Biblio

A trademark may be a word, phrase, symbol, sound, color, scent or design, or combination of these, that identifies and distinguishes the products or services of a particular source from those of others. Obtaining a trademark is a complex, time intensive and costly process that involves varied steps before the trademark can be registered including searching prior trademarks, filing of the trademark application, review of the trademark application and final publication for opposition by the public. Currently, the process of trademark registration, renewal and validation faces numerous challenges such as the requirement for registration in different jurisdictions, maintenance of centralized databases in different jurisdictions, proving the authenticity of the physical trademark documents, identifying the violation and abuse of the intellectual property etc. to name a few. Recently, blockchain technology has shown great potential in a variety of industries such as finance, education, energy and resource management, healthcare, due to its decentralization and non-tampering features. Furthermore, in the recent years, smart contracts have attracted increased attention due to the popularity of blockchains. In this study, we have utilized Hyperledger fabric as the permissioned blockchain framework along with smart contracts to provide solution to the financial, procedural, enforcement and protection related challenges of the current trademark system. Our blockchain based application seeks to provide a secure, decentralized, immutable trademark system that can be utilized by the intellectual property organizations across different jurisdictions for easily and effectively registering, renewing, validating and distributing digital trademark certificates.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is widely prevalent in banking, emails and virtual private networks (VPN) connections or in accessing any secure web service. In 2FA, to get authenticated the users are expected to provide additional secret information along with the password. Typically, this secret information (tokens) is generated by a centralized trusted third party upon receiving an authentication request from users. Thus, this additional layer of security comes at the cost of inherently trusting the third party for their services. The security of such authentication systems is always under the threat of the trusted party is being compromised. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to make server authentication even more secure by building 2FA over the blockchain platform which is distributed in nature. The proposed solution does not require any trusted third party between claimant (user) and the verifier (server) for the authentication purpose. To demonstrate the idea of using blockchain technology for 2FA, we have added an extra layer of security component to the OpenSSH server a widely used application for Secure Shell (SSH) protocol.

With the widespread of cloud computing, the delegation of storage and computing is becoming a popular trend. Concerns on data integrity, security, user privacy as well as the correctness of execution are highlighted due to the untrusted remote data manipulation. Most of existing proposals solve the integrity checking and verifiable computation problems by challenge-response model, but are lack of scalability and reusability. Via blockchain, we achieve efficient and transparent public verifiable delegation for both storage and computing. Meanwhile, the smart contract provides API for request handling and secure data query. The security and privacy issues of data opening are settled by applying cryptographic algorithms all through the delegations. Additionally, any access to the outsourced data requires the owner's authentication, so that the dat transference and utilization are under control.

Recently Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) are becoming more and more sophisticated, which makes the existing defence systems not capable of tolerating by themselves against wide-ranging attacks. Thus, collaborative protection mitigation has become a needed alternative to extend defence mechanisms. However, the existing coordinated DDoS mitigation approaches either they require a complex configuration or are highly-priced. Blockchain technology offers a solution that reduces the complexity of signalling DDoS system, as well as a platform where many autonomous systems (Ass) can share hardware resources and defence capabilities for an effective DDoS defence. In this work, we also used a Deep learning DDoS detection system; we identify individual DDoS attack class and also define whether the incoming traffic is legitimate or attack. By classifying the attack traffic flow separately, our proposed mitigation technique could deny only the specific traffic causing the attack, instead of blocking all the traffic coming towards the victim(s).

The Internet of Things is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity, requiring massive data processing and storage. Unfortunately, because of the unique characteristics of resource constraints, short-range communication, and self-organization in IoT, it always resorts to the cloud or fog nodes for outsourced computation and storage, which has brought about a series of novel challenging security and privacy threats. For this reason, one of the critical challenges of having numerous IoT devices is the capacity to manage them and their data. A specific concern is from which devices or Edge clouds to accept join requests or interaction requests. This paper discusses a design concept for developing the IoT data management platform, along with a data management and lineage traceability implementation of the platform based on blockchain and smart contracts, which approaches the two major challenges: how to implement effective data management and enrich rational interoperability for trusted groups of linked Things; And how to settle conflicts between untrusted IoT devices and its requests taking into account security and privacy preserving. Experimental results show that the system scales well with the loss of computing and communication performance maintaining within the acceptable range, works well to effectively defend against unauthorized access and empower data provenance and transparency, which verifies the feasibility and efficiency of the design concept to provide privacy, fine-grained, and integrity data management over the IoT devices by introducing the blockchain-based data management platform.

