Biblio

The push for data sharing and data processing across organisational boundaries creates challenges at many levels of the software stack. Data sharing and processing rely on the participating parties agreeing on the permissible operations and expressing them into actionable contracts and policies. Converting these contracts and policies into a operational infrastructure is still a matter of research and therefore begs the question how should a digital data market place infrastructure look like? In this paper we investigate how communication fabric and applications can be tightly coupled into a multi-domain overlay network which enforces accountability. We prove our concepts with a prototype which shows how a simple workflow can run across organisational boundaries.

Blockchain technology is the cornerstone of digital trust and systems' decentralization. The necessity of eliminating trust in computing systems has triggered researchers to investigate the applicability of Blockchain to decentralize the conventional security models. Specifically, researchers continuously aim at minimizing trust in the well-known Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) model which currently requires a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to sign digital certificates. Recently, the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) was standardized as a certificate issuance automation protocol. It minimizes the human interaction by enabling certificates to be automatically requested, verified, and installed on servers. ACME only solved the automation issue, but the trust concerns remain as a trusted CA is required. In this paper we propose decentralizing the ACME protocol by using the Blockchain technology to enhance the current trust issues of the existing PKI model and to eliminate the need for a trusted CA. The system was implemented and tested on Ethereum Blockchain, and the results showed that the system is feasible in terms of cost, speed, and applicability on a wide range of devices including Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

This paper proposes a novel extension of blockchain systems with fuzzy ontologies. The main advantage is to let the users have flexible restrictions, represented using fuzzy sets, and to develop smart contracts where there is a partial agreement among the involved parts. We propose a general architecture based on four fuzzy ontologies and a process to develop and run the smart contracts, based on a reduction to a well-known fuzzy ontology reasoning task (Best Satisfiability Degree). We also investigate different operators to compute Pareto-optimal solutions and implement our approach in the Ethereum blockchain.

In isolated network domains, global trustworthiness (e.g., consistent network view) is critical to the multiple-domain business partners who aim to perform the trusted corporations depending on each isolated network view. However, to achieve such global trustworthiness across distributed network domains is a challenge. This is because when multiple-domain partners are required to exchange their local domain views with each other, it is difficult to ensure the data trustworthiness among them. In addition, the isolated domain view in each partner is prone to be destroyed by malicious falsification attacks. To this end, we propose a blockchain-based approach that can ensure the trustworthiness among multiple-party domains. In this paper, we mainly present the design and implementation of the proposed trustworthiness-protection system. A cloud-based prototype and a local testbed are developed based on Ethereum. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed prototype and testbed.

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.

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 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.

The cost and complexity of conducting multi-site clinical trials have significantly increased over time, with site monitoring, data management, and Institutional Review Board (IRB) amendments being key drivers. Trial sponsors, such as pharmaceutical companies, are also increasingly outsourcing trial management to multiple organizations. Enforcing compliance with standard operating procedures, such as preserving data privacy for human subject protection, is crucial for upholding the integrity of a study and its findings. Current efforts to ensure quality of data collected at multiple sites and by multiple organizations lack a secure, trusted, and efficient framework for fragmented data capture. To address this challenge, we propose a novel data management infrastructure based on a permissioned blockchain with private channels, smart contracts, and distributed ledgers. We use an example multi-organizational clinical trial to design and implement a blockchain network: generate activity-specific private channels to segregate data flow for confidentiality, write channel-specific smart contracts to enforce regulatory guidelines, monitor the immutable transaction log to detect protocol breach, and auto-generate audit trail. Through comprehensive experimental study, we demonstrate that our system handles high-throughput transactions, exhibits low-latency, and constitutes a trusted, scalable solution.

With the advent of blockchain technology, multiple avenues of use are being explored. The immutability and security afforded by blockchain are the key aspects of exploitation. Extending this to legal contracts involving digital intellectual properties provides a way to overcome the use of antiquated paperwork to handle digital assets.

