Blockchains

This paper presents a distributed Load Balancing Trade Framework (LBTF) with focus on demand response and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) security in smart grid. This comprehensive energy market model LBTF framework can achieve good balance in demand response in two ways. First way is utility-grid contract, which introduced a simple reward policy using distributed proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm in Blockchain to motivate consumer to use less energy in peak hours. Through this policy consensus algorithm reward electric units to the consumers in peak hours. And in second way scheme introduce Micro-grid contract, which is a peer to peer (P2P) trade in global market. Those consumer (prosumer) who can generate energy using renewable resources can sell their surplus energy to other consumer through this contract. Furthermore, hash functions, public key encryption and digital signatures have been used to provide privacy preserving to the consumers and integrity to the stored data.

Business network brings many organizations close together to achieve their desired goals and profit from it. People from different organizations may or may not know each other but still can be part of a business network. A major challenge with these business networks is how to provide trust among people and data security. Blockchain is another means through which many organizations in the current digital age are overcoming these problems with ease. Blockchains have also changed the way the business transactions with clients take place. Blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger in a peer to peer network which can be public or private, and it enables individuals or companies to collaborate with each other to achieve trust and transparency between business and its clients. Many implementations of blockchain technology are widely available today. Each of them have their own strengths for a specific application domain. They can fundamentally alter electronic communications with a ...

This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of consensus algorithms used in a blockchain system for Internet of Things (IoT). In such systems the time necessary to achieve consensus should be small. Three most used consensus algorithms (modified proof of work, practical byzantine fault tolerance and binary consensus) are evaluated in different situations – type of motes, number of nodes participating in consensus algorithm and radio propagation model. An integrated solution is proposed to adapt an IoT node to different consensus algorithm. The simulations in Contiki IoT operating system show good performance (time to achieve consensus less than seconds)

This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of consensus algorithms used in a blockchain system for Internet of Things (IoT). In such systems the time necessary to achieve consensus should be small. Three most used consensus algorithms (modified proof of work, practical byzantine fault tolerance and binary consensus) are evaluated in different situations – type of motes, number of nodes participating in consensus algorithm and radio propagation model. An integrated solution is proposed to adapt an IoT node to different consensus algorithm. The simulations in Contiki IoT operating system show good performance (time to achieve consensus less than seconds)

Fast Moving Consumer Goods come a long way from the production of their raw materials to finally being bought by the end user, i.e. the customer. Their Supply Chain Management is a tedious task and doesn’t really provide you with an auditable trail. The source and thus the quality of the product raises few questions. The paperwork involved in this leads to days of auditing for even a small discrepancy arising in the whole SCM. One of the obvious solutions to this is the digitalization of the whole process. But that still doesn’t stop it from getting tampered. The truth still poses a question with the quality of the product being consumed by the end user. Adding another level of surety is only possible by ensuring that the data is not tampered with during the whole supply chain of the product. This is only possible by having a blockchain to moderate the whole process. This will not only make sure that the data regarding the product is true to its point but also make the auditing easy...

Despite the availability of advanced security software and hardware mechanisms available, still, there has been a breach in the defence system of an organization or individual. Social engineering mostly targets the weakest link in the security system i.e. “Humans” for gaining access to sensitive information by manipulating human psychology. Social engineering attacks are arduous to defend as such attacks are not easily detected by available security software or hardware. This article surveys recent studies on social engineering attacks with discussion on the social engineering phases and categorizing the various attacks into two groups. The main aim of this survey is to examine the various social engineering attacks on individuals and countermeasures against social engineering attacks are also discussed.

In recent years, the block chain technology considered as adaptable compared to other techniques. Many of the industry, understanding the block chain technology is utilizing for financial services and its transactions but it also effective in other sectors like healthcare industry. Existing methods are hazardous; where, data stored in outsider servers might be eavesdropped, stolen, or legitimate way. Nevertheless, the trustworthiness of storage server architecture relies upon dependability of single service provider. The security manager’s detect the which are client(s) can get to a specific part of the data. However, the existing method is increasingly failed to maintain access control, record transaction authentications with anonymous interruptions. The paper proposes a secure and efficient health record transaction utilizing block chain (SEHRTB) algorithm for addressing health record information transaction between the patient, doctor, service providers, and institutions in a pri...