Blockchain technology has attracted much attention due to the great success of the cryptocurrencies. Owing to its immutability property and consensus protocol, blockchain offers a new solution for trusted storage and computation services. To scale up the services, prior research has suggested a hybrid storage architecture, where only small meta-data are stored onchain and the raw data are outsourced to off-chain storage. To protect data integrity, a cryptographic proof can be constructed online for queries over the data stored in the system. However, the previous schemes only support simple key-value queries. In this paper, we take the first step toward studying authenticated range queries in the hybrid-storage blockchain. The key challenge lies in how to design an authenticated data structure (ADS) that can be efficiently maintained by the blockchain, in which a unique gas cost model is employed. By analyzing the performance of the existing techniques, we propose a novel ADS, called GEM2-tree, which is not only gas-efficient but also effective in supporting authenticated queries. To further reduce the ADS maintenance cost without sacrificing much the query performance, we also propose an optimized structure, GEM2*-tree, by designing a two-level index structure. Theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation validate the performance of the proposed ADSs.

With features such as decentralization, consistency, tamper resistance, non-repudiation, and pseudonym, blockchain technology has the potential to strengthen the Internet of Things (IoT) significantly, thus opening an intriguing research area in the integration of blockchain and IoT. However, most existing blockchain schemes were not dedicated to the IoT ecosystem and hence could not meet the specific requirements of IoT. This paper aims to fix the gap. Inspired by Chainspace, a blockchain platform which could be applicable in IoT, VChain is proposed, a novel blockchain scheme suitable for IoT which is more secure, concrete, and practical compared with Chainspace. Specifically, in VChain, a two-layer BFT-based consensus protocol with HoneyBadger BFT protocol is proposed and a collective signature scheme as building blocks. The designs above allow for supporting faulty-shards-tolerance and asynchronous network model, which could not be sustained in Chainspace, and keeping high efficiency as well. Moreover, the sharding strategy presented in VChain, different from that in RapidChain, which adopts the energy-consuming PoW mechanism for sharding, is environmentfriendly and thus makes VChain fit for IoT well. Last but not least, VChain also inherits the merits of Chainspace to separate the execution and verification of smart contracts for privacy.

Appending digital signatures and certificates to messages guarantee data integrity and ensure non-repudiation, but do not identify greedy authenticated nodes. Trust evolves if some reputable and trusted node verifies the node, data and evaluates the trustworthiness of the node using an accurate metric. But, even if the verifying party is a trusted centralized party, there is opacity and obscurity in computed reputation rating. The trusted party maps it with the node's identity, but how is it evaluated and what inputs derive the reputation rating remains hidden, thus concealment of transparency leads to privacy. Besides, the malevolent nodes might collude together for defamatory actions against reliable nodes, and eventually bad mouth these nodes or praise malicious nodes collaboratively. Thus, we cannot always assume the fairness of the nodes as the rating they give to any node might not be a fair one. In this paper, we propose a smart contract-based approach to update and query the reputation of nodes, stored and maintained by IPFS distributed storage. The use case particularly deals with an emergency scenario, dealing against colluding attacks. Our scheme is implemented using MATLAB simulation. The results show how smart contracts are capable of accurately identifying trustworthy nodes and record the reputation of a node transparently and immutably.

Malware is pervasive and poses serious threats to normal operation of business processes in cloud. Cloud computing environments typically have hundreds of hosts that are connected to each other, often with high risk trust assumptions and/or protection mechanisms that are not difficult to break. Malware often exploits such weaknesses, as its immediate goal is often to spread itself to as many hosts as possible. Detecting this propagation is often difficult to address because the malware may reside in multiple components across the software or hardware stack. In this scenario, it is usually best to contain the malware to the smallest possible number of hosts, and it's also critical for system administration to resolve the issue in a timely manner. Furthermore, resolution often requires that several participants across different organizational teams scramble together to address the intrusion. In this vision paper, we define this problem in detail. We then present our vision of decentralized malware containment and the challenges and issues associated with this vision. The approach of containment involves detection and response using graph analytics coupled with a blockchain framework. We propose the use of a dominance frontier for profile nodes which must be involved in the containment process. Smart contracts are used to obtain consensus amongst the involved parties. The paper presents a basic implementation of this proposal. We have further discussed some open problems related to our vision.

