Blockchain Technology-Security Booster

Author(s):  
Harsha Kundan Patil

“Blockchain” as the name suggests is the chain of blocks. It is the chunk of digital information (blocks) that are connected through the public databases (Chain). It is nothing but the newer version of file organisation. Blocks store digital information like actual record of any transaction, details of involve entities in the transaction, time stamps, and other metadata of the transactions. Blocks also have unique ids, which are known as hash. Blockchain technology is built using peer-to-peer networking. Anyone who is on network can access the blocks. There is no centralised community to control the blockchain. It is operated by miners, the peoples who lend their computing power to the network to solve the complex computation algorithm problems. These blocks are stored in multiple computers. Due to its distribution and decentralisation, the validation process is broadcast in nature, which provides it “the trusted approach”. Blockchain enables security and tamperproof capabilities for storing data and smart contracts. Any tampering of data attempted by a node or user in a block changes the hash of the block. The blockchain technology has the capability to face and provides the solution to fight with the problem of risk and security concern online. In 2008, a mysterious white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”, by visionary Satoshi Nakamoto gave birth to the concept of blockchain. The chapter explains the structure of blockchain technology in detail and enlighten the aspects that make blockchain technology the secure concept of today's world.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5307
Author(s):  
Ricardo Borges dos Santos ◽  
Nunzio Marco Torrisi ◽  
Rodrigo Palucci Pantoni

Every consumer’s buying decision at the supermarket influences food brands to make first party claims of sustainability and socially responsible farming methods on their agro-product labels. Fine wines are often subject to counterfeit along the supply chain to the consumer. This paper presents a method for efficient unrestricted publicity to third party certification (TPC) of plant agricultural products, starting at harvest, using smart contracts and blockchain tokens. The method is capable of providing economic incentives to the actors along the supply chain. A proof-of-concept using a modified Ethereum IGR token set of smart contracts using the ERC-1155 standard NFTs was deployed on the Rinkeby test net and evaluated. The main findings include (a) allowing immediate access to TPC by the public for any desired authority by using token smart contracts. (b) Food safety can be enhanced through TPC visible to consumers through mobile application and blockchain technology, thus reducing counterfeiting and green washing. (c) The framework is structured and maintained because participants obtain economical incentives thus leveraging it´s practical usage. In summary, this implementation of TPC broadcasting through tokens can improve transparency and sustainable conscientious consumer behaviour, thus enabling a more trustworthy supply chain transparency.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Sakız ◽  
Ayşen Hiç Gencer

Blockchain technology is a disruptive innovation with the potential to replace existing business models that rely on centralized systems and third parties for trust. Even if there are a lot of application areas, blockchain used primarily for cryptocurrencies. Satoshi Nakamoto implemented the first blockchain application and invented the world’s first digital currency which is named as Bitcoin in 2008. Fundementally Bitcoin relies on cryptographic “proof of work” mechanism, digital signatures, and peer to peer distributed networking layer in order to provide a distributed ledger holding transactions. In 2014, a second generation of blockchains allow to program and execute them over distributed networks such as Ethereum project. The code to program any asset stored in blockchain’s peer-to-peer network is called as "smart contract" and smart contracts gives a powerful tool to developers for decentralized applications. There are various types of tokens that anyone can built on top of Ethereum and by combining smart contracts and new tokens, this paved the way of possibility to build a wide range of decentralized projects. One of the disruptive blockchain based innovation impacting intellectual property is called non-fungible-tokens or NFTs firstly introcuced in late 2017 on Ethereum network. This research contends that blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which are cryptographically unique, scarce, non-replicable digital assets created through smart contracts and provably digital collectible assets. Our objective is to give NFT taxonomy, review NFT platforms and discuss technical challenges as well as recent advances in tackling the challenges. Moreover, this paper also aims to point out the future directions for NFT technology.


Author(s):  
Sara Jeza Alotaibi

Today's era of globalization and digital transformation has produced many modern technologies that have influenced modern societies, blockchain being one. This chapter will set out definitions and criteria related to what blockchain is, its advantages and limitations, and its relation to the modern techniques used in the conclusion of smart contracts; and the impact of this technology on fighting administrative and financial corruption. Within this chapter, the central focus is on a new form of contracts founded as a result of the challenge of aligning the current system of the contract with the application of blockchain technology (i.e., to replace the idea of credit intermediation in dealing [notary, bank, management] with another thought based on a peer-to-peer system to increase contractual security and to establish the principle of self-implementation of the contract without the need to mediate with others).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vidhi Pitroda ◽  
Vraj Shah ◽  
Jinan Fiaidhi

In recent years blockchain technology has become mainstream research topic because of its decentralized, peer to peer transaction and anonymity properties. There are several applications of blockchain which are secure and easy as compare to the current techniques. One of the applications is a smart contract. Smart contracts are lines of code which are stored on a blockchain and automatically executed when the conditions defined by the it (developer) are met. This smart contract with the addition of blockchain technology can do task fast and with high security. In this paper we have developed a smart contract for a generalized notary application on solidity, Ethereum and the application is tested using the truffle suite. Furthermore, applications and their methodology for notary applications are also mentioned.