Mucho se ha hablado en los ultimos anos sobre la industria 4.0, sin embargo, fue hasta hace poco que se implemento realmente tanto en la industria, como en la vida cotidiana. Este termino se le ha acunado al uso de tecnologias como sistemas ciberfisicos (Samaniego & Deters, 2016), a la cultura maker (cultura Hagalo usted mismo), a la manufactura automatizada, al servicio al cliente con el uso de Inteligencia artificial (bots), al internet de las cosas y al blockchain, donde este ultimo, ha demostrado un gran potencial con innumerables aplicaciones que todavia se siguen desarrollando. Su principal uso ha sido en el intercambio de criptodivisas tales como el Bitcoin, Ethereum, entre otras cerca de 1900 criptomonedas que diariamente mueven en el mercado cerca de 12 mil MDD. Por otro lado, el intercambio de dinero no es la unica aplicacion que tiene el blockchain, por mencionar algunas, se tienen: registro de propiedades, almacenamiento en la nube, redes privadas de intercambio de infor...

This issue of supply chain management is very important for the stakeholder groups. Due to the complexity of the supply chain, its management often requires manual work and frequent sharing of information. This paper proposes a new approach that uses block chain technology to resolve the issue and improve the efficiency of the supply chain. Block chain is a distributed database that enables users to trust each other without intermediaries. Its decentralized nature and its ability to verify transactions through automated algorithms make it a safer and more secure alternative to the existing supply chain model. Due to the complexity of the coffe e supply chain, the accuracy of the data collected during the CRC process became an issue. This study proposed the use of Block chain technology to address these issues.

This essay considers the ideological context of blockchain technology. This technology is often celebrated for its potential for decentralization, distribution, privacy, and a lack of intermediaries and coordinators for transactions and general governance. Because of these features, blockchain technology, and, in particular, its most famous inauguration—the bitcoin blockchain—is frequently identified with libertarianism. In this essay, we argue that the ideological context of blockchain technology is much more complicated. In addition to unraveling a number of background ideologies and their role in this technology, we raise the ontological issue concerning the relationship of ideology to technology. These matters have implications for, among other things, the approach that should be taken to blockchain's governance, as well as how international lawyers may approach this “foreign”-seeming phenomenon that has its proponents from the European Central Bank to the United Nations (not, however, forgetting the private sector nor the digital underground). | Published in AJIL: Unbound, vol 115, 2021, 408–412. URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2021.65.

In recent years, blockchain technology has affected to a large extent all aspects of life, however, until now paper-based elections have been practiced. It is time to upgrade the election scenario using modern technology such as blockchain and advanced cryptography methods. Actually, both of Estonia and New South Wales have been using i-voting systems, but after developing an example software of their systems for the purpose of analysis, it is discovered that it has weaknesses against many kinds of attacks, such as malwares, network attacks, and servers attacks. The fact that the blockchain technology has demonstrated infinite immutability and resistance against hacking, so it is possible to use it to secure election results from fraud by saving every single piece of data, record or transaction with unchangeable history. By abandoning the traditional database and compensating it with two blockchains instead of one ensures voter/vote privacy, as well as, safeguards the results from m...

Over the past decade, smart crime-fighting solutions have been adopted by the major cities around the world. In this context, license plate recognition (LPR) systems have been used by public safety forces to monitor vehicle movement. However, current systems store vehicle location data indistinctly, without differentiating vehicles that are under criminal investigation from those that are not. This monitoring may be used to infer personal data about the owner of the vehicle, resulting in a violation of privacy by disregarding data protection laws. This paper presents a study about the use of technologies to ensure privacy in the Internet of Things and proposes a model to protect data collected by LPR systems. Our solution uses private blockchains regulated by smart contracts to ensure that the storage of data complies with current data protection laws.