The global Electronic Health Record (EHR) market is growing dramatically and expected to reach \$39.7 billions by 2022. To safe-guard security and privacy of EHR, access control is an essential mechanism for managing EHR data. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture to facilitate access control of EHR data by using both blockchain and edge node. Within the architecture, a blockchain-based controller manages identity and access control policies and serves as a tamper-proof log of access events. In addition, off-chain edge nodes store the EHR data and apply policies specified in Abbreviated Language For Authorization (ALFA) to enforce attribute-based access control on EHR data in collaboration with the blockchain-based access control logs. We evaluate the proposed hybrid architecture by utilizing Hyperledger Composer Fabric blockchain to measure the performance of executing smart contracts and ACL policies in terms of transaction processing time and response time against unauthorized data retrieval.

We propose an approach for allowing data owners to trade their data in digital data market scenarios, while keeping control over them. Our solution is based on a combination of selective encryption and smart contracts deployed on a blockchain, and ensures that only authorized users who paid an agreed amount can access a data item. We propose a safe interaction protocol for regulating the interplay between a data owner and subjects wishing to purchase (a subset of) her data, and an audit process for counteracting possible misbehaviors by any of the interacting parties. Our solution aims to make a step towards the realization of data market platforms where owners can benefit from trading their data while maintaining control.

Today, Internet of Things (IoT) implements an ecosystem where a panoply of interconnected devices collect data from physical environments and supply them to processing services, on top of which cloud-based applications are built and provided to mobile end users. The undebatable advantages of smart IoT systems clash with the need of a secure and trustworthy environment. In this paper, we propose a service-based methodology based on blockchain and smart contracts for trustworthy evidence collection at the basis of a trustworthy IoT assurance evaluation. The methodology balances the provided level of trustworthiness and its performance, and is experimentally evaluated using Hyperledger fabric blockchain.

The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks, emerge as areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utilizes a private forensic evidence database, where the captured evidence is stored, along with a permissioned blockchain that allows providing security services like integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation, so that the evidence can be used in a court of law. The blockchain stores evidences' metadata, which are critical for providing the aforementioned services, and interacts via smart contracts with the different entities involved in an investigation process, including Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. A high-level architecture of the blockchain-based solution is presented that allows tackling the unique challenges posed by the need for digitally handling forensic evidence collected from IoT networks.

The advancement and penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and renewable energy sources (RES) are transforming legacy energy systems in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions and energy waste. Demand Response (DR) has been identified as a key enabler of integrating these, and other, Smart Grid technologies, while, simultaneously, ensuring grid stability and secure energy supply. The massive deployment of smart meters, IoT devices and DERs dictate the need to move to decentralized, or even localized, DR schemes in the face of the increased scale and complexity of monitoring and coordinating the actors and devices in modern smart grids. Furthermore, there is an inherent need to guarantee interoperability, due to the vast number of, e.g., hardware and software stakeholders, and, more importantly, promote trust and incentivize the participation of customers in DR schemes, if they are to be successfully deployed.In this work, we illustrate the design of an energy system that addresses all of the roadblocks that hinder the large scale deployment of DR services. Our DR framework incorporates modern Smart Grid technologies, such as fog-enabled and IoT devices, DERs and RES to, among others, automate asset handling and various time-consuming workflows. To guarantee interoperability, our system employs OpenADR, which standardizes the communication of DR signals among energy stakeholders. Our approach acknowledges the need for decentralization and employs blockchains and smart contracts to deliver a secure, privacy-preserving, tamper-resistant, auditable and reliable DR framework. Blockchains provide the infrastructure to design innovative DR schemes and incentivize active consumer participation as their aforementioned properties promote transparency and trust. In addition, we harness the power of smart contracts which allows us to design and implement fully automated contractual agreements both among involved stakeholders, as well as on a machine-to-machine basis. Smart contracts are digital agents that "live" in the blockchain and can encode, execute and enforce arbitrary agreements. To illustrate the potential and effectiveness of our smart contract-based DR framework, we present a case study that describes the exchange of DR signals and the autonomous instantiation of smart contracts among involved participants to mediate and monitor transactions, enforce contractual clauses, regulate energy supply and handle payments/penalties.

