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Blockchain in Data Security and Transparency in Business Transactions
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Years ago, intercommunication among systems was not at all possible, but with the development of the application programming interface (APIs-traditional) in the 1960s, this was possible. With the evolution from the 1960s, these APIs have advanced, and the birth of APIs (Modern) took place in the initial 2000s. Many conventional techniques and tools that possess diverse security issues and are operating in a fully functional manner can be solved to a greater extent with the help of APIs if integrated with modern and SMART technologies. One such example is a sub-group of artificial intelligence (AI) i.e., IoT, that possesses diverse issues and challenges and can be solved by the peer-to-peer technology blockchain. Here, blockchain is regarded as the SMART solution. The diverse attacks on IoT spectrum are illustrated in this paper to attain a better scope and security for IoT devices. Moreover, the implementation of blockchain is also illustrated in this paper to depict a convenient approach for solving the issues of IoT with decentralization attribute. The reason is that IoT illustrates a centralized architecture.KeywordsBlockchainIoTDecentralizationEnhanced communication
Advancement is a term that never stops with something so is technology. Blockchain technology is an old term but with updation, it has become a key-buzz term in the technological market. The advancements in blockchain led to the formation of distributed and decentralized applications. This advancement is only possible in the applications phase of blockchain. A simplified ecosystem in which decentralized apps (DApps) can be built is truffle suite. Majorly, three constituents that are completing the truffle suite are truffle, drizzle and ganache. DApps are those that operate among the users and are not monitored by a central authority. In DApps, the ecosystem of a peer-to-peer network works as a complete operating system. This paper focuses on these DApps using truffle suite and its different scenarios. A quick depiction of blockchain with its connection to the truffle suite is also highlighted in this paper. Moreover, this paper also illustrates a popular use case of a DApp with its real-time issues and concerns.KeywordsBlockchainSecurityCybersecurityPrivacyTruffle suite
Brute-force attack is considered one of the oldest attacks in the entire history of cybersecurity. Amid the diverse cyberattacks, the brute-force technique or exhaustive search has always gained its importance when it comes to access data in an unauthorized manner. Slowly and gradually, a lot more variants of brute-force have been released by the cybercriminals as they have also evolved. Alternatively, hashing has also evolved timely as a countermeasure of various cyberattacks. All variants of the SHA are illustrated here in this paper such as SHA-0, SHA-1, SHA-512, and SHA-256. SHA is also very popular as a network peer-to-peer technology blockchain also uses this for its security. The objective of the paper is to attain a measure of enhanced security. This paper discusses the in-depth analysis of brute-force attack on the secure hashing algorithms. Moreover, a study of diverse brute-force attacks is also highlighted in this paper.KeywordsBrute-forceSHASecured communicationPrivacy preservationCryptanalysis
INTRODUCTION: Cryptocurrency is a digital, decentralized form of money based on blockchain technology, which makes it the most secure method of making a transaction. There has been a huge increase in the number of cryptocurrencies in the past few years. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have become an interesting subject of study in fields such as finance. In 2021, over 4,000 cryptocurrencies are already listed. There are many past studies that focus on predicting the price of cryptocurrencies using machine learning, but the majority of them only focused on Bitcoin. Moreover, the majority of the models implemented for price prediction only used the historical market prices, and do not utilize social signals related to the cryptocurrency. OBJECTIVES: In this paper, we propose a deep learning model for predicting the prices of dogecoin cryptocurrency. The proposed model is based on historical market price data as well as social trends of Dogecoin cryptocurrency. METHODS: The market data of Dogecoin is collected from Kaggle on the granularity of a day and for the same duration the verified tweets have also been collected with hashtags “Dogecoin” and “Doge”. Experimental results show that the proposed model yields a promising prediction of future price of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that has recently become the talk of the town of the crypto market. RESULTS: Minimum achieved RMSE in predicted price of Dogecoin was 0.02 where the feature vector consisted of OCVP (Open, Close, Volume, Polarity) values from combined dataset. RESULTS: Experimental results show that the proposed approach performs efficiently.