Islamic finance has grown considerably over the last four decades and has a global reach. It is considered one of the fastest-growing segments of the global financial industry. One of the biggest challenges for Islamic finance in the next decade is in financial technology (known as Fintech). In the digital world, traditional financial practice will be left behind. This paper examines the phenomenon of financial innovation and technology in Islamic finance and its Shariah parameters. The research adopts a qualitative approach employing the inductive method to trace primary and secondary data on the topic and the descriptive method to describe the emergence of fintech in the Islamic finance industry. The study found that all financial innovations are generally welcomed and can be considered as benefits (Maslahah) to the customers and to the whole financial industry. Innovations in fintech become impermissible only if there is clear evidence from the Shariah that they are against the basic rules of the Shariah. The study also highlights the relationship between fintech and Shariah compliance and suggested to have a proper Shariah governance framework in order to ensure the operation of fintech is in total compliance with Shariah. Besides that, authorities and regulators are required to develop Shariah standards that would explicitly spell out the requirement of Shariah that are fundamental to fintech operations and practices. Keywords: Innovation, Fintech, Digital World, Shariah Compliance, Islam-ic Finance.

Blockchain and other business disruption technologies have created a buzz in the last few years and have become an inevitable discussions topic in the financial circles. It will have game-changing impact on businesses, particularly on the banking and financial services. Consortium or Enterprise Blockchain is the latest technological evolution allowing us to build hybrid blockchains (public and private) using features such as permission restriction and multiple controlling authorities. These hybrid features allow easy yet controlled information sharing between various stakeholders. After getting acceptance in areas such as remittance & supply chain financing, blockchain is now making inroads into sub-sectors such as asset and wealth management. This article demystifies blockchain concepts and demonstrates an implementation for the mutual fund (MF) industry. MF industry is plagued by slow processing. For example, it takes days together to onboarding a new investor, transactions take a date to appear on statements while NAV computations takes hours to compute and show up for registrars to process transactions. We explore how smart contracts can help cut the transaction processing but will blockchain provide high speed and latency necessary? Can investor statements be accessed dynamically? Will distributed information sharing and decentralization system save costs and time for the stakeholders, particularly in client onboarding, NAV dissemination? How can blockchain help in KYC and other compliance related activities? Can mf scheme portfolios and factsheets get constructed automatically and available with real time updates? How can regulators and auditors have easy access to information as and when they want? Finally, we will examine some of the challenges or hurdles that come in way towards the implementation.

Image encryption has unique characteristics that differs from other data, with pixels representation having undergone many encryption techniques, such as data embedding, AES, chaotic transpositions, DES etc. Some of these techniques are not really practical for the modern security application, although other techniques proposed against reversible attack, by combining both Chaotic Steganography and Cryptography together, in order to increase encryption strength. In this proposal work, we used structural and non-linear technique, using pre-defined encoding system and FFT shifting, to produce QRs keys for both encryption and decryption processes, the initial keys are present, but not dependent as secrets keys, they are encoded dynamically each time, to generate vector of Bar Codes, then reshaped to QR codes thru generation phases. We calculated the information entropy that reached up to 7.995 for the encrypted image, and NPCR is 99.62%, as well as, the average changing intensity UACI u...

