Analysis of blockchain data is useful for both scientific research and commercial applications. We present BlockSci, an open-source software platform for blockchain analysis. BlockSci is versatile in its support for different blockchains and analysis tasks. It incorporates an in-memory, analytical (rather than transactional) database, making it several hundred times faster than existing tools. We describe BlockSci's design and present four analyses that illustrate its capabilities.
This is a working paper that accompanies the first public release of BlockSci, available at https://github.com/citp/BlockSci. We seek input from the community to further develop the software and explore other potential applications.
Many developers have ideas to create blockchain applications but do not know where to begin. Often these developers default to using the first blockchain development platform they discover, which may not be the best platform for their project. Over 8000 new blockchain-related projects are added to GitHub a year. The near-constant influx of new projects can make it difficult for developers to search through existing projects and platforms to find the best platform for their projects. We considered 65 blockchain development platforms for this work and provided a brief yet comprehensive summary o…
It is observed that users have higher requirements for fairness, transparency, and privacy of transactions of energy exchanges that occur across platforms like Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) and Power Exchange India Limited (PXIL). As a decentralized distributed accounting system, blockchain is characterized by traceability, security, credibility, and non-tampering of transactions, which can meet the needs of integrated energy and multi-energy transactions. Based on the research on the application of blockchain technology in the field of integrated energy services, this solution proposes an inte…
Digital signature is a major component of transactions on Blockchain platforms, especially in enterprise Blockchain platforms, where multiple signatures from a set of peers need to be produced to endorse a transaction. However, such process is often complex and time-consuming. Multi-signature, which can improve transaction efficiency by having a set of signers cooperate to produce a joint signature, has attracted extensive attentions. In this work, we propose two multi-signature schemes, GMS and AGMS, which are proved to be more secure and efficient than state-of-the-art multi-signature scheme…
Blockchain Technology is an emerging technology with the potential to disrupt a number of application domains. Though blockchain platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen immense success and acceptability, their nature of being public and anonymous make them unsuitable for many enterprise level use-cases. To address this issue, Linux Foundation has started an open source umbrella initiative, known as the Hyperledger Platforms. Under this initiative, a number of private blockchain platforms have been developed which can be used for different enterprise level applications. However, the scala…
As a disruptive technology that originates from cryptocurrency, blockchain provides a trusted platform to facilitate industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. However, implementing a blockchain platform in IIoT scenarios confronts various security challenges due to the rigorous deployment condition. To this end, we present a novel design of secure blockchain based on trusted computing hardware for IIoT applications. Specifically, we employ the trusted execution environment (TEE) module and a customized security chip to safeguard the blockchain against different attacking vectors. Furthermore, we imp…
Advancements in distributed ledger technologies are driving the rise of blockchain-based social media platforms such as Steemit, where users interact with each other in similar ways as conventional social networks. These platforms are autonomously managed by users using decentralized consensus protocols in a cryptocurrency ecosystem. The deep integration of social networks and blockchains in these platforms provides potential for numerous cross-domain research studies that are of interest to both the research communities. However, it is challenging to process and analyze large volumes of raw S…
The governance of data used for biomedical research and clinical trials is an important requirement for generating accurate results. To improve the visibility of data quality and analysis, we developed TrialChain, a blockchain-based platform that can be used to validate data integrity from large, biomedical research studies. We implemented a private blockchain using the MultiChain platform and integrated it with a data science platform deployed within a large research center. An administrative web application was built with Python to manage the platform, which was built with a microservice arc…
With the development of communication technologies in 5G networks and the Internet of things (IoT), a massive amount of generated data can improve machine learning (ML) inference through data sharing. However, security and privacy concerns are major obstacles in distributed and wireless networks. In addition, IoT has a limitation on system resources depending on the purpose of services. In addition, a blockchain technology enables secure transactions among participants through consensus algorithms and encryption without a centralized coordinator. In this paper, we first review the federated le…
The goal of this paper is to propose a blockchain-based platform to enhance transparency and traceability of cybersecurity certification information motivated by the recently adopted EU Cybersecurity Act. The proposed platform is generic and intended to support the trusted exchange of cybersecurity certification information for any electronic product, service, or process. However, for the purposes of this paper, we focus on the case study of the cybersecurity certification of IoT devices, which are explicitly referenced in the recently adopted Cybersecurity Act as one of the main domains where…