Blockchain technology has attracted considerable attention due to the boom of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. Among them, the emerging blockchain-based crowdsourcing is a typical paradigm, which gets rid of centralized cloud-servers and leverages smart contracts to realize task recommendation and reward distribution. However, there are still two critical issues yet to be solved urgently. First, malicious evaluation from crowdsourcing requesters will result in honest workers not getting the rewards they deserve even if they have provided valuable solutions. Second, unfair evaluation and reward distribution can lead to low enthusiasm for work. Therefore, the above problems will seriously hinder the development of blockchain-based crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain-based crowdsourcing framework with enhanced trustworthiness and fairness, named TFCrowd. The core idea of TFCrowd is utilizing a smart contract of blockchain as a trusted authority to fairly evaluate contributions and allocate rewards. To this end, we devise a reputation-based evaluation mechanism to punish the requester who behaves as “false-reporting” and a Shapley value -based method to distribute rewards fairly. By using our proposed schemes, TFCrowd can prevent malicious requesters from making unfair comments and reward honest workers according to their contributions. Extensive simulations and the experiment results demonstrate that TFCrowd can protect the interests of workers and distribute rewards fairly.
Purpose - This paper presents a systematic literature review, including content and bibliometric analyses, of the impact of blockchain technology (BT) in auditing, to identify trends, research areas, and construct an agenda for future research.
Design/methodology/approach – We include studies from 2010 to 2020 in our Structured Literature Review (SLR), using accounting journals on the Scopus database, which yielded 40 articles with blockchain and auditing at its core.
Findings – One of the contributions of our analyses is to group the prior research, and therefore also the agenda for future research, into three main research areas: 1) Blockchain as a tool for auditing professionals to improve business information systems to save time and prevent fraud; 2) Smart contracts enabling Audit 4.0 efficiency, reporting, disclosure and transparency; 3) Cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) as a springboard for corporate governance and new venture financing. Our findings have several important implications for practice and theory.
Implications for research and practice – The results of our study emphasize that 1) the disruption of blockchain in auditing is in a nascent phase and there is a need for compelling empirical studies and potential for the involvement of practitioners; 2) there may be a need to reconsider audit procedures especially suited for digitalisation and BT adoption; 3) standards, guidelines, and training are required to pivot towards and confront the challenge BT will represent for auditing; and 4) there are two sides to the BT coin for auditing, enthusiasm about the potential and risk upon implementation. These practical implications can also be seen as a template for future research in a quest to align theory and practice.
Originality/value – Our SLR facilitates the identification of research areas and implications, forming a useful baseline for practitioners, professionals and academics, as we draft the state of the art on the disruption of blockchain in auditing, highlighting how BT is changing auditing activities and traditions.
In many enterprises and the private sector, the Internet of Things (IoT) has spread globally. The growing number of different devices connected to the IoT and their various protocols have contributed to the increasing number of attacks, such as denial-of-service (DoS) and remote-to-local (R2L) ones. There are several approaches and techniques that can be used to construct attack detection models, such as machine learning, data mining, and statistical analysis. Nowadays, this technique is commonly used because it can provide precise analysis and results. Therefore, we decided to study the previous literature on the detection of IoT attacks and machine learning in order to understand the process of creating detection models. We also evaluated various datasets used for the models, IoT attack types, independent variables used for the models, evaluation metrics for assessment of models, and monitoring infrastructure using DevSecOps pipelines. We found 49 primary studies, and the detection models were developed using seven different types of machine learning techniques. Most primary studies used IoT device testbed datasets, and others used public datasets such as NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15. When it comes to measuring the efficiency of models, both numerical and graphical measures are commonly used. Most IoT attacks occur at the network layer according to the literature. If the detection models applied DevSecOps pipelines in development processes for IoT devices, they were more secure. From the results of this paper, we found that machine learning techniques can detect IoT attacks, but there are a few issues in the design of detection models. We also recommend the continued use of hybrid frameworks for the improved detection of IoT attacks, advanced monitoring infrastructure configurations using methods based on software pipelines, and the use of machine learning techniques for advanced supervision and monitoring.
