Blockchain-Research and Applications最新文献

We discuss the problem of accountability when multiple parties cooperate towards an end result, such as multiple companies in a supply chain or departments of a government service under different authorities. In cases where a fully trusted central point does not exist, it is difficult to obtain a trusted audit trail of a workflow when each individual participant is unaccountable to all others. We propose AudiWFlow, an auditing architecture that makes participants accountable for their contributions in a distributed workflow. Our scheme provides confidentiality in most cases, collusion detection, and availability of evidence after the workflow terminates. AudiWFlow is based on verifiable secret sharing and real-time peer-to-peer verification of records; it further supports multiple levels of assurance to meet a desired trade-off between the availability of evidence and the overhead resulting from the auditing approach. We propose and evaluate two implementation approaches for AudiWFlow. The first one is fully distributed except for a central auxiliary point that, nevertheless, needs only a low level of trust. The second one is based on smart contracts running on a public blockchain, which is able to remove the need for any central point but requires integration with a blockchain.

Rural areas are steadily being marginalised in a global economy where ‘core/periphery’ models of development are dominant. To overcome this, rural areas have experimented with decentralised governance. However, this process is fraught with political, fiscal, and institutional difficulties. These often revolve around transparency and accountability issues and low participation rates. Blockchain technology could act as a social innovation to overcome issues in decentralised governance, and rural areas could even prove to be a fertile environment for future innovation. In this conceptual paper, the potential of blockchain technology is theoretically positioned in regional development discourses. After exploring how blockchain could be applied to rural governance and the barriers it needs to overcome to reach mass adoption, a new distributed model of governance is suggested.

The “Bitcoin Generator Scam” (BGS) is a cyberattack in which scammers promise to provide victims with free cryptocurrencies in exchange for a small mining fee. In this paper, we present a data-driven system to detect, track, and analyze the BGS. It works as follows: we first formulate search queries related to BGS and use search engines to find potential instances of the scam. We then use a crawler to access these pages and a classifier to differentiate actual scam instances from benign pages. Last, we automatically monitor the BGS instances to extract the cryptocurrency addresses used in the scam. A unique feature of our system is that it proactively searches for and detects the scam pages. Thus, we can find addresses that have not yet received any transactions.

Our data collection project spanned 16 months, from November 2019 to February 2021. We uncovered more than 8,000 cryptocurrency addresses directly associated with the scam, hosted on over 1,000 domains. Overall, these addresses have received around 8.7 million USD, with an average of 49.24 USD per transaction.

Over 70% of the active addresses that we are capturing are detected before they receive any transactions, that is, before anyone is victimized. We also present some post-processing analysis of the dataset that we have captured to aggregate attacks that can be reasonably confidently linked to the same attacker or group.

Our system is one of the first academic feeds to the APWG eCrime Exchange database. It has been actively and automatically feeding the database since November 2020.

Blockchain technology is impacting several industries, including the creative industries and those operating in the Internet of Things (IoT). Lately, researchers' attention has been devoted to the application of blockchain in the recorded music industry. However, thus far, no research has investigated the use of such technology in the Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT). The IoMusT is a new area emerging in industry and academy as an extension of the IoT to the musical domain. The IoMusT itself, as the IoT, is a distributed network of musical things, which are objects augmented with information and communication technologies serving a musical purpose. The IoMusT vision requires, above all, IoT features such as decentralization, seamless authentication, transparency, data integrity and privacy, and self-maintenance, as well as the musical domain features such as efficient handling of copyrights and speed of royalties payment. Such features can be brought by blockchain. In this paper, we investigate the integration of blockchain technology with the IoMusT, and we name such synthesis “Blockchain-based IoMusT”. We present a vision for this new paradigm in terms of the novel opportunities that are enabled, and we propose a set of application scenarios enabled by technological integration. Finally, we outline the open research directions in this promising area.

Recent advances in wireless technology and embedded systems enable vehicles to share relevant traffic-related data to improve the transportation Quality-of-Service (QoS). However, due to the ubiquitousness of cyber-attacks, it is challenging to ensure the integrity of the data collected from cars. This paper proposes a novel architecture for road traffic events management in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) relying on a permissioned blockchain. It also introduces the concept of micro-transactions to minimize communication and storage overhead. Through simulations, a rigorous performance evaluation of the proposed approach was conducted, and the micro-transactions effectiveness was assessed. In addition, a comparison with close works in the literature was performed. The proposed scheme ensures road traffic records integrity and traceability, and simulation results on the considered scenarios showed good performance.