Blockchain technology has gained increasing popularity in the research of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in the past decade. As a distributed and immutable ledger secured by strong cryptography algorithms, the blockchain brings a new perspective to secure IoT systems. Many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy. In comparison, the blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is much less studied. Nonetheless, we see the potential of blockchain in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. This pap…
Blockchain technology has piqued the interest of businesses of all types, while consistently improving and adapting to developers and business owners requirements. Therefore, several blockchain platforms have emerged, making it challenging to select a suitable one for a specific type of business. This paper presents a classification of over one hundred blockchain platforms. We develop smart contracts for detecting healthcare insurance frauds using two blockchain platforms selected based on our proposed decision-making map approach for the selection of the top two suitable platforms for healthc…
Ride-hailing and ride-sharing applications have recently gained popularity as a convenient alternative to traditional modes of travel. Current research into autonomous vehicles is accelerating rapidly and will soon become a critical component of a ride-hailing platforms architecture. Implementing an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing platform proves a difficult challenge due to the centralized nature of traditional ride-hailing architectures. In a traditional ride-hailing environment the drivers operate their own personal vehicles so it follows that a fleet of autonomous vehicles would be require…
In this paper, we discuss the integration of blockchain in smart energy systems. We present various blockchain technology solutions, review important blockchain platforms, and several blockchain based smart energy projects in different smart energy domains. The majority of blockchain platforms with embedded combination of blockchain technology solutions are computing- and resource- intensive, and hence not entirely suitable for smart energy applications. We consider the requirements of smart energy systems and accordingly identify appropriate blockchain technology solutions for smart energy ap…
While electronic signatures are widespread, there currently exists no viable signing solutions that can track amendments. We proposed VeriSign, a secure contract consensus platform where amendments to contracts can be tracked in a decentralized medium. We demonstrate a user-facing app where signatories can vote on original contracts and amendments, and incorporate a Blockchain where we store the transaction history of original contracts and amendments. This platform has possible applications in tracking the history of legislation, and amendments to legislation.
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have received significant interest in various areas beyond the financial sector, with profound applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), providing the means for creating truly trustless and secure solutions for IoT applications. Taking into account the weak security defences that the majority of IoT devices have, it is critical that a blockchain-based solution targeting the IoT is not only capable of addressing the many challenges IoT is facing, but also does not introduce other defects, in terms of performance, making its adoption hard to ach…
It is said that blockchain will contribute to the digital transformation of society in a wide range of ways, from the management of public and private documents to the traceability in various industries, as well as digital currencies. A number of so-called blockchain platforms have been developed, and experiments and applications have been carried out on them. But are these platforms really conducive to practical use of the blockchain concept? To answer the question, we need to better understand what the technology called blockchain really is. We need to sort out the confusion we see in unders…
Hybrid on/off-blockchain vehicle data management approaches have received a lot of attention in recent years. However, there are various technical challenges remained to deal with. In this paper we relied on real-world data from Austria to investigate the effects of connectivity on the transport of personal protective equipment. We proposed a three-step mechanism to process, simulate, and store/visualize aggregated vehicle datasets together with a formal pipeline process workflow model. To this end, we implemented a hybrid blockchain platform based on the hyperledger fabric and gluster file sy…
Ride-hailing and ride-sharing applications have recently gained in popularity as a convenient alternative to traditional modes of travel. Current research into autonomous vehicles is accelerating rapidly and will soon become a critical component of a ride-hailing platform's architecture. Implementing an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing platform proves a difficult challenge due to the centralized nature of traditional ride-hailing architectures. In a traditional ride-hailing environment the drivers operate their own personal vehicles so it follows that a fleet of autonomous vehicles would be req…
Attacks targeting several millions of non-internet based application users are on the rise. These applications such as SMS and USSD typically do not benefit from existing multi-factor authentication methods due to the nature of their interaction interfaces and mode of operations. To address this problem, we propose an approach that augments blockchain with multi-factor authentication based on evidence from blockchain transactions combined with risk analysis. A profile of how a user performs transactions is built overtime and is used to analyse the risk level of each new transaction. If a trans…