Contract production and transaction are very common and important since it can greatly reduce future uncertainty and is well-organized by buyers, sellers, and trusted third parties (TTPs). However, current commodity trading systems (such as spot, futures, and forward contract) are still traditional centralized structures, which means that there may always be concerned about the single point of failure and data corruption. Besides, even though there already exists fragmentary decentralized applications (DApps) for the marketplace, order management, resale, delivery, financing, and insurance, they are not integrated for operating contract production and transaction comprehensively. In this work, a blockchain-enabled integrated marketing platform (BeIMP) is proposed for contract production and transactions. BeIMP is a consortium blockchain (CsBc) framework that enables better safety, efficiency, and interoperability among stakeholders. BeIMP can directly match producers and consumers and reduce the problem of intermediaries' improper market operation. BeIMP has a three-tier risk diversification mechanism. First, both parties can know the quantity and price according to the contract specification (CSpec) in advance to avoid future uncertainty. Second, the buyers can resell the established order if they need, thereby diversifying the risk. Third, the concept of insurance is introduced to reduce force majeure and other systemic risks. BeIMP can also help producers get the loan from the financial institution (FI) if they need fund for production. We implement and demonstrate the prototype in contract farming (CF) first and discuss its generalizability to other scenarios. Experiment results show that the smart contract (SC) function is stable enough and the proof of authority (PoA) has the advantage in throughput and can give users a better experience.
Realizing secure and private communications on the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging, primarily due to IoT's projected vast scale and extensive deployment. Recent efforts have explored the use of blockchain in decentralized protection and privacy supported. Such solutions, however, are highly demanding in terms of computation and time requirements, barring these solutions from the majority of IoT applications. Specifically, in this paper, we introduce a resource-efficient, blockchain-based solution for secure and private IoT. The solution is made possible through novel exploitation of computational resources in a typical IoT environment (e.g., smart homes), along with the use of an instance of Deep Extreme Learning Machine (DELM). In this proposed approach, the Smart Home Architecture based in Blockchain is protected by carefully evaluating its reliability in regard to the essential security aims of privacy, integrity, and accessibility. In addition, we present simulation results to emphasize that the overheads created by our method (in terms of distribution, processing time, and energy consumption) are marginal related to their protection and privacy benefits.
Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising technology with far-reaching implications for the food industry. The combination of immutability, enhanced visibility, transparency and data integrity provides numerous benefits that improve trust in extended food supply chains (FSCs). Blockchain can enhance traceability, enable more efficient recall and aids in risk reduction of counterfeits and other forms of illicit trade. Moreover, blockchain can enhance the integrity of credence claims such as sustainably sourced, organic or faith-based claims such as kosher or halal by integrating the authoritative source of the claim (e.g., the certification body or certification owner) into the blockchain to verify the claim integrity and reassure business customers and end consumers. Despite the promises and market hype, a comprehensive overview of the potential benefits and challenges of blockchain in FSCs is still missing. To bridge this knowledge gap, we present the findings from a systematic review and bibliometric analysis of sixty-one (61) journal articles and synthesize existing research. The main benefits of blockchain technology in FCSs are improved food traceability, enhanced collaboration, operational efficiencies and streamlined food trading processes. Potential challenges include technical, organizational and regulatory issues. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our research and present several ideas for future research.
Phishing attacks are still very rampant and do not show signs of ever stopping. According to Santander Bank Customer Service, reports of phishing attacks have doubled each year since 2001. This work is based on identifying phishing Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). It focuses on preventing the issue of phishing attacks and detecting phishing URLs by using a total of 8 distinctive features that are extracted from the URLs. The sample size of study is 96,018 URLs. A total of four supervised machine learning algorithms: Naive Bayes Classifier, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree and Random Forest were used to train the model and evaluate which of the algorithms performs better. Based on the analysis and evaluation, Random Forest performs best with an accuracy of 84.57% on the validation data set. The uniqueness of this work is in the choice of the selected features considered for the implementation.