Since a mysterious creator under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym) launched first successful cryptocurrency in January 2009, he (or could be she) also opened the door for never-ending criticism, claims, arguments, plethora of articles, and media frenzy all contemplating what Bitcoin is. This paper concludes that Bitcoin is not a currency to be used for every-day transactions like all fiat currencies. Furthermore, Bitcoin is not a stable cryptocurrency and it is useless (and impractical) of arguing how Bitcoin meets or fails basic functions of money; to make it clear, Bitcoin satisfies all three functions of money (not to the extent of fiat currencies, nonetheless it does); store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange. As discussed in this article, our proposal of Bitcoin as a supranational central bank reserve currency not only will put an end to debates and the frequently asked old question of “what is Bitcoin?”, it will also make Bitcoin’s design flaws disappear instantly. Under the new Bitcoin standard (Gold 2.0), inefficiencies become trivial because Bitcoin is capable of easily handling the volume of operations among central banks. Bitcoin’s extensively discussed weaknesses become no issue; high latency (a block of transactions is validated every 10 minutes), low processing speed (3-7 transactions per second), huge power cost (mining of 1 bitcoin requires 1,825 kWh of electricity, equivalent to 63 days of power usage by a U.S. household), and low scalability (the maximum number of bitcoins is fixed at 21 million). Key elements of the proposed new Bitcoin Standard include: Bitcoin will be a supranational reserve currency used by central banks only; ownership, trade, and other uses of bitcoins by citizens and various entities will be prohibited; the fixed supply of bitcoins (21 million) will remain unchanged; every country’s financial authority will switch to central bank digital coins (CBDC); CBDCs will be defined in bitcoin by a corresponding exchange rate for each country; 100% of CBDCs will be 100% backed by bitcoins; any increase in the digital money supply by a central bank will require additional bitcoins; and the value of each bitcoin will be raised to a price level to cover 100% of the total money in circulation (approximately $75 trillion).

The innovative potential of blockchain technology proves to be convenient and useful in different sectors, but these opportunities may also be disruptive and create challenges. This paper investigates technical, risk and security related challenges of blockchain. The use of this technology is viewed in light of financial crime that pose a threat to security on national and international level as well. Firstly, elements of blockchain technology and the reasons they really matter are explained. Secondly, we focus on national security and how is it affected by the criminal use of cryptocurrencies. Thirdly, we elaborate on the lack of standards and mechanisms in connection with illegal activities, particularly money-laundering and financing terrorism. Finally, we suggest the use of fuzzy methods for security analysis and testing, and compatibility with GDPR for better protection of the recorded data in chain. We conclude that a collaboration of responsible entities in different sectors ...

Introdução: por meio de portais governamentais, é possível aumentar a transparência e a participação da sociedade no governo. A tecnologia blockchain tem sido apontada como uma alternativa para aumentar a transparência governamental e reduzir custos no setor público. Nesse contexto, o artigo teve como objetivo responder à questão principal: qual o atual panorama das aplicações da tecnologia blockchain no setor público? Método: foi feita uma revisão sistemática de literatura por meio do indexador Google Acadêmico, tendo como recorte temporal os trabalhos publicados entre 2008 e 2018. Foram utilizadas as seguintes palavras-chave: "government transparency", "open government", "e-government", "blockchain applications", "blockchain application", "transparência governamental", "governo aberto", "setor público", "governo eletrônico", "aplicações blockchain" e "aplicação blockchain". Resultados: foram detectadas diversas áreas consideradas de interesse do setor público para implantações da tecnologia blockchain, bem como áreas onde ela já se encontra em uso. Conclusões: o tema tem ganhado destaque em diversas áreas, como pode ser comprovado por meio desta pesquisa, que encontrou relatos de uso nos seguintes setores: energia elétrica, imobiliário, medicina, gerenciamento de identidades, agricultura, transações comerciais, mercado financeiro, tributação, cidades inteligentes, contratos inteligentes, administração governamental e votação eletrônica, entre outros. Esta revisão sistemática de literatura indica que a tecnologia em tela tem potencial para ajudar o setor público.

The current system to manage the global pool of IP addresses is centralized in five transnational organizations, the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Each of these RIRs manage the address pool for a large number of countries. Because the RIRs are private organizations, they are subject to the legal framework of the country where they are based. This configuration results in a jurisdictional overflow from the legal framework of the countries where the RIR is based to all the countries that the RIRs are serving (the countries served by the RIRs de facto become subjects of the legal system of the country where the RIR is hosted). The situation is aggravated by the deployment of new security techniques such as the RPKI and BGPsec, that enable enforcement of allocations by the RIRs. In this paper we present InBlock, a blockchain-based distributed governance body aimed to provide de-centralized management of IP addresses. InBlock also aims to fulfil the same objectives as the current ...