Today there is considerable interest in deploying blockchains and decentralized ledger technology as a means to address the deficiencies of current financial and digital asset infrastructures. The focal point of attention in many projects on digital asset and cryptocurrency is centered around blockchain systems and smart contracts. Many projects seek to make the blockchain as the centerpiece of the new decentralized world of finance. However, several roadblocks and challenges currently face this predominant blockchain-centric view. In this paper we argue that the proper and correct perspective…
We design and implement Publication Chain (PubChain), a decentralized open-access publication platform built on decentralized and distributed technologies of blockchain and IPFS peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The existing publication platforms have some severe drawbacks. First, instead of promoting widespread knowledge sharing, access to publications on the platforms owned by publishers is often on a fee basis. This drawback of pay wall prevents researchers from "standing on the shoulders of giants". Moreover, the peer review process on most all existing publication platforms (including bo…
After being legalized as an agricultural commodity by the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, the Industrial Hemp production is moved from limited pilot programs to a regulated agriculture production system, and the market keeps increasing since then. However, Industrial Hemp Supply Chain (IHSC) faces several critical challenges, including high complexity and variability, data tampering, and lack of immutable information tracking system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain enabled internet-of-things (IoT) platform for IHSC to support process tracking, scalability, interoperability, and risk management. Ba…
This applied research paper introduces a novel framework for integrating hardware security and blockchain functionality with grid-edge devices to establish a distributed cyber-security mechanism that verifies the provenance of messages to and from the devices. Expanding the idea of Two Factor Authentication and Hardware Root of Trust, this work describes the development of a Cryptographic Trust Center(TM) (CTC(TM)) chip integrated into grid-edge devices to create uniform cryptographic key management. Product managers, energy system designers, and security architects can utilize this modular fr…
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a flexible permissioned blockchain platform designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of HLF is its extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for building the blockchain. Nonetheless, the version 1.0 was launched in early 2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a BFT ordering service for HLF on top of the BFT-SMaRt state machine repli…
Blockchain technologies are taking the world by storm. Public blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable secure peer-to-peer applications like crypto-currency or smart contracts. Their security and performance are well studied. This paper concerns recent private blockchain systems designed with stronger security (trust) assumption and performance requirement. These systems target and aim to disrupt applications which have so far been implemented on top of database systems, for example banking, finance applications. Multiple platforms for private blockchains are being actively developed …
Quorum is a permissioned blockchain platform built from the Ethereum codebase with adaptations to make it a permissioned consortium platform. It is one of the key contenders in the permissioned ledger space. Quorum supports confidentiality and privacy of smart contracts and transactions, and crash and Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithms. In this paper, we characterize the performance features of Quorum. We study the throughput and latency characteristics of Quorum with different workloads and consensus algorithms that it supports. Through a suite of micro-benchmarks, we explore how c…
The 5G network would fuel next-gen, bandwidth-heavy technologies such as automation, IoT, and AI on the factory floor. It will improve efficiency by powering AR overlays in workflows, as well as ensure safer practices and reduce the number of defects through predictive analytics and real-time detection of damage. The Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) in 5G networks will permit 5G NR and 4G LTE to coexist and will provide cost-effective and efficient solutions that enable a smooth transition from 4G to 5G. However, this increases the attack surface in the 5G networks. To the best of our knowledge,…
Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security assurances of blockchains, however, they are impeded by blockchains' lack of confidentiality and poor performance. We present Ekiden, a system that addresses these critical gaps by combining blockchains with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Ekiden leverages a novel architecture that separates consensus from execution, enabling efficient TEE-backed con…
Blockchain has attracted a broad range of interests from start-ups, enterprises and governments to build next generation applications in a decentralized manner. Similar to cloud platforms, a single blockchain-based system may need to serve multiple tenants simultaneously. However, design of multi-tenant blockchain-based systems is challenging to architects in terms of data and performance isolation, as well as scalability. First, tenants must not be able to read other tenants' data and tenants with potentially higher workload should not affect read/write performance of other tenants. Second, m…