Author(s):  
Burcu Sakız ◽  
E. Ayşen Hiç Gencer

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons believed to be the inventor of cryptocurrency Bitcoin, came up with the concept of blockchain as a core component of it when published a white paper on “BitCoin: A peer to peer electronic cash system” in 2008, blockchain technology made its public debut. Bitcoin is generally considered the first decentralized cryptocurrency and since the release of it, over 6,000 altcoins have been created. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to well-known, traditional centralized digital currency and also central banking systems. The decentralized control of each cryptocurrency works through distributed ledger technology, typically a blockchain. Blockchain is a system that in which a record of transactions made in cryptocurrencies are maintained across several computers/servers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network. Blockchain based applications provides many opportunities to create a more sustainable world. This paper contribute to the discussion on future avenues for sustainability especially in terms of cryptocurrencies and blockchain based platforms and services.


Author(s):  
Suvarna Sharma ◽  
Puneeta Rosmin ◽  
Amit Bhagat

Blockchain, as the name suggests, is a linear chain of blocks. It is a digital ledger that holds information on transactions taking place over the web. So every block contains data in the form of coding that is organized in a chronological manner. In 2004, a concept called “reusable proofs of work” was introduced by Hal Finney. In 2009, a mysterious white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System,” by visionary Satoshi Nakamoto gave birth to the concept of blockchain. This is a survey of blockchain technology that first provides a short introduction of the blockchain, discussing its advantages and followed by possible limitations and their possibilities for the future.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye-Byoul Son ◽  
Jong-Hyuk Im ◽  
Hee-Yong Kwon ◽  
Seong-Yun Jeon ◽  
Mun-Kyu Lee

Advanced smart grid technologies enable energy prosumers to trade surplus energy from their distributed renewable energy sources with other peer prosumers through peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. In many previous works, P2P energy trading was facilitated by blockchain technology through blockchain’s distributive nature and capacity to run smart contracts. However, the feature that all the data and transactions on a blockchain are visible to all blockchain nodes may significantly threaten the privacy of the parties participating in P2P energy trading. There are many previous works that have attempted to mitigate this problem. However, all these works focused on the anonymity of participants but did not protect the data and transactions. To address this issue, we propose a P2P energy trading system on a blockchain where all bids are encrypted and peer matching is performed on the encrypted bids by a functional encryption-based smart contract. The system guarantees that the information encoded in the encrypted bids is protected, but the peer matching transactions are performed by the nodes in a publicly verifiable manner through smart contracts. We verify the feasibility of the proposed system by implementing a prototype composed of smart meters, a distribution system operator (DSO) server, and private Ethereum blockchain.


Computers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Tim Weingärtner ◽  
Danielle Batista ◽  
Sandro Köchli ◽  
Gilles Voutat

Corruption in public procurement is a worldwide appearance that causes immense financial and reputational damages. Especially in developing countries, corruption is a widespread issue due to secrecy and lack of transparency. An important instrument for transparency and accountability assurance is the record which is managed and controlled by recordkeeping systems. Blockchain technology and more precisely blockchain-based smart contracts are emerging technological tools that can be used as recordkeeping systems and a tool to mitigate some of the fraud involving public procurement records. Immutability, transparency, distribution and automation are some of the features of smart contracts already implemented in several applications to avoid malicious human interference. In this paper, we discuss some of the frauds in public procurement, and we propose smart contracts to automatize different stages of the public procurement procedure attempting to fix their biggest current weaknesses. The processes we have focused on include the bidding process, supplier habilitation and delivery verification. In the three subprocesses, common irregularities include human fallibility, improper information disclosure and hidden agreements which concern not only governments but also civil society. To show the feasibility and usability of our proposal, we have implemented a prototype that demonstrates the process using sample data.


This paper describes a decentralized electronic voting system using blockchain technology with peer-to-peer network rather than the centralized voting system of server-client structure. In the proposed system, an Ethereum-based private blockchain network is configured and decentralized applications are implemented to store and distribute voting data to all nodes participating in the network to create secure and reliable electronic voting system. Smart contracts for electronic voting are implemented using the Solidity language and distributed to a configured network so that all users can view and vote on elections, and voting data are shared and contrasted by all users in the network, which makes it possible to build a safer and more reliable electronic voting system without third party involvement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Kapsoulis ◽  
Alexandros Psychas ◽  
Georgios Palaiokrassas ◽  
Achilleas Marinakis ◽  
Antonios Litke ◽  
...  

Enterprise blockchain solutions attempt to solve the crucial matter of user privacy, albeit that blockchain was initially directed towards full transparency. In the context of Know Your Customer (KYC) standardization, a decentralized schema that enables user privacy protection on enterprise blockchains is proposed with two types of developed smart contracts. Through the public KYC smart contract, a user registers and uploads their KYC information to the exploited IPFS storage, actions interpreted in blockchain transactions on the permissioned blockchain of Alastria Network. Furthermore, through the public KYC smart contract, an admin user approves or rejects the validity and expiration date of the initial user’s KYC documents. Inside the private KYC smart contract, CRUD (Create, read, update and delete) operations for the KYC file repository occur. The presented system introduces effectiveness and time efficiency of operations through its schema simplicity and smart integration of the different technology modules and components. This developed scheme focuses on blockchain technology as the most important and critical part of the architecture and tends to accomplish an optimal schema clarity.


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