IET Blockchain最新文献

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.

The train control system is the railway system's brain, ensuring the train protection and the railway network's operating performance. This control system relies on the balise data received via near-field wireless communication to localize the train and update real-time operating conditions and constraints. The attackers can capture these data through their balise antenna and corrupt them through replay or false data injection attacks. This corrupted data can compromise train safety and jeopardize the entire train fleet operations. To overcome these attacks and to ensure the trustworthiness of balise and data integrity, this study proposes the permissioned blockchain-enabled two novel architectures for data transactions. Besides, each balise is equipped with a novel built-in blockchain cryptography algorithm to create its secret and public keys to provide the key integrity without needing third-party Certification Authority of conventional Public-Key Infrastructure based security systems. Each balise can create the unique signature using a ‘nonce’ signal sent by the train control system in the static architecture or using a self-generated ‘k-once’ secret key per train control system in dynamic architecture. Finally, the case studies are carried out to confirm the security sufficiency of the proposed architectures.

The traditional oil supply chain suffers from various shortcomings regarding crude oil extraction, processing, distribution, environmental pollution and traceability. It offers only forward flow of products with limitations in quality inspection, fraudulent information and monopolistic behavior of supply chain entities. Inclusion of counterfeiting products and opaqueness of the system urge renovation in this sector. Technological advancement can now reshape the infrastructure of the supply chain for the future. Here, a conceptual framework utilizing blockchain and smart contract to monitor the overall oil supply chain is suggested. Blockchain is a used to monitor and support the security building of a decentralized type supply chain. The Internet of Things (IoT) sensors open a broader window to track the process and attributes in real time. A methodology to support reverse traceability for each participant of the supply chain is constructed. Implementation of smart contracts is also shown with detailed analysis. The challenges of implementing such a system are further described and our framework's adaptability in the real world is validated. The paper concludes with future research scope to mitigate the restrictions of data management and maintenance with advancedworking prototypes and agile systems achieving greater traceability and transparency.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks utilize centralized entities (trackers) to assist peers in finding and exchanging information. Although modern P2P protocols are now trackerless and their function relies on distributed hash tables (DHTs), centralized entities are still needed to build file indices (indexing) and assist users in joining DHT swarms (bootstrapping). Although the functionality of these centralized entities are limited, every peer in the network is expected to trust them to function as expected (e.g. to correctly index new files). In this work, a new approach for designing and building decentralized online applications is proposed by introducing DIBDApp. The approach combines blockchain, smart contracts and BitTorrent for building up a combined technology that permits to create decentralized applications that do not require any assistance from centralized entities. DIBDApp is a software library composed of Ethereum smart contracts and an API to the BitTorrent protocol that fully decentralizes indexing, bootstrapping and file storing. DIBDApp enables any peer to seamlessly connect to the designed smart contracts via the Web3J protocol. Extensive experimentation on the Rinkeby Ethereum testnet shows that applications built using the DIBDApp library can perform the same operations as in traditional back-end architectures with a gas cost of a few USD cents.

With the considerable exploration of unmanned aerial vehicles in civilian and military fields, the data storage and transmission mechanism of unmanned aerial vehicles exhibit significant security limitations, which cannot meet the strict requirements for data security in civilian and military business scenarios. In recent years, blockchain technology has been tried to be applied to multiple fields. The features of blockchain includes decentralization, immutability, transparency and auditability, make transactions more secure and tamper proof. In view of the many excellent features of blockchain, in this paper, blockchain technology is introduced into the application of cluster of unmanned aerial vehicles, aiming to solve the problems of identity authentication, secure and reliable transmission of data between unmanned aerial vehicles, and access control of the data on the blockchain, thereby to enhance the security of the cluster of unmanned aerial vehicles and to ensure the integrity and security of data.

The consensus mechanism is a key technology to achieve state consistency among distributed nodes and it determines the consensus efficiency and stability of the blockchain system. If the consensus efficiency and stability are improved, that can promote the development of the entire society. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the consensus efficiency and stability of the blockchain system. However, there are many disadvantages in the existing consensus mechanism, such as high communication complexity, low throughput, and poor scalability. For solving these disadvantages, a blockchain consensus mechanism Score-Based Byzantine Fault Tolerance (SBBFT) is proposed. First, the score of nodes are obtained by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and SBBFT uses the score of the node to choose a node to be the primary node and acknowledgment node. Second, SBBFT selects $�c$ acknowledgment nodes to be an acknowledgment node subset. This subset can change the communication of nodes from all-to-all to all-to-c. Moreover, the view change of acknowledgment node subset can make the system resistant to attacks from more malicious nodes. According to the experiment, 900,000 transactions from Ethereum, the result demonstrates SBBFT can significantly reduce the communication complexity, improve the consensus efficiency and stability of the system.