist
performs changes in scientific information, there is no
evidence that the plagiarism has been carried out. Also, the
proposed model does not yet have a secure data
transmission mechanism so that when scientific works are
sent to reviewers, the possibility of such scientific work
being stolen and plagiarized by other parties is very likely.
In this paper, we introduce the application of
blockchain technology to model the prevention of
plagiarism potential in scientific publications. The proposed
model handles the problems related to (1) the main process
in scientific publications, namely submission of scripts and
peer reviews, still has insecure mechanisms and dishonesty
from the individuals (third parties) involved, causing the
possibility of data leakage, theft of ideas, alteration of
plagiarism evidence and retrieval of scientific works
belonging to others which become gaps which has the
potential to carry out plagiarism, (2) the prevention of
potential plagiarism by implementing blockchain is only
based on recording copyright through timestamping only
and does not yet have a secure data security mechanism
such that the possibility of such scientific work being stolen
and plagiarized by other parties is very likely. We use
decentralized architecture by applying SHA-256 hash
function as a message finger print and Elliptic Curve Digital
Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) as the digital signature
scheme. We ran some simulation to proof that plagiarism
prevention by using the dataset from
https://aminer.org/citation. We did tests for three cases i.e.
(a) normal paper addition to show that everything is normal
if the paper addition does not violate the rule of plagiarism
prevention; (b) someone intentionally changes the paper
information to eliminate the evidence of plagiarism and (c)
preventing other parties from plagiarizing and reading
scientific works sent to the relevant reviewer.
The remaining paper is structured as follows: Section 2
provides background research related to blockchain
application. Section 3 presents the research methodology or
our approach to prevent the potential of plagiarism. Section
4 provides the result and discussion and Section 5 provides
the conclusion of the paper.
II. RELATED WORKS
In 2008, an individual (or group) writing under the
name of Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper entitled
“Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System”. This
paper described a peer-to-peer version of the electronic cash
that would allow online payments to be sent directly from
one party to another without going through a financial
institution. Bitcoin uses cryptographic proof instead of the
trust-in-the-third-party mechanism for two willing parties to
execute an online transaction over the Internet. Each
transaction is protected through a digital signature is sent to
the “public key” of the receiver, and is digitally signed using
the “private key” of the sender. To spend money, the owner
of the cryptocurrency needs to prove his ownership of the
“private key”. Bitcoin uses a consensus protocol called PoW
(Proof of Work) based on Cryptocurrency to ensure that
only legitimate transactions are allowed in the system.
Every time a new transaction is made, the hash value of the
transaction is calculated and entered into a database called
the blockchain. This block is connected to other blocks that
already in the chain. To connect one block to another, the
hash value of the previous block is entered into the next
block to calculate the hash value of the new one. The hash
value must meet certain requirements called difficulty so
that it can be considered a legitimate block as described in
Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Blockchain Illustration
After bitcoin, blockchain technology has been successfully
used in several industries, such as finance, energy, health
sector, and supply chain. Mettler [11] conducted research
related to the potential application of blockchain in the
health sector to prevent counterfeiting of health data such as
drug and medical records. This study only explains that
blockchain has enormous potential if applied in the health
sector. After the study, the idea began to emerge to apply
blockchain in other fields such as that done by O’Dair [12]
to analyze the application of Blockchain in the music
industry, especially in the protection of music copyright and
recording the payment of loyalty benefits from the music
created. Furthermore, some researchers began to analyze the
blockchain in recording copyright in other fields, such as
conducted by Xu [13] which proposed a method of
safeguarding and protecting copyright by using rights
management schemes based on blockchain technology. The
results of the study are in the form of an architectural model
that explains the procedures for copyright protection by
implementing the blockchain. Based on some of these
studies, it is proven that blockchain has a high level of
security such that Hanifatunnisa [14] conducted a research
to implement the blockchain in e-voting to maintain data
security such that it cannot be changed by third parties.
Through the implementation of the blockchain, the e-voting
database cannot be changed, because even a slight data
change will change the hash value of the entire network.
Gipp [9] introduced CryptSubmit, an architecture of the
delivery system of scientific publications that record
scientific copyright in blockchain network before being sent
to reviewers to prevent plagiarism. Hepp [15] continued to
study the idea and overcome the weaknesses of
timestamping which are still centralized by proposing
Decentralized Trusted Timestamping (DTT). The results of
the study presented a new approach to timestamping and
archiving digital content using blockchain technology.
Furthermore, Pozi [10] continuing the implementation of
blockchain in scientific publications, namely by proposing a
blockchain-based framework to calculate the contribution of
scientific writers so that publication information can be
accessed transparently. Research on the implementation of
blockchain to prevent plagiarism was then carried out by
Holland [16], but in a different perspective by explaining
how the blockchain application in preventing counterfeiting
and plagiarism towards brands comes from 3D printing
printers. The results of this study illustrate the model and
proof of how the blockchain is carrying out brand
registrations to prevent counterfeiting and acts of
plagiarism.
