IET Blockchain最新文献

The cover image is based on the Original Research Bitcoin address clustering method based on multiple heuristic conditions by Xi He et al., https://doi.org/10.1049/blc2.12014.

Single heuristic method and incomplete heuristic conditions were difficult to cluster a large number of addresses comprehensively and accurately. Therefore, this paper analysed the associations between Bitcoin transactions and addresses and used six heuristic conditions to cluster addresses and entities. We proposed an improved change address detection algorithm and compared it with the original change address algorithm to prove the effectiveness of the improved algorithm. By adding conditional constraints, the identified change address was more accurate, and the convergence speed of the algorithm was accelerated. Our work presented the pseudo-anonymity mechanism of the Bitcoin system, which could be used by the law enforcement agencies to track and crack down illegal transactions.

Cross-chain is the key technology to achieve interconnectivity and interoperability across various blockchain networks. It surpasses traditional single-chain architecture in terms of the performance, capacity, privacy, economic and technical scalability. Cross-chain can break barriers between institutions, industries, and regions. This paper integrates existing blockchain interoperability technologies and proposes a distributed fusion cross-chain model in financial industry. In order to support large scale computing and high availability requirements in financial industry, the model is built on a decentralized architecture and highly scalable. It supports large-scale isomorphic or heterogeneous blockchain cross-chain data and state interaction. And it achieves reliable financial value circulation in various underlying blockchain networks.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger based on peer-to-peer networks, originally used for crypto-currency systems. Blockchains are being used as an enabling technology for decentralised applications in the areas of Internet-of-Things, finance, supply-chain and others. Consistency, data privacy, performance, and energy efficiency are of paramount importance in such applications. The full nodes of public, permissionless blockchains undertake the task of verifying the transactions generated by the network. Full nodes perform operations such as confirming balances, transactions, and history, i.e. mostly database search queries. Consequently, their throughput is crucial for the performance of blockchain systems. In this work, the benefits of accelerating the blockchain search and insert queries by leveraging GPU platforms are studied. An extensive comparison between the most dominant utilized database is provided, i.e. LevelDB, and MegaKV, a high-performance GPU-accelerated database. Realistic operations that take place in blockchain systems are emulated and evaluated over representative scenarios, showing three orders of magnitude gains in throughput and energy efficiency without compromising the security aspect. The extensive comparison between LevelDB and MegaKV indicates that GPU acceleration is an effective solution for runtime and energy efficiency enhancement of blockchain systems, and the integration of the two technologies is a promising field of research.

In New Zealand, the demand for healthcare services has grown gradually in the last decade, and it is likely to increase further. This had led to issues such as increasing treatment costs and processing time for the patients. To address the growing pressure in the healthcare sector, and its fragmented IT landscape that compounds the problems further, the New Zealand Ministry of Health aims to establish a shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that integrates all the major healthcare organisations such as hospitals, medical centres, and specialists. Due to its characteristics, blockchain technology could be a potential platform for building such large-scale health systems. Here, MedBloc, a blockchain-based secure EHR system that enables patients and healthcare providers to access and share health records while providing usability, security, and privacy is presented. MedBloc captures a longitudinal view of the patients’ health story and empowers the patients to regulate their own data by allowing them to give or withdraw consent for healthcare providers to access their records. To preserve the patients’ privacy and protect their health data, MedBloc uses an encryption scheme to secure records and smart contracts to enforce access control to prevent unauthorised access.

Indoor location-based services have numerous applications built on indoor navigation. Over the years, researchers have proposed various indoor navigation methods to find a certain point of interest. This paper proposes location paging and answering service (LPAS) for finding out someone in an indoor environment . However, it may face serious problems of privacy disclosure of the clients' indoor location data . To ensure security, privacy and convenience, the authors leverage blockchain to model the indoor environment, and build blockchain-based indoor LPAS (BILPAS) on blockchain by embedding our three-way-handshake Diffie–Hellman Key Agreement procedures. Our BILPAS can automatically establish a secure and privacy communication tunnel between any two users, thus greatly liberating participants from unnecessary self-determining interactions . On the premise that the certain person can also be found, the authors introduce Truncated-Geo-Indistinguishability (TGeoI) to perturb the actual location within a limited, valid, user-defined distance, thereby allowing users to obtain reasonable location privacy. The authors have put a strong emphasis in the formal treatment of the reasonable privacy guarantees, giving a rigorous definition of TGeoI and providing a comparison with Geo-Indistinguishability that the authors' method satisfies such property. Then, the authors present the BILPAS prototype and implement it on Hyperledger Fabric. Finally, the authors conduct the security and privacy analysis and evaluate the time performance. The experiment results validate the reasonable privacy, high security and convenience of the authors' framework.