The transparent and immutable nature of blockchain provides incentives for organizations wishing to create and implement an open, decentralized governance structure. As members exercise their voting rights, a fault-tolerant record accumulates on the blockchain that can be analyzed to diagnose and intercept potential threats to the governing body. To date, there has not been a systematic study of on-chain governance with respect to voting. In this paper, we provide an analysis of blockchain governance through a case study of the first cryptocurrency to adopt on-chain voting, Dash. Our analysis introduces the key characteristics of blockchain governance, steps through a data-driven exploration of Dash's on-chain voting system, and highlights exploitable attack vectors and vulnerabilities for the subversion of Dash's on-chain voting system via a novel network analysis methodology. We then conclude with guidelines for other organizations looking to implement similar blockchain governance solutions while maintaining integrity in their operations.

In blockchains, transaction fees are fixed by the users. The probability for a transaction to be processed quickly increases with the fee level. In this paper, we study the transaction fee optimization problem in the Ethereum blockchain. This problem consists of determining the minimum price a user should pay so that its transaction is processed with a given probability in a given amount of time. To reach this goal, we define a new solution method based on a Monte Carlo approach to predict the probability that a transaction will be mined within a given time limit. Numerical results on real data highlight the quality of the results.

The last few years have seen a paradigm shift in the financial sector with the development of cryptocurrencies as an alternative mode of payment as well as an investment scheme. The aim of this study is two-fold. The first is to quantify the volatility of cryptocurrencies in terms of the dynamics of tail-end behavior using different approaches and choose the one with the lowest value-at-risk. The second is to investigate the effect of its inclusion in a portfolio with and without gold, to see if Bitcoin is indeed the “digital gold”. This paper uses the generalized simulated annealing optimization technique to compare portfolios for ten countries across the world. The data provide convincing evidence in favor of the inclusion of Bitcoin in the optimized portfolios. Rolling-window analyses (three-year and five-year) confirm the same. However, for some countries, the empirical pattern suggests that instead of replacing gold from the portfolio, both should be comprised. Our results are robust in terms of the inclusion of non-linear constraints.

The blockchain-enabled smart logistics market is expected to grow worth USD 1620 billion and at a compound annual growth rate of 62.4%. Smart logistics ensures intelligence infrastructure, logistics automation, real-time analysis of supply chain data synchronization of the logistics process, cost transparency, unbroken shipment tracking all the way down to the transportation route, etc. In the smart logistics domain, significant advancement and growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors are evident. However, the connectivity of IoT systems, including Tactile Internet, without proper safeguards creates vulnerabilities that can still be deliberately or inadvertently cause disruption. In view of this, we primarily notice two key issues. Firstly, the logistics domain can be compromised by a variety of natural or man-made activities, which eventually affect the overall network security. Secondly, there are thousands of entities in the supply chain network that use extensive machine-learning algorithms in many scenarios, and they require high-power computational resources. From these two challenges, we note that the first concern can be addressed by adding blockchain to IoT logistic networks. The second issue can be addressed using 6G. This will support 1-μs latency communications, support seamless computing at the edges of networks, and autonomously predict the best optimal location for edge computing. Motivated by this, we have highlighted motivational examples to show the necessity to integrate 6G and blockchain in smart logistic networks. Then, we have proposed a 6G and blockchain-enabled smart logistic high-level framework. We have presented the key intrinsic issues of this framework mainly from the security and resource management context. In this paper, recent state-of-the-art advances in blockchain enabled next-generation smart logistic networks are analyzed. We have also examined why 6G and not 5G would be compatible with the smart network. We have introduced five different use cases of blockchain technology in smart logistics. Later, this paper discusses some important concerns that blockchain in smart logistics might face. We have also provided potential solutions to tackle these concerns.

The revolution of blockchain technology started in the form of a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. In recent years, this decentralized technology has attained worldwide adoption and growth in multiple sectors, including e-governance, e-commerce, and asset management. Having disrupted these sectors, the choice of blockchain technology to solve real-world problems concerning supply chain seems to be an innovative strategy. In this paper, an attempt is made to analyze blockchain's ability to improve the standards of supply chain management. This paper includes a methodology to implement the suggested idea using a permissioned blockchain platform—Hyperledger Fabric. For the paper's scope, the existing supply chain problems, such as data integrity, provenance transparency, privacy, and security, are given emphasis more specifically in the context of the coffee supply chain industry, while also concurrently attempting to generalize the solution to manage other supply chain activities effectively. Thus, the final objective of this research is to identify whether permissioned blockchain platforms could help stakeholders in the supply chain industry engage in a less-corruptible alternative to traditional web technology and whether they could enable a more positively nuanced blockchain system that draws the best balance between traditional web technology and a public blockchain, including privacy protection and security.