Biomedical industries produce an enormous amount of medical data day by day which requires a huge storage space and processing power. Cloud computing provides enough space to store this huge amount of data. Cloud computing technology offers the required scalability with computing power through cloud service providers. In this scenario, medical data sharing in the form of images securely is very important in bio-medical industries. The cloud facilitates a better platform for sharing crucial data between the physicians and patients. Hence, data integrity and authenticity are a challenging issue today in cloud while sharing these medical images through the Internet. For overcoming these issues, we propose a modified digital signature scheme that ensures data integrity and authenticity of the biomedical image. Here, the third-party auditor checks the shared medical image whether it is damaged or modified by applying the proposed digital signature scheme. Moreover, an existing Adler32 hash function is used for creating a digital signature with 8 bits and the proposed digital signature scheme provides 16 bits of output signature which is better than the existing digital signatures. Finally, the proposed scheme proved its efficiency by conducting various experiments.
A ledger can be defined as a “book of permanent record.” With modern information technology, data have become economic resources if they are associated with exclusive owners and put into a ledger. It is shown in Chaps. 3 and 4 that IoT data can be transformed into productive resources while Chaps. 5 and 6 show that transaction data can be turned into money-like bank deposit currencies.
Due to the proliferation of ICT during the last few decades, there is an exponential increase in the usage of various smart applications such as smart farming, smart healthcare, supply-chain & logistics, business, tourism and hospitality, energy management, etc. However, for all the aforementioned applications, security and privacy are major concerns keeping in view of the usage of the open channel, i.e., the Internet for data transfer. Although many security solutions and standards have been proposed over the years to enhance the security levels of the aforementioned smart applications, the existing solutions are either based upon centralized architecture (having a single point of failure) or having high computation and communication costs. Moreover, most of the existing security solutions have focussed only on a few aspects and fail to address scalability, robustness, data storage, network latency, auditability, immutability, and traceability. To handle the aforementioned issues, blockchain technology can be one of the solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we present a systematic review of various blockchain-based solutions and their applicability in various Industry 4.0-based applications. Our contributions in this paper are four fold. Firstly, we explored the current state-of-the-art solutions in the blockchain technology for smart applications. Then, we illustrated the reference architecture used for the blockchain applicability in various Industry 4.0 applications. Then, the merits and demerits of the traditional security solutions are also discussed in comparison to their countermeasures. Finally, we provided a comparison of existing blockchain-based security solutions using various parameters to provide deep insights to the readers about its applicability in various applications.
Blockchain is the major technology in today’s growing world to enhance the performance and profit of any environment through its characteristics such as security, auditing, perpetuation, and Inconspicuous. From the outcome of these characteristics, the blockchain can be used in various non-financial operations of some of the domains, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed computing. But implementing the blockchain technology in the IoT will not be a feasible solution, because blockchain deployment is somewhat costlier, includes restricted extensibility, provides irregular bandwidth and latency. In this regard, a Simple Size Extensible (SSE) blockchain has been proposed to provide an optimal solution for IoT environments by satisfying the need of the IoT environment and to ensure the end to end Security. The implementation of the proposed blockchain will develop an overlay network to attain a distributed environment where the blockchain is handled by the resources present in the distributed environment. To minimize the irregularity, latency and to maximize the throughput of the system two algorithms are proposed in the proposed system. One is Shared-Time depending Agreement algorithm (STD) to minimize the irregularity in extraction operation and latency. Another one is the Shared Throughput Administration algorithm (STA) to justify that the overall collection of the transmission load in the network and the performance of the blockchain are the same. The proposed system is applied to some of the smart home IoT appliances to depict the working of the proposed system. The experimental results show that the proposed blockchain system minimizes nearly 70% of the data irregularity, latency and 30% of the blockchain extensibility is maximized when comparing to the existing systems.