Firms collaborate with partners in research and development (R&D) of new technologies for many reasons such as to access complementary knowledge, know-how or skills, to seek new opportunities outside their traditional technology domain, to sustain their continuous flows of innovation, to reduce time to market, or to share risks and costs [1]. The adoption of collaborative research agreements (CRAs) or collaboration agreements (CAs) is rising rapidly as firms attempt to access innovation from various types of organizations to enhance their traditional in-house innovation [2], [3]. To achieve the objectives of their collaborations, firms need to share knowledge and jointly develop new knowledge. As more firms adopt open collaborative innovation strategies, intellectual property (IP) management has inevitably become important because clear and fair contractual IP terms and conditions such as IP ownership allocation, licensing arrangements and compensation for IP access are required for each collaborative project [4], [5]. Moreover, the firms need to adjust their IP management strategies to fit the unique characteristics and circumstances of each particular project [5].

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.

Engineering complex distributed systems is challenging. Recent solutions for the development of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in industry tend to rely on architectural designs based on service orientation, where the constituent components are deployed according to their service behavior and are to be understood as loosely coupled and mostly independent. In this paper, we develop a workflow that combines contract-based and CPS model-based specifications with service orientation, and analyze the resulting model using fault injection to assess the dependability of the systems. Compositionality principles based on the contract specification help us to make the analysis practical. The presented techniques are evaluated on two case studies.

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.

The growing demand for safety in urban environments is supported by monitoring using video surveillance. The need to analyze multiple video-flows from different cameras deployed around the city by heterogeneous owners introduces vulnerabilities and privacy issues. Video frames, timestamps, and camera settings can be digitally manipulated by malicious users; the positions of cameras, their orientation and their mechanical settings can be physically manipulated. Digital and physical manipulations may have several effects, including the change of the observed scene and the potential violation of neighbors' privacy. To face these risks, we introduce BlockSee, a blockchain-based video surveillance system that jointly provides validation and immutability to camera settings and surveillance videos, making them readily available to authorized users in case of events. The encouraging results obtained with BlockSee pave the way to new distributed city-wide monitoring systems.

As a decentralized ledger technology, blockchain is considered to be a potential solution for applications with highly concentrated management mechanism. However, most of the existing blockchain networks are employed with the hash-puzzle-solving consensus protocol, known as proof-of-work. The competition of solving the puzzle introduces high latency, which directly leads to a long transaction-processing time. One solution of this dilemma is to establish a blockchain network with shards. In this paper, we focus on the blockchain network with shards and adopt the security-deposit based consensus protocol, studying the problem of how to balance the security incentive and the economic incentive. Also, the inherent features of the blockchain, i.e., anonymity and decentralization, introduce the information asymmetric issue between the beacon chain and the participants. The contract theory is utilized to formulate the problem between them. As such, the optimal rewards related to the different types of validators can be obtained, as well as the reasonable deposits accordingly. Compared with the fixed deposits, the flexible deposits can provide enough economic incentive for the participants without losing the security incentives. Besides, the simulation results demonstrate that the contract theory approach is capable of maximizing the beacon chain's utility and satisfying the incentive compatibility and individual rationality of the participants.

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.

With the growing scale of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), it is challenging to maintain their stability under all operating conditions. How to reduce the downtime and locate the failures becomes a core issue in system design. In this paper, we employ a hierarchical contract-based resilience framework to guarantee the stability of CPS. In this framework, we use Assume Guarantee (A-G) contracts to monitor the non-functional properties of individual components (e.g., power and latency), and hierarchically compose such contracts to deduce information about faults at the system level. The hierarchical contracts enable rapid fault detection in large-scale CPS. However, due to the vast number of components in CPS, manually designing numerous contracts and the hierarchy becomes challenging. To address this issue, we propose a technique to automatically decompose a root contract into multiple lower-level contracts depending on I/O dependencies between components. We then formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to search the optimal parameters of each lower-level contract. This enables automatic contract refinement taking into consideration the communication overhead between components. Finally, we use a case study from the manufacturing domain to experimentally demonstrate the benefits of the proposed framework.

The Internet of Things (IoT) visualizes a massive network with billions of interaction among smart things which are capable of contributing all sorts of services. Self-configuring things (nodes) are connected dynamically with a global network in IoT scenario. The small things are widely spread in a real world paradigm with minimal processing capacity and limited storage. The recent IoT technologies have more concerns about the security, privacy and reliability. Sharing personal data over the centralized system still remains as a challenging task. If the infrastructure is able to provide the assurance for transferring the data but for now it requires special attention on security and data consistency. Because, centralized system and infrastructure is viewed as a more attractive point for hacker or cyber-attacker. To solve this we present a secured smart contract based on Blockchain to develop a secured communicative network. A Hash based secret key is used for encryption and decryption purposes. A demo attack is done for developing a better understanding on blockchain technology in terms of their comparison and calculation.