In financial market, especially primary market, it is very costly and difficult to make a deal due to discovery difficulty, information asymmetry, lack of trust, complicated trading process and low liquidity. Blockchain is an innovative technology enabling new business models of distributed data storage, point-to-point transaction and decentralized autonomous organizations via consensus. The unique features of blockchain, ‘decentralization, highly transparent, enhanced security and immutability of information’, make it a good solution candidate to meet the needs of private equity exchange. This article focuses on analysing the technical basis of the blockchain financial model and the typical application scenarios of the blockchain in the financial market. It discusses the importance of applying key blockchain technology to the financial market, especially in the primary market. Research has found that the development of blockchain technology, especially the maturity of stabilized token technology, makes it possible for blockchain to become a supporting technology to support the next generation of infrastructure in the future financial market. At present, blockchain technology has been concentrated in the issuance, registration, clearing, settlement and derivatives management of private equity and other over-the-counter securities. The use of blockchain to build a decentralized primary market has not received enough attention in research and practice, and the use of blockchain technology to establish a primary market with diverse distribution methods is still in its infancy. On this basis, this article further analyses the current problems and the possibility of solving these problems in the application of blockchain in the primary market and points out several interesting directions for future research in this field.

Welcome to IET Blockchain. It is a great pleasure and privilege to serve as its Founding Editors-in-Chief. Together with IET Chief Executive Nigel Fine, we announced the launch of IET Blockchain in the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in July 2020. We look forward to making this journal the leading outlet for the Blockchain research community.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” introducing a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” known as Bitcoin. Since then, blockchain technology that runs Bitcoin has developed into one of today's most exciting innovations with potential to impact every industry from financial, management, and healthcare, to manufacturing, information technology, and energy.

At its core, blockchain is a decentralized, immutable, public ledger that permanently records transactions between two parties without third-party authentication. This creates digital trust that opens the door to disruptive innovations in many areas including digital twin, artificial intelligence, data management, network science, and privacy-preserving. When researchers and public realized that blockchain could be used for more than cryptocurrency and has the great potential to enable innovative digital services, there was a surge of interest in how blockchain could impact other industries.

We expect IET Blockchain to become one of the premier venues to publish cutting-edge research and latest achievements to promote multidisciplinary, unbounded digital innovations of blockchain technology. Accordingly, we have invited a team of world-class researchers to serve on the editorial board, which comprises experts from internationally renowned universities and organizations such as Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, Oxford University, Imperial College, Technische Universität Berlin, University of Helsinki, University of Oslo, University of New South Wales, Indian Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Tongji University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), IBM, and several others.

The inaugural issue of the IET Blockchain journal covers a wide range of topics, as an evidence of the strong potential of Blockchain and its diverse applications. Research articles in this inaugural issue not only discuss about the core technologies of Blockchain, such as smart contracts, consensus algorithms, and online bootstrapping but also demonstrate the stellar performance of Blockchain in a number of applications, including unmanned aerial vehicles, railway signalling, and supply chain management.

We have been expanding our editorial board, and now have 60 editors from all over the world, covering the broad spectrum that the journal's sco

Blockchain-based audit systems suffer from low scalability and high message complexity. The root cause of these shortcomings is the use of “Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance” (PBFT) consensus protocol in those systems. Alternatives to PBFT have not been used in blockchain-based audit systems due to the limited knowledge about their functional and operational requirements. Currently, no blockchain testbed supports the execution and benchmarking of different consensus protocols in a unified testing environment. This paper demonstrates building a blockchain testbed that supports the execution of five state-of-the-art consensus protocols in a blockchain system; namely PBFT, Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Proof-of-Elapsed Time (PoET), and Clique. Performance evaluation of those consensus algorithms is carried out using data from a real-world audit system. These results show that the Clique protocol is best suited for blockchain-based audit systems, based on scalability features.