In recent years, blockchain technology has begun to attract close attention. The blockchain solved the problem of replacing the original centralized ledger with a low level of trust, on a decentralized form with a high level of trust, which has various objects, or, in other words, checking nodes. The main feature of the blockchain technology is a consistent algorithm that decides how an agreement is reached on adding a new block between all nodes in the checking network. Blockchain algorithms can be divided into two main groups. There is consensus based on evidence. This group requires that nodes connecting to the inspection network show that they are more qualified than others to do the extra work. The second type is consensus, which is based on voting and requires that the nodes in the network exchange the results of the verification of a new block or transaction before making a final decision. This article provides an overview of existing blockchain consensus algorithms. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8928323
This paper identifies three common risk factors in the returns on cryptocurrencies, which are related to cryptocurrency market return, market capitalization (size) and momentum of cryptocurrencies. Investigating a collection of 78 cryptocurrencies, we find that there are anomalous returns that decrease with size and increase with return momentum, and the momentum effect is more significant in small cryptocurrencies. Moreover, Fama-Macbeth regressions show the size and momentum combine to capture the cross-sectional variation in average cryptocurrency returns. In the tests of the three-factor model, we find most cryptocurrencies and their portfolios have significant exposures to the proposed three factors with insignificant intercepts, demonstrating that the three factors explain average cryptocurrency returns very well.
This paper will revisit two existing technologies—the more traditional relational database and a newer solution, Google Sheets—for storing and sharing data over the network, and their applicability to meeting an accounting organization’s business needs. These two technologies, along with blockchain, will be evaluated against a set of criteria that are essential to most business operations. Decision makers can use this framework that identifies the capabilities and shortfalls of each of these technologies to inform the most effective and appropriate technological solution for individual business opportunities. Further, the paper will address the implications on how an accounting organization addresses data governance. Lastly, a decision paradigm, based on an established set of criteria, is presented to guide an organization in choosing the most appropriate technology. In other words, no single one technology will provide the solution for all business problems.
Technological advancement is a never-ending field that shows its evolution from time to time. In 1832, with the invention of the electromagnetic telegraph, the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) began. Within the time of 190 years, this technological domain has revolutionized IoT and made it omnipresent. However, with this evolved and omnipresent nature of IoT, many drawbacks, privacy, interoperability, and security issues have also been generated. These different concerns should be tackled with some newer technologies rather than the conventional ones as somehow, they are only the generator of those issues. Outdated Security could be an appropriate issue of IoT along with the centralized point of failure. It also possesses more concerns and challenges to tackle. On the other side, there is a visible solution to address the challenges of IoT in this developing domain of technology. The visible approach is Blockchain which acted as the backbone in securing Bitcoin in 2008, which was created by the pseudo group named Satoshi Nakamoto. Blockchain has evolved from Blockchain 1.0 to Blockchain 4.0 as the latest one depicts its amalgamation with another component of Industry 4.0 i.e., Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI will give the ability to think logically and like humans. In addition to this SMART solution, there is also an advanced cryptographical technique known as the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) which can enhance the security spectrum of IoT if applied appropriately. This paper produces a vision to enhance and optimize the security of IoT using a network peer-to-peer technology Blockchain along with advanced cryptography.
The Coronavirus Disease i.e. (COVID-19) pandemic is a major health crisis affecting several nations, with new cases being confirmed every day. Such widespread and frequent outbreaks will inevitably lead to a corresponding movement restrictive measure by the members of both central and state government leadership. The current limitation of healthcare systems cannot predict the COVID-19 outbreaks and vaccination drive. The need of the hour is to use Blockchain Technology for the construction of immutable ledger that can share the vaccination details of each individual in a secured manner. In this paper a Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled COVID-19 vaccine tracking system has been proposed. The proposed system is designed using Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), decentralized storage by Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and implemented using Truffle and Ganache Tool. The smart contract interaction among the entities is developed with Drizzle and the front-end using ReactJS. The performance of the proposed framework has been presented with Keccack 256 transaction hash, the total number of transactions, gas consumed by each contract. Additionally the performance parameters such as latency, throughput, traffic in, out, CPU and memory utilization of the blockchain framework is also calculated. The Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been used to classify the vaccination group. Such an attempt is a worthwhile addition to state of the art as evident from the results presented herein. The proposed framework provides a way for vaccinated members of the community to be tracked and indexed so as to avail the benefits, for example, less restrictive movements nationally, internationally or simply in their own respective communities. This paper leverages the advantages of Blockchain Technology to obtain a reliable and accurate way to facilitate the entire tracking process.