A DDoS attack is a spiteful attempt to disrupt legitimate traffic to a server by overwhelming the target with a flood of requests from geographically dispersed systems. Today attackers prefer DDoS attack methods to disrupt target services as they generate GBs to TBs of random data to flood the target. In existing mitigation strategies, because of lack of resources and not having the flexibility to cope with attacks by themselves, they are not considered to be that effective. So effective DDoS mitigation techniques can be provided using emerging technologies such as blockchain and SDN(Software-Defined Networking). We propose an architecture where a smart contract is deployed in a private blockchain, which facilitates a collaborative DDoS mitigation architecture across multiple network domains. Blockchain application is used as an additional security service. With Blockchain, shared protection is enabled among all hosts. With help of smart contracts, rules are distributed among all hosts. In addition, SDN can effectively enable services and security policies dynamically. This mechanism provides ASes(Autonomous Systems) the possibility to deploy their own DPS(DDoS Prevention Service) and there is no need to transfer control of the network to the third party. This paper focuses on the challenges of protecting a hybridized enterprise from the ravages of rapidly evolving Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) attack.

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.

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are one of the main building blocks for securing communications over the Internet. Currently, PKIs are under the control of centralized authorities, which is problematic as evidenced by numerous incidents where they have been compromised. The distributed, fault tolerant log of transactions provided by blockchains and more recently, smart contract platforms, constitutes a powerful tool for the decentralization of PKIs. To verify the validity of identity records, blockchain-based identity systems store on chain either all identity records, or, a small (or even constant) sized amount of data for verifying identity records stored off chain. However, as most of these systems have never been implemented, there is little information regarding the practical implications of each design's tradeoffs. In this work, we first implement and evaluate the only provably secure, smart contract based PKI of Patsonakis et al. on top of Ethereum. This construction incurs constant-sized storage at the expense of computational complexity. To explore this tradeoff, we propose and implement a second construction which, eliminates the need for trusted setup, preserves the security properties of Patsonakis et al. and, as illustrated through our evaluation, is the only version with constant-sized state that can be deployed on the live chain of Ethereum. Furthermore, we compare these two systems with the simple approach of most prior works, e.g., the Ethereum Name Service, where all identity records are stored on the smart contract's state, to illustrate several shortcomings of Ethereum and its cost model. We propose several modifications for fine tuning the model, which would be useful to be considered for any smart contract platform like Ethereum so that it reaches its full potential to support arbitrary distributed applications.

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.

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.

Cyber insurance is a viable method for cyber risk transfer. However, the cyber insurance faces critical challenges, the most important of which is lack of statistical data. In this paper, we proposed an incentive model considering monitoring signals for cybersecurity information haring based on the principal-agent theory. We studied the effect of monitoring signals on increasing the rationality of the incentive contract and reducing moral hazard in the process of cybersecurity information sharing, and analyzed factors influencing the effectiveness of the incentive contract. We show that by introducing monitoring signals, the insurer can collect more information about the effort level of the insured, and encourage the insured to share cybersecurity information based on the information sharing output and monitoring signals of the effort level, which can not only reduce the blindness of incentive to the insured in the process of cybersecurity information sharing, but also reduce moral hazard.

Delivery service via ridesharing is a promising service to share travel costs and improve vehicle occupancy. Existing ridesharing systems require participating vehicles to periodically report individual private information (e.g., identity and location) to a central controller, which is a potential central point of failure, resulting in possible data leakage or tampering in case of controller break down or under attack. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain secured ridesharing delivery system, where the immutability and distributed architecture of the Blockchain can effectively prevent data tampering. However, such tamper-resistance property comes at the cost of a long confirmation delay caused by the consensus process. A Hash-oriented Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) based consensus algorithm is proposed to improve the Blockchain efficiency and reduce the transaction confirmation delay from 10 minutes to 15 seconds. The Hash-oriented PBFT effectively avoids the double-spending attack and Sybil attack. Security analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Blockchain secured ridesharing delivery system offers strong security guarantees and satisfies the quality of delivery service in terms of confirmation delay and transaction throughput.