A rational delegating computation protocol based on reputation and smart contract

The delegating computation has become an irreversible trend, together comes the pressing need for fairness and efficiency issues. To solve this problem, we leverage game theory to propose a smart contract-based solution. First, according to the behavioral preferences of the participants, we design an incentive contract to describe the motivation of the participants. Next, to satisfy the fairness of the rational delegating computation, we propose a rational delegating computation protocol based on reputation and smart contract. More specifically, rational participants are to gain the maximum utility and reach the Nash equilibrium in the protocol. Besides, we design a reputation mechanism with a reputation certificate, which measures the reputation from multiple dimensions. The reputation is used to assure the client’s trust in the computing party to improve the efficiency of the protocol. Then, we conduct a comprehensive experiment to evaluate the proposed protocol. The simulation and analysis results show that the proposed protocol solves the complex traditional verification problem. We also conduct a feasibility study that involves implementing the contracts in Solidity and running them on the official Ethereum network. Meanwhile, we prove the fairness and correctness of the protocol.

An Incentive and Reputation Mechanism Based on Blockchain for Crowd Sensing Network

Nowadays, sensors inserted in mobile applications are used for gathering data for an explicit assignment that can effectively save cost and time in crowd sensing networks (CSNs). The true value and essence of gathered statistics depend on the participation level from all the members of a CSN, i.e., service providers, data collectors, and service consumers. In comparison with the centralized conventional mechanisms that are susceptible to privacy invasion, attacks, and manipulation, this article proposes a decentralized incentive and reputation mechanism for CSN. The monetary rewards are used to motivate the data collectors and to encourage the participants to take part in the network activities. Whereas the issue of privacy leakage is dealt with using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES128) technique. Additionally, a reputation system is implemented to tackle issues like data integrity, fake reviews, and conflicts among entities. Through registering reviews, the system encourages data utilization by providing correct, consistent, and reliable data. Furthermore, simulations are performed for analyzing the gas consumed by smart contracts. Similarly, the encryption technique is ratified by comparing its execution time with other techniques that are previously used in literature. Lastly, the reputation system is inspected through analyzing the gas consumption and mining time of input string length.

BMC-SDN: Blockchain-Based Multicontroller Architecture for Secure Software-Defined Networks

Multicontroller software-defined networks have been widely adopted to enable management of large-scale networks. However, they are vulnerable to several attacks including false data injection, which creates topology inconsistency among controllers. To deal with this issue, we propose BMC-SDN, a security architecture that integrates blockchain and multicontroller SDN and divides the network into several domains. Each SDN domain is managed by one master controller that communicates through blockchain with the masters of the other domains. The master controller creates blocks of network flow updates, and its redundant controllers validate the new block based on a proposed reputation mechanism. The reputation mechanism rates the controllers, i.e., block creator and voters, after each voting operation using constant and combined adaptive fading reputation strategies. The evaluation results demonstrate a fast and optimal detection of fraudulent flow rule injection.

Exploring the Effects of Governance Mechanism on Patient' Usage Intention in Web-based Consultation Platforms (Preprint)

BACKGROUND In recent years, the Internet has been gradually applied to the field of medical services. With the advantages of no time and geographical restrictions on the web-based medical treatment has begun to flourish in China. In the web-based medical market, individual patients are in a relatively weak position, so they mainly rely on the web-based medical platform operators to ensure the quality of medical services. OBJECTIVE Based on social exchange theory and transaction cost theory, this paper empirically studies the influence of governance mechanism on online patients' willingness to use, and explores the moderating effect of perceived uncertainty on the influence of social exchange theory and transaction cost theory. METHODS In this paper, a questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain the online patients’ attitudes towards medical service providers including the physicians and medical websites.In this survey, a total of 600 questionnaires were sent out, of which 565 were effectively recovered. Among them, 133 were invalid questionnaires eliminated. RESULTS Stratified linear regression analysis showed that supervision mechanism, reputation mechanism and communication mechanism had a significant positive effect on online patients' willingness to use. The perceived uncertainty doctors' behavior has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between supervision mechanism, reputation mechanism, communication mechanism and online patient willingness to use. Website perceived uncertainty moderates the relationship between supervision mechanism, reputation mechanism and online patients' willingness to use. This paper provides a basis and reference for improving the willingness of online patients through platform governance of Internet medical treatment. CONCLUSIONS The innovation of this paper is to introduce the website governance mechanism and perceived uncertainty into the Internet medical research to explore how the website governance mechanism affects patients' usage willingness. Based on the website governance mechanism, a model of the influence of perceived uncertainty on online patients' willingness to use was constructed. The perceived uncertainty and the website governance mechanism can be applied to a new field--the web-based medical field. Moreover, it enriches the web-based medical platform theory, which makes the research of patient seeking medical treatment more in-depth and specific and more scientific and rigorous.

Monitoring in Originate-to-Distribute Lending: Reputation versus Skin in the Game

Banks face liquidity and capital pressures that favor selling off the loans they originate, but loan sales undermine their monitoring incentives. A bank’s loan default history is a noisy measure of its past monitoring choices, which can serve as a reputation mechanism to incentivize current monitoring. In equilibrium, higher reputation banks monitor (weakly) more intensively; if retention is credible, they generally retain less of the loans they originate. Monitoring is difficult to sustain in periods with uncommonly large spikes in loan demand (“booms”), especially for low-reputation banks, which are more likely to accommodate boom demand and forgo monitoring.