Blockchain technology enables new kinds of decentralized systems. Thus, it has often been advocated as a 'disruptive' technology that could have the potentiality of reshaping political, economic and social relations, "solving" problems like corruption, power centralization and distrust towards political institutions. Blockchain has been gradually gaining attention beyond finance and is thus applied by a range of different actors. This includes local, regional, and national governments interested in the potentiality of experimenting with blockchain-supported governance. This article contributes to identifying blockchain as a contested socio-political object prone to contradictory political imaginaries regarding its potentialities, particularly when applied to policy. The article explores some of the most praised of blockchain's affordances (e.g. decentralization and transparency) in the context of Estonia, one of the most cited examples of blockchain governmental applications. Estonia has received international attention as the alleged first national infrastructure integrating blockchain. However, so far, few have asked: what kind of blockchain-based tools have been built by the Estonian government in practice and why? And to what extent do blockchain-based governmental applications reflect the original promises of disruption of the crypto-community? This article draws on a qualitative approach to explore several blockchain-based socio-technical objects to identify the narratives that have emerged in Estonia. The research shows clear contrasting views between stakeholders and technical experts from inside and outside the institutional sphere. The conflict revolves around two different social imaginaries associated with permissioned vs public blockchains. The paper concludes with an analysis of the profound political implications of each vision.
Information security is very significant needs to be secured due to people relying on networks and communication. Therefore, protecting information is a major challenge with the number of users increases rapidly in recent years. The aim of this article is to review Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) in information security. This article focuses on the issues of information security and the requirements of information security. The articles, journals and conference papers are reviewed by researchers were published in 2016-2021. Security issues are analyzed in the recent methodologies. The result of the relationship between CIA in each information security requirement is at a moderate level. It is suggested cybersecurity risk awareness program for society is needed. Therefore, every user could get full advantages in networks and digital platforms.
This research work provides a systematic review on blockchain-based applications present across multiple domains. Also, a comprehensive classification of technology applications across diverse sectors such as healthcare, supply chain, education, automobile industry, etc. has been presented. The twenty-first century has introduced significant innovations and discoveries that have completely changed our lives. In this way, Computers were first introduced followed by the internet, internet of things, and this has recently resulted in the introduction of “Blockchain” technology. This technology is considered as the most important innovation since the internet, and it is also known as the future internet since it creates a decentralized network chain. It has huge potential to impact, disrupt, and change human activities. Also, blockchain becomes an ideal tool for creating a trust-based solution. Nowadays several private, public sector firms, and government organizations are initiating new research work in the blockchain domain. This paper discusses innovative ideas, technologies, and its real-time applications by considering different industries, where blockchain can be applied to create new business opportunities.
The application of blockchain in food supply chains does not resolve conventional IoT data quality issues. Data on a blockchain may simply be immutable garbage. In response, this paper reports our observations and learnings from an ongoing beef supply chain project that integrates Blockchain and IoT for supply chain event tracking and beef provenance assurance and proposes two solutions for data integrity and trust in the Blockchain and IoT-enabled food supply chain. Rather than aiming for absolute truth, we explain how applying the notion of ‘common knowledge’ fundamentally changes oracle identity and data validity practices. Based on the learnings derived from leading an IoT supply chain project with a focus on beef exports from Australia to China, our findings unshackle IoT and Blockchain from being used merely to collect lag indicators of past states and liberate their potential as lead indicators of desired future states. This contributes: (a) to limit the possibility of capricious claims on IoT data performance, and; (b) to utilise mechanism design as an approach by which supply chain behaviours that increase the probability of desired future states being realised can be encouraged.
Integrating blockchain into Internet of Things (IoT) systems can offer many advantages to users and organizations. It provides the IoT network with the capability to distribute computation over many devices and improves the network’s security by enhancing information integrity, ensuring accountability, and providing a way to implement better access control. The consensus mechanism is an essential part of any IoT-blockchain platform. In this paper, a novel consensus mechanism based on Proof-of-Authority (PoA) and Proof-of-Work (PoW) is proposed. The security advantages provided by PoW have been realized, and its long confirmation time can be mitigated by combining it with PoA in a single consensus mechanism called Honesty-based Distributed Proof-of-Authority (HDPoA) via scalable work. The measured results of transaction confirmation time and power consumption, and the analyses of security aspects have shown that HDPoA is a suitable and secure protocol for deployment within blockchain-based IoT applications.