Blockchain is a database technology that provides the integrity and trust of the system can't make arbitrary modifications and deletions by being an append-only distributed ledger. That is, the blockchain is not a modification or deletion but a CRAB (Create-Retrieve-Append-Burn) method in which data can be read and written according to a legitimate user's access right(For example, owner private key). However, this can not delete the created data once, which causes problems such as privacy breach. In this paper, we propose an on-off block-chained Hybrid Blockchain system to separate the data and save the connection history to the blockchain. In addition, the state is changed to the distributed database separately from the ledger record, and the state is changed by generating the arbitrary injection in the XOR form, so that the history of modification / deletion of the Off Blockchain can be efficiently retrieved.

Crowdsensing, driven by the proliferation of sensor-rich mobile devices, has emerged as a promising data sensing and aggregation paradigm. Despite useful, traditional crowdsensing systems typically rely on a centralized third-party platform for data collection and processing, which leads to concerns like single point of failure and lack of operation transparency. Such centralization hinders the wide adoption of crowdsensing by wary participants. We therefore explore an alternative design space of building crowdsensing systems atop the emerging decentralized blockchain technology. While enjoying the benefits brought by the public blockchain, we endeavor to achieve a consolidated set of desirable security properties with a proper choreography of latest techniques and our customized designs. We allow data providers to safely contribute data to the transparent blockchain with the confidentiality guarantee on individual data and differential privacy on the aggregation result. Meanwhile, we ensure the service correctness of data aggregation and sanitization by delicately employing hardware-assisted transparent enclave. Furthermore, we maintain the robustness of our system against faulty data providers that submit invalid data, with a customized zero-knowledge range proof scheme. The experiment results demonstrate the high efficiency of our designs on both mobile client and SGX-enabled server, as well as reasonable on-chain monetary cost of running our task contract on Ethereum.

The software development life cycle (SDLC) starts with business and functional specifications signed with a client. In addition to this, the specifications also capture policy / procedure / contractual / regulatory / legislation / standard compliances with respect to a given client industry. The SDLC must adhere to service level agreements (SLAs) while being compliant to development activities, processes, tools, frameworks, and reuse of open-source software components. In today's world, global software development happens across geographically distributed (autonomous) teams consuming extraordinary amounts of open source components drawn from a variety of disparate sources. Although this is helping organizations deal with technical and economic challenges, it is also increasing unintended risks, e.g., use of a non-complaint license software might lead to copyright issues and litigations, use of a library with vulnerabilities pose security risks etc. Mitigation of such risks and remedial measures is a challenge due to lack of visibility and transparency of activities across these distributed teams as they mostly operate in silos. We believe a unified model that non-invasively monitors and analyzes the activities of distributed teams will help a long way in building software that adhere to various compliances. In this paper, we propose a decentralized CAG - Compliance Adherence and Governance framework using blockchain technologies. Our framework (i) enables the capturing of required data points based on compliance specifications, (ii) analyzes the events for non-conformant behavior through smart contracts, (iii) provides real-time alerts, and (iv) records and maintains an immutable audit trail of various activities.

Trusted collaboration satisfying the requirements of (a) adequate transparency and (b) preservation of privacy of business sensitive information is a key factor to ensure the success and adoption of online business-to-business (B2B) collaboration platforms. Our work proposes novel ways of stringing together game theoretic modeling, blockchain technology, and cryptographic techniques to build such a platform for B2B collaboration involving enterprise buyers and sellers who may be strategic. The B2B platform builds upon three ideas. The first is to use a permissioned blockchain with smart contracts as the technical infrastructure for building the platform. Second, the above smart contracts implement deep business logic which is derived using a rigorous analysis of a repeated game model of the strategic interactions between buyers and sellers to devise strategies to induce honest behavior from buyers and sellers. Third, we present a formal framework that captures the essential requirements for secure and private B2B collaboration, and, in this direction, we develop cryptographic regulation protocols that, in conjunction with the blockchain, help implement such a framework. We believe our work is an important first step in the direction of building a platform that enables B2B collaboration among strategic and competitive agents while maximizing social welfare and addressing the privacy concerns of the agents.

Smart contracts have been widely used on Ethereum to enable business services across various application domains. However, they are prone to different forms of security attacks due to the dynamic and non-deterministic blockchain runtime environment. In this work, we highlighted a general miner-side type of exploit, called concurrency exploit, which attacks smart contracts via generating malicious transaction sequences. Moreover, we designed a systematic algorithm to automatically detect such exploits. In our preliminary evaluation, our approach managed to identify real vulnerabilities that cannot be detected by other tools in the literature.