III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
In this paper we solved two problems related to
preventing the potential of plagiarism: (1) the main process
in scientific publications, namely submission of scripts and
peer reviews, still has insecure mechanisms and dishonesty
from the individuals (third parties) involved, causing the
possibility of data leakage, theft of ideas, alteration of
plagiarism evidence and retrieval of scientific works
belonging to others which become gaps which has the
potential to carry out plagiarism, (2) plagiarism prevention
by implementing blockchain is only based on recording
copyright through timestamping only and does not yet have
a secure data security mechanism such that the possibility of
such scientific work being stolen and plagiarized by other
parties is very likely. This paper is an improvement to
research by Gipp [9] called CryptSubmit as shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. CryptSubmit Architecture [9]
There are two main differences between our model to
the model by Gipp [9]: (1) we record the whole information
of scientific work rather than just the timestamping; (2)
scientific work submission from the writer to the reviewer is
not protected by digital signature. Based on the above
architecture, we introduce a new model and we use Citation
Network Dataset [17], as shown in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. Proposed Model for the Prevention Of Potential
Plagiarism
The publication processes are conducted as follows:
A. Publication Registration
Researchers who have scientific works carry out the
publication process by filling in the online forms that are
separate on the front end which is usually a website. After
the online form is filled in, the next step is to sign
information on scientific papers using ECDSA to produce a
public key, private key and message digest. The final
process is to process or send the scientific work to
reviewers, so you must press the submit button.
B. Backend Process
The system implements the blockchain using SHA-256
every time a new publication is submitted. Information
about scientific work will be protected with a digital
signature using public key and private key, where the
private key will be stored (kept) by the researcher and the
public key will be given to the reviewer concerned so that
scientific information can only be opened by the reviewer.
All information that is processed will be stored in the
database and read through the blockchain network. The
blockchain network contains information on all scientific
works that have been sent by previous researchers. Each
scientific work is stored in a block that will be connected to
previous blocks such that if there is a change in scientific
work information by someone, it will be related to other
blocks, so that evidence of plagiarism is impossible to
eliminate.
C. Paper Review
The reviewer who wants to review a paper must have a
public key such that he (she) can open the whole
information about that scientific publication.
In our model, we simulate three different scenarios to
show that the blockchain technology we implement can
prevent participants (researcher and reviewer) from
misconduct action. First, we change the information about
plagiarism intending to eliminate evidence of plagiarism.
Secondly, we will show how the blockchain eliminates the
existence of third-party intermediaries who have the
potential to commit plagiarism. Finally, we show how to
prevent other parties from doing potential plagiarism and
read the scientific work sent to the reviewer.
IV. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
In this paper, we build an application to model the
prevention of potential plagiarism using node.js and we run
the test on Processor Intel ® Core™ i5 @ 2.3 GHz. We
provide the model with some features such as paper
submission or add publication by legitimate writer, list all
added blocks to see all legitimate blocks, and do some
changes to the information on a certain block in the chain
(network). We separate the experiments into 2 parts i.e.: (1)
quantitative test to find the relationship between number of
blocks and difficulty targets to security level which is
indicated by mining time if there is change in the block; (2)
qualitative test to show that 1. any attempt to plagiarize
somebody’s work will be detected, 2. peer reviewers who are
also third parties will be eliminated so that the potential for
plagiarism can be prevented, 3. paper submission from a
writer to the system will be encrypted and signed such that
nobody can see or alter the paper to prevent potential of
plagiarism.
For the quantitative test, we use the number of blocks NB
= 1, 10, 50, 100, 250 and 500. Meanwhile, for difficulty
targets we use DT= 1 until DT = 5. For different NB and DT,
we find the mining time as shown in Table I.
Table I. Experiment Mining Time
Number
of Blocks
Mining Time (Seconds)
DT=1
DT=2
DT=3
DT=4
DT=5
1
0.006
0.104
0.156
9.937
92.197
10
0.057
0.546
3.39
88.539
1,754.79
50
0.353
2.054
26.027
426.595
8,350.6
100
1.141
4.393
57.791
977.731
17,539
250
5.777
13.991
142.74
2,325.54
42,847.5
500
22.298
40.645
326.921
4,484.16
90,695.7
From Table I, we can see that the more block and the
more difficulty target, we find that mining time very
significantly increases. This time increasing indicates that it
is difficult to make any slight change to the block that
already in the blockchain. Furthermore, the mining time
needed to fulfill the difficulty target shows that it is
impossible to plagiarize the paper that its hash value already
in the blockchain. The test shows that for block number =
500 with difficulty target = 5, it takes up to 90,695.7 seconds
to complete the mining process. If it is assumed that
scientific publication information on a blockchain network is
around 500,000, then if the mining process is carried out on
the entire block it will take 90,695,700 seconds (around
25,193 days). This test result shows that the model could
prevent the potential of plagiarism since the computation
time needed does not make sense to mine the entire block to
become valid.