The peer-to-peer (P2P) network of blockchain used to transport its transactions and blocks has a high impact on the efficiency and security of the system. The P2P network topologies of popular blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, therefore, deserve our highest attention. The current Ethereum blockchain explorers (e.g., Etherscan) focus on the tracking of block and transaction records but omit the characterization of the underlying P2P network. This work presents the Ethereum Network Analyzer (Ethna), a tool that probes and analyzes the P2P network of the Ethereum blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin that adopts an unstructured P2P network, Ethereum relies on the Kademlia DHT to manage its P2P network. Therefore, the existing analytical methods for Bitcoin-like P2P networks are not applicable to Ethereum. Ethna implements a novel method that accurately measures the degrees of Ethereum nodes. Furthermore, it incorporates an algorithm that derives the latency metrics of message propagation in the Ethereum P2P network. We ran Ethna on the Ethereum Mainnet and conducted extensive experiments to analyze the topological features of its P2P network. Our analysis shows that the Ethereum P2P network possesses a certain effect of small-world networks, and the degrees of nodes follow a power-law distribution that characterizes scale-free networks.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has enhanced its importance through machines in the field of present business scenario. AI delineates the intelligence illustrated by machines and performs in a contrasting manner to the natural intelligence signified by all living objects. Today, AI is popular due to its Machine Learning (ML) techniques. In the field of ML, the performance of a machine depend upon the learning performance of that machine. Hence, the improvement of the machine's performance is always proportional to its learning behavior. These Learning behaviors are obtained from the knowledge of living object's intelligence. An introductory aspect of AI through a detailed scenario of ML is presented in this chapter. In the journey of ML's success, data is the only requirement. ML is known because of its execution through its diverse learning approaches. These approaches are known as supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement. These are performed only on data, as its quintessential element. In Supervised, attempts are done to find the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variables. The Independent variables are the input attributes whereas the dependent variables are the target attributes. Unsupervised works are contrary to the supervised approach. The former (i.e. unsupervised) deals with the formation of groups or clusters, whereas the latter (i.e. supervised) deals with the relationship between the input and the target attributes. The third aspect (i.e. reinforcement) works through feedback or reward. This Chapter focuses on the importance of ML and its learning techniques in day to day lives with the help of a case study (heart disease) dataset. The numerical interpretation of the learning techniques is explained with the help of graph representation and tabular data representation for easy understanding.
The platforms supporting the smart city applications are rarely implemented from scratch by a municipality and/or totally owned by a single company, but are more typically realized by integrating some existing ICT infrastructures thanks to a supporting platform, such as the well known FIWARE platform. Such a multi-tenant deployment model is required to lower the initial investment costs to implement large scale solutions for smart cities, but also imposes some key security obstacles. In fact, smart cities support critical applications demanding to protect the data and functionalities from malicious and unauthorized uses. Equipping the supporting platforms with proper means for access control is demanding, but these means are typically implemented according to a centralized approach, where a single server stores and makes available a set of identity attributes and authorization policies. Having a single root of trust is not suitable in a distributed and cooperating scenario of large scale smart cities due to their multi-tenant deployment. In fact, each of the integrated system has its own set of security policies, and the other systems need to be aware of these policy, in order to allow a seamless use of the same credentials across the overall infrastructure (realizing what is known as the single-sign-on). This imposes the problem of consistent and secure data replicas within a distributed system, which can be properly approached by using the blockchain technology. Therefore, this work proposes a novel solution for distributed management of identity and authorization policies by leveraging on the blockchain technology to hold a global view of the security policies within the system, and integrating it in the FIWARE platform. A detailed assessment is provided to evaluate the goodness of the proposed approach and to compare it with the existing solutions.