Much recent work focuses on finding bugs and security vulnerabilities in smart contracts written in existing languages. Although this approach may be helpful, it does not address flaws in the underlying programming language, which can facilitate writing buggy code in the first place. We advocate a re-thinking of the blockchain software engineering tool set, starting with the programming language in which smart contracts are written. In this paper, we propose and justify requirements for a new generation of blockchain software development tools. New tools should (1) consider users' needs as a primary concern; (2) seek to facilitate safe development by detecting relevant classes of serious bugs at compile time; (3) as much as possible, be blockchain-agnostic, given the wide variety of different blockchain platforms available, and leverage the properties that are common among blockchain environments to improve safety and developer effectiveness.

In last decades' web application security has become one of the most important case study of information security studies. Business processes are transferred to web platforms. So web application usage is increased very fast. Web-based attacks have also increased due to the increased use of web applications. In order to ensure the security of web applications, intrusion detection and prevention systems and web application firewalls are used against web based attacks. Blockchain technology, which has become popular in recent years, enables reliable and transparent sharing of data with all stakeholders. In this study, in order to detect web-based attacks, a blockchain based web attack detection model that uses the signature based detection method is proposed. The signature based detection refers to the detection of attacks by looking for specific patterns against known web based attack types, such as Structured Query Language (SQL) Injection, Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Command Injection. Three web servers were used for the experimental study. A blockchain node has been installed with the MultiChain application for each server. Attacks on web applications are detected using the signature list found in the web application as well as detected using the signature list updated on the blockchain. According to the experimental results, the attacks signature detected and defined by a web application are updated in the blockchain lists and used by all web applications.

The labor market involves several untrusted actors with contradicting objectives. We propose a blockchain based system for labor market, which provides benefits to all participants in terms of confidence, transparency, trust and tracking. Our system would handle employment data through new Wavelet blockchain platform. It would change the job market enabling direct agreements between parties without other participants, and providing new mechanisms for negotiating the employment conditions. Furthermore, our system would reduce the need in existing paper workflow as well as in major internet recruiting companies. The key differences of our work from other blockchain based labor record systems are usage of Wavelet blockchain platform, which features metastability, directed acyclic graph system and Turing complete smart contracts platform and introduction of human interaction inside the smart contracts logic, instead of automatic execution of contracts. The results are promising while inconclusive and we would further explore potential of blockchain solutions for labor market problems.

We introduce BitML, a domain-specific language for specifying contracts that regulate transfers of bitcoins among participants, without relying on trusted intermediaries. We define a symbolic and a computational model for reasoning about BitML security. In the symbolic model, participants act according to the semantics of BitML, while in the computational model they exchange bitstrings, and read/append transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. A compiler is provided to translate contracts into standard Bitcoin transactions. Participants can execute a contract by appending these transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, according to their strategies. We prove the correctness of our compiler, showing that computational attacks on compiled contracts are also observable in the symbolic model.

Traditionally, a Certification Authority (CA) is required to sign, manage, verify and revoke public key certificates. Multiple CAs together form the CA-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). The use of a PKI forces one to place trust in the CAs, which have proven to be a single point-of-failure on multiple occasions. Blockchain has emerged as a transformational technology that replaces centralized trusted third parties with a decentralized, publicly verifiable, peer-to-peer data store which maintains data integrity among nodes through various consensus protocols. In this paper, we deploy three blockchain-based alternatives to the CA-based PKI for supporting IoT devices, based on Emercoin Name Value Service (NVS), smart contracts by Ethereum blockchain, and Ethereum Light Sync client. We compare these approaches with CA-based PKI and show that they are much more efficient in terms of computational and storage requirements in addition to providing a more robust and scalable PKI.

The underlying or core technology of Bitcoin cryptocurrency has become a blessing for human being in this era. Everything is gradually changing to digitization in this today's epoch. Bitcoin creates virtual money using Blockchain that's become popular over the world. Blockchain is a shared public ledger, and it includes all transactions which are confirmed. It is almost impossible to crack the hidden information in the blocks of the Blockchain. However, there are certain security and technical challenges like scalability, privacy leakage, selfish mining, etc. which hampers the wide application of Blockchain. In this paper, we briefly discuss this emerging technology namely Blockchain. In addition, we extrapolate in-depth insight on Blockchain technology.