Crowdsourcing is a process wherein an individual or an organisation utilizes the talent pool present over the Internet to accomplish their task. The existing crowdsourcing platforms and their reputation computation are centralised and hence prone to various attacks or malicious manipulation of the data by the central entity. A few distributed crowdsourcing platforms have been proposed but they lack a robust reputation mechanism. So we propose a decentralised crowdsourcing platform having an immutable reputation mechanism to tackle these problems. It is built on top of Ethereum network and does…
Massive amounts of multimedia data (i.e., text, audio, video, graphics and animation) are being generated everyday. Conventionally, multimedia data are managed by the platforms maintained by multimedia service providers, which are generally designed using centralised architecture. However, such centralised architecture may lead to a single point of failure and disputes over royalties or other rights. It is hard to ensure the data integrity and track fulfilment of obligations listed on the copyright agreement. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present a blockchain-based platform archite…
Role-based access control (RBAC) policies represent the rights of subjects in terms of roles to access resources. This research proposes a scalable, flexible and auditable RBAC system using the EOS blockchain platform to meet the security requirements of organizations. The EOS blockchain platform for developing smart contract and decentralized applications (DAPPs) aims to address the scalability problem found in existing blockchain platforms. This smart contract platform aims to eliminate transaction fees while conducting millions of transactions per second. In our proposed approach, the EOS b…
Blockchain-based smart contract has become a growing field in the blockchain technology. What was once a technology used to solve digital transaction issues turns out to have some wider usage, including smart contract. The development of smart contract can be traced from the numerous platforms facilitating it, however the issue on how well each platform works as oppose to each other has yet been fully explored. The usage of smart contract can be seen from the applications that are built on top of the smart contract platform, such as the tokenization of real world to virtual world assets. Howev…
Internet censorship has been implemented in several countries to prevent citizens from accessing information and to suppress discussion of specific topics. This paper presents Infnote, a platform that helps eliminate the problem of sharing content in these censorship regimes. Infnote is a decentralized information sharing system based on blockchain and peer-to-peer network, aiming to provide an easy-to-use medium for users to share their thoughts, insights and views freely without worrying about data tampering and data loss. Infnote provides a solution that is able to work on any level of Inte…
This paper presents an empirical analysis of Steemit, a key representative of the emerging incentivized social media platforms over Blockchains, to understand and evaluate the actual level of decentralization and the practical effects of cryptocurrency-driven reward system in these modern social media platforms. Similar to Bitcoin, Steemit is operated by a decentralized community, where 21 members are periodically elected to cooperatively operate the platform through the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol. Our study performed on 539 million operations performed by 1.12 million …
From online education and trading, all aspects of our lives are affected by digital technology. Among them, the storage of music has also entered the digital era. Music productions created by artists have brought great joy to people. However, when artists upload their works, they are most downloaded and reprinted by others, and copyright information and the issue associated with the sharing of music arise. This will have a significant negative impact on the enthusiasm and motivation of artists. This paper provides an internet database platform for artists, which uses the distributed and tamper…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives control of personal data back to the owners by appointing higher requirements and obligations on service providers who manage and process personal data. As the verification of GDPR-compliance, handled by a supervisory authority, is irregularly conducted; it is challenging to be certified that a service provider has been continuously adhering to the GDPR. Furthermore, it is beyond the data owner's capability to perceive whether a service provider complies with the GDPR and effectively protects her personal data. This motivates us to envision a…
Steganography is a solution for covert communication and blockchain is a p2p network for data transmission, so the benefits of blockchain can be used in steganography. In this paper, we discuss the advantages of blockchain in steganography, which include the ability to embed hidden data without manual change in the original data, as well as the readiness of the blockchain platform for data transmission and storage, which eliminates the need for the Steganographer to design and implement a new platform for data transmission and storage. We have proposed two algorithms for steganography in block…
Blockchain technology has been used to build next-generation applications taking advantage of its decentralised nature. Nevertheless, there are some serious concerns about the trustworthiness of blockchain due to the vulnerabilities in on-chain algorithmic mechanisms, and tedious disputes and debates in off-chain communities. Accordingly, blockchain governance has received great attention for improving the trustworthiness of all decisions that direct a blockchain platform. However, there is a lack of systematic knowledge to guide practitioners to perform blockchain governance. We have performe…
Content sharing platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo have promoted pay per view models for artists to monetize their content. Yet, artists remain at the mercy of centralized platforms that control content listing and advertisement, with little transparency and fairness in terms of number of views or revenue. On the other hand, consumers are distanced from the publishers and cannot authenticate originality of the content. In this paper, we develop a reliable and fair platform for content sharing without a central facilitator. The platform is built as a decentralized data storage layer to store a…
