Blockchain-Research and Applications最新文献

Ethereum smart contracts are computer programs that are deployed and executed on the Ethereum blockchain to enforce agreements among untrusting parties. Being the most prominent platform that supports smart contracts, Ethereum has been targeted by many attacks and plagued by security incidents. Consequently, many smart contract vulnerabilities have been discovered in the past decade. To detect and prevent such vulnerabilities, different security analysis tools, including static and dynamic analysis tools, have been created, but their performance decreases drastically when codes to be analyzed are constantly being rewritten. In this paper, we propose Eth2Vec, a machine-learning-based static analysis tool that detects smart contract vulnerabilities. Eth2Vec maintains its robustness against code rewrites; i.e., it can detect vulnerabilities even in rewritten codes. Other machine-learning-based static analysis tools require features, which analysts create manually, as inputs. In contrast, Eth2Vec uses a neural network for language processing to automatically learn the features of vulnerable contracts. In doing so, Eth2Vec can detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts by comparing the similarities between the codes of a target contract and those of the learned contracts. We performed experiments with existing open databases, such as Etherscan, and Eth2Vec was able to outperform a recent model based on support vector machine in terms of well-known metrics, i.e., precision, recall, and F1-score.

This paper designed and implemented a blockchain-based multisignature approach to digitally transform supply chain governance in multi-tier food supply chains, particularly in a geographically dispersed beef supply chain. An exploratory case study was utilised to demonstrate the design, implementation, and evaluation of a blockchain-based multisignature approach that was deployed on the Smart Trade Networks (STN) Proof of Authority (PoA) blockchain system for data collection and validation in a beef supply chain context. The multisignature approach was implemented with a use case to track a shipment of 92 cattle and meat products through key events from farm to food service. The use-case deployment records approximately 6000 data points registered on the STN PoA blockchain system. The real-case deployment illustrates the capability of the blockchain-based multisignature approach to digitally improve beef supply chain governance by enabling whole-of-chain transparency and trustworthy information sharing and supports supply chain professionals to have a better understanding of how to unlock blockchain potential for supply chain transformation.

Energy has always been one of the fundamental elements in the growth of human society. It is crucial that we improve our energy management due to the ever-growing imbalance in demand-supply. The new wave in the energy sector is characterized by the three D's of decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization. For a sustainable life, it is necessary that energy is tapped from alternative sources that are renewable to leave a minimal carbon footprint. To integrate different sources with the main power grid, we require two-way communication among them. This makes it indispensable that consumers are empowered to protect their privacy and make them the sole owners of their data. A good access control scheme would ensure security of data, and an efficient trading platform would ensure judicious use of the resources. Here, we propose a framework URJA with an access control scheme and an energy trading platform based on blockchain for a smart grid. The locally available renewable sources of energy are connected to the grid such that demand-supply is managed effectively without loss of efficiency and privacy. A customized consensus scheme based on trust ensures a quick operation in real-time.

The demand for electricity is increasing exponentially day by day, especially with the arrival of electric vehicles. In the smart community neighborhood project, electricity should be produced at the household or community level and sold or bought according to the demands. Since the actors can produce, sell, and buy according to the demands, thus the name prosumers. ICT solutions can contribute to this in several ways, such as machine learning for analyzing the household data for customer demand and peak hours for the usage of electricity, blockchain as a trustworthy platform for selling or buying, data hub, and ensuring data security and privacy of prosumers. TOTEM: Token for controlled computation is a framework that allows users to analyze the data without moving the data from the data owner's environment. It also ensures the data security and privacy of the data. Here, in this article, we will show the importance of the TOTEM architecture in the EnergiX project and how the extended version of TOTEM can be efficiently merged with the demands of the current and similar projects.

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.