Blockchain technologies have grown in prominence in recent years, with many experts citing the potential applications of the technology in regard to different aspects of any industry, market, agency, or governmental organizations. In the brief history of blockchain, an incredible number of achievements have been made regarding how blockchain can be utilized and the impacts it might have on several industries. The sheer number and complexity of these aspects can make it difficult to address blockchain potentials and complexities, especially when trying to address its purpose and fitness for a specific task. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of applying blockchain as a service for applications within today’s information systems. The survey gives the reader a deeper perspective on how blockchain helps to secure and manage today information systems. The survey contains a comprehensive reporting on different instances of blockchain studies and applications proposed by the research community and their respective impacts on blockchain and its use across other applications or scenarios. Some of the most important findings this survey highlights include the fact that blockchain’s structure and modern cloud- and edge-computing paradigms are crucial in enabling a widespread adaption and development of blockchain technologies for new players in today unprecedented vibrant global market. Ensuring that blockchain is widely available through public and open-source code libraries and tools will help to ensure that the full potential of the technology is reached and that further developments can be made concerning the long-term goals of blockchain enthusiasts.
We explore the origins of blockchain technologies to better understand the enduring needs they address. We identify the five key elements of a blockchain, show the embodiments of these elements, and examine how these elements come together to yield important properties in selected systems. To facilitate comparing the many variations of blockchains, we also describe the four crucial roles of common blockchain participants. Our historical exploration highlights the 1979 work of David Chaum, whose vault system embodies many of the elements of blockchains.
An increasing number of Internet of Things applications have been recently considering the use of the blockchain technology, calling for dedicated computational capabilities of the underlying devices. This poses an inherent challenge in an application domain notoriously characterised by several, often stringent limitations in terms of available resources. This paper focuses on a key component of the blockchain technology, the SHA-256 hash function, proposing a hardware accelerator which can be adapted to different requirements according to the application context. Experimental results show how the proposed accelerator can be used to satisfy different sets of constraints, effectively providing low-end devices with the computational capabilities required to undertake complex tasks such as blockchain protocols.
During the last decade, the blockchain space has exploded with a plethora of new cryptocurrencies, covering a wide array of different features, performance and security characteristics. Nevertheless, each of these coins functions in a stand-alone manner, independently. Sidechains have been envisioned as a mechanism to allow blockchains to communicate with one another and, among other applications, allow the transfer of value from one chain to another, but so far there have been no decentralized constructions. In this paper, we put forth the first side chains construction that allows communication between proof-of-work blockchains without trusted intermediaries. Our construction is generic in that it allows the passing of any information between blockchains. Using this construction, two blockchains can be connected in a “two-way peg” in which an asset can be transferred from one chain to another and back. We pinpoint the features needed for two chains to communicate: On the source side, a proof-of-work blockchain that has been interlinked, potentially with a velvet fork; on the destination side, a blockchain with smart contract support. We put forth the smart contracts needed to implement these sidechains and explain them in detail. In the heart of our construction, we use a recently introduced cryptographic primitive, Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work (NIPoPoWs).
In recent years, the growing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) is providing a promising opportunity not only for the development of various home automation systems but also for different industrial applications. By leveraging these benefits, automation is brought about in the industries giving rise to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). IoT is prone to several cyberattacks and needs challenging approaches to achieve the desired security. Moreover, with the emergence of IIoT, the security vulnerabilities posed by it are even more devastating. Therefore, in order to provide a guideline to researchers, this survey primarily attempts to classify the attacks based on the objects of vulnerability. Subsequently, each of the individual attacks is mapped to one or more layers of the generalized IoT/IIoT architecture followed by a discussion on the countermeasures proposed in literature. Some relevant real-life attacks for each of these categories are also discussed. We further discuss the countermeasures proposed for the most relevant security threats in IIoT. A case study on two of the most important industrial IoT applications is also highlighted. Next, we explore the challenges brought by the centralized IoT/IIoT architecture and how blockchain can effectively be used towards addressing such challenges. In this context, we also discuss in detail one IoT specific Blockchain design known as Tangle, its merits and demerits. We further highlight the most relevant Blockchain-based solutions provided in recent times to counter the challenges posed by the traditional cloud-centered applications. The blockchain-related solutions provided in the context of two of the most relevant applications for each of IoT and IIoT is also discussed. Subsequently, we design a taxonomy of the security research areas in IoT/IIoT along with their corresponding solutions. Finally, several open research directions relevant to the focus of this survey are identified.