The world-changing blockchain technique provides a novel method to establish a secure, trusted and decentralized system for solving the security and personal privacy problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The mining process in blockchain requires miners to solve a proof-of-work puzzle, which requires high computational power. However, the lightweight IIoT devices cannot directly participate in the mining process due to the limitation of power and computational resources. The edge computing service makes it possible for IIoT applications to build a blockchain network, in…
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities in blockchain platforms and target the users through social engineering to carry out malicious activities. Most of the state-of-the-art techniques for detecting malicious actors depend on the transactional behavior of individual wallet addresses but do not analyze the money trails. We propose a heuristics-based approach that adds new…
Decentralized electronic voting solutions represent a promising advancement in electronic voting. One of the e-voting paradigms, the self-tallying scheme, offers strong protection of the voters' privacy while making the whole voting process verifiable. Decentralized smart contract platforms became interesting practical instantiation of the immutable bulletin board that this scheme requires to preserve its properties. Existing smart contract-based approaches employing the self-tallying scheme (such as OVN or BBB-Voting) are only suitable for a boardroom voting scenario due to their scalability …
The advent of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables, energy storage, electric vehicles, and controllable loads, \rv{brings} a significantly disruptive and transformational impact on the centralized power system. It is widely accepted that a paradigm shift to a decentralized power system with bidirectional power flow is necessary to the integration of DERs. The virtual power plant (VPP) emerges as a promising paradigm for managing DERs to participate in the power system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based VPP energy management platform to facilitate a ric…
In the age of Big Data, enabling task scheduling while protecting users' privacy is critical for various decentralized applications in blockchain-based smart contract platforms. Such a privacy-preserving task scheduler requires the task input data to be secretly maintained until a prescribed task execution time and be automatically recorded into the blockchain to enabling the execution of the task at the execution time, even if the user goes offline. While straight-forward centralized approaches provide a basic solution to the problem, unfortunately they are limited to a single point of trust …
Medical data sharing needs to be done with the utmost respect for privacy and security. It contains intimate data of the patient and any access to it must be highly regulated. With the emergence of vertical solutions in healthcare institutions, interoperability across organisations has been hindered. The authors of this paper propose a blockchain based medical-data sharing solution, utilising Hyperledger Fabric to regulate access to medical data, and using the InterPlanatory File System for its storage. We believe that the combination of these two distributed solutions can enable patients to a…
Patients living in a digitized world can now interact with medical professionals through online services such as chat applications, video conferencing or indirectly through consulting services. These applications need to tackle several fundamental trust issues: 1. Checking and confirming that the person they are interacting with is a real person; 2. Validating that the healthcare professional has competence within the field in question; and 3. Confirming that the healthcare professional has a valid license to practice. In this paper, we present VerifyMed -- the first proof-of-concept platform,…
Skill verification is a central problem in workforce hiring. Companies and academia often face the difficulty of ascertaining the skills of an applicant since the certifications of the skills claimed by a candidate are generally not immediately verifiable and costly to test. Blockchains have been proposed in the literature for skill verification and tamper-proof information storage in a decentralized manner. However, most of these approaches deal with storing the certificates issued by traditional universities on the blockchain. Among the few techniques that consider the certification procedur…
We develop a model of coordination and allocation of decentralized multi-sided markets, in which our theoretical analysis is promisingly optimizing the decentralized transaction packaging process at high-throughput blockchains or Web 3.0 platforms. In contrast to the stylized centralized platform, the decentralized platform is powered by blockchain technology, which allows for secure and transparent Peer-to-Peer transactions among users. Traditional single-chain-based blockchains suffer from the well-known blockchain trilemma. Beyond the single-chain-based scheme, decentralized high-throughput…
A critical component of any blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform is the consensus algorithm. Blockchain consensus algorithms are the primary vehicle for the nodes within a blockchain network to reach an agreement. In recent years, many blockchain consensus algorithms have been proposed mainly for private and permissioned blockchain networks. However, the performance of these algorithms and their reliability in hostile environments or the presence of byzantine and other network failures are not well understood. In addition, the testing and validation of blockchain applicat…