For the qualitative test, we experiment with three
different tests to see that blockchain’s application can detect
any action related to plagiarism conduct:
First, a writer conducts plagiarism by publishing
scientific works belonging to others by making a few
changes. The author assumes that with the presence of a third
party within the publishing organization, the evidence of
plagiarism can be changed and deleted if at any time a
dispute arises over the scientific work resulting from the
plagiarism. For this test, it is assumed that the block number
of the scientific work produced by plagiarism is in block
number 22 and original scientific works are in block number
20. With the timestamping, it can be seen who the owner of
the scientific work first published the scientific work, so that
it can be proved that the number block 22 is plagiarizing the
scientific work contained in block number 20. Suppose that a
writer or a third party, attempts to change the information of
the author's name from Eun-Kyeong Kwon to Sutanto and
timestamping information from 2019-07-07 03:38:44 to be
2019-07-07 02:38:44 such as block 22 was first published
before block 20. However, when a change occurs, the hash
value of block 22 and the next blocks will change. In this
case, we show that block 22 and block 23 becomes red which
means that the block is invalid as a result of the information
change. has been changed. as shown in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. Information Change in Block 22 Causes Block 23
Invalid
To validate the remaining blocks, the mining process must
be carried out against these blocks. The mining process is
certainly not easy to do, because it requires very expensive
computing equipment and takes a very long time to mine.
The more blocks found on the blockchain network, the
longer time will take to do the mining process for the entire
block. This result is in line with the previous quantitative
test.
Second, a writer who is also a reviewer from an
educational institution uses his/her authority to carry out
acts of plagiarism. Every piece of scientific work
information sent to him/her is taken and quoted to be
published in his/her name. This happens because the
scientific publication process still utilizes third parties as
publications that do not have security guarantees for the
submitted scientific work. Because of these problems, it is
necessary to apply the permissionless blockchain in a
network of scientific publications. Suppose that there are 3
peers namely A, B, and C, each peer represents the sender
(writer) of scientific publications. When there is a new
scientific publication sender who wants to join the network,
all block data will be duplicated and stored into a new peer,
namely, peer D. This mechanism eliminates the existence
of third-party intermediaries that store a database of
scientific publication information. A decentralized network
will be created where each sender has a copy of his/her
own record which is able to eliminate third parties
interfering in it. Each peer is protected by a consensus such
that if there is data in different peer, it will be rejected in the
blockchain network. The test shows if there is an
information change by one peer will automatically change
the hash value of the last block and will be different from
the other peer. Through the permissionless blockchain
mechanism, it can create a decentralized and trusted
publicity network such that we can add the application of
text mining that provides more accurate results of plagiarism
comparison. Fig. 5 shows how the blockchain can detect any
change made and eliminate the existence of the third party.
Fig. 5. The Application of Blockchain that Eliminates
Third-Parties Existence
Third, a writer who sends a paper for the publication of
scientific work to reviewers wants to secure his/her
scientific work information such that nobody can read
his/her paper. It is assumed that a researcher who sends
his/her work will sign the paper using ECDSA with his/her
private key and only legitimate reviewer who owns (knows)
the valid public key can verify the signature of the paper
owner. This is done to prevent other people to carry out
plagiarism and nobody can open the submitted paper. If
there is a change for the paper during the submission
process, blockchain will detect that change and reject the
paper for review. Simulation of opening scientific
publication information with a public key can be seen in
Fig. 6.
Fig. 6. Simulation of Opening Scientific Publication
Information by Entering a Valid Public Key
After the scientific publication information is open, then
the authenticity of the information must be verified, whether
it has been changed or not by pressing the verify button. If
the information is not changed, the block will be green and
if the information has been changed, the block will be red.
The simulation of digital signature verification can be seen
in Fig. 7 and 8.
Fig. 7. Valid Message Digest Verification Simulation
Fig. 8. Invalid Message Digest Verification Simulation
Through the application of digital signatures in the
proposed model, it is, of course, able to safeguard the
information of the owner of the scientific work so that the
scientific work is not easy to be stolen or plagiarized by
unauthorized parties.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
Based on the results of research conducted, it can be
concluded that blockchain can be used as a solution in
preventing the potential of plagiarism namely (a) through the
application of the technology it is shown that it is impossible
to change plagiarism evidence or claim the scientific work of
others because a slight change will have an impact on the
entire network , (b) blockchain has the potential to eliminate
third parties who often become a loophole to carry out
potential plagiarism, (c) through the application of digital
signatures can provide guarantees for the protection of
scientific works that only legitimate reviewers can read the
scientific work, making it impossible to do so information
theft or potential plagiarism. At the end of the study, a
combination of the number of blocks with difficulty targets
was tested to prove the safety of the blockchain. The
experimental results imply that using blockchain is very safe
because no one can make changes to the data on the block
and validate all blocks on the network. Future research can
be done by using blockchain 4.0 as a new technology for
industry 4.0 and implementing deep learning to make any
plagiarism misconduct can be broadcasted to the entire
scientific publication network. The use of blockchain 4.0 can
increase trade per second (TPS) significantly.
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