2,313 research outputs found
EduCTX: A blockchain-based higher education credit platform
Blockchain technology enables the creation of a decentralized environment
where transactions and data are not under the control of any third party
organization. Any transaction ever completed is recorded in a public ledger in
a verifiable and permanent way. Based on blockchain technology, we propose a
global higher education credit platform, named EduCTX. This platform is based
on the concept of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS).
It constitutes a globally trusted, decentralized higher education credit and
grading system that can offer a globally unified viewpoint for students and
higher education institutions (HEIs), as well as for other potential
stakeholders such as companies, institutions, and organizations. As a proof of
concept, we present a prototype implementation of the environment, based on the
open-source Ark Blockchain Platform. Based on a globally distributed
peer-to-peer network, EduCTX will process, manage and control ECTX tokens,
which represent credits that students gain for completed courses such as ECTS.
HEIs are the peers of the blockchain network. The platform is a first step
towards a more transparent and technologically advanced form of higher
education systems. The EduCTX platform represents the basis of the EduCTX
initiative which anticipates that various HEIs would join forces in order to
create a globally efficient, simplified and ubiquitous environment in order to
avoid language and administrative barriers. Therefore we invite and encourage
HEIs to join the EduCTX initiative and the EduCTX blockchain network.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure
Fake News, Disinformation, and Deepfakes: Leveraging Distributed Ledger Technologies and Blockchain to Combat Digital Deception and Counterfeit Reality
The rise of ubiquitous deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda
and post-truth, often referred to as fake news, raises concerns over the role
of Internet and social media in modern democratic societies. Due to its rapid
and widespread diffusion, digital deception has not only an individual or
societal cost (e.g., to hamper the integrity of elections), but it can lead to
significant economic losses (e.g., to affect stock market performance) or to
risks to national security. Blockchain and other Distributed Ledger
Technologies (DLTs) guarantee the provenance, authenticity and traceability of
data by providing a transparent, immutable and verifiable record of
transactions while creating a peer-to-peer secure platform for storing and
exchanging information. This overview aims to explore the potential of DLTs and
blockchain to combat digital deception, reviewing initiatives that are
currently under development and identifying their main current challenges.
Moreover, some recommendations are enumerated to guide future researchers on
issues that will have to be tackled to face fake news, disinformation and
deepfakes, as an integral part of strengthening the resilience against
cyber-threats on today's online media.Comment: Updated versio
Blockchain And The Future of the Internet: A Comprehensive Review
Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure
currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is
underscored by decentralization, transparency, and trusted auditability. In
ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more
democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and
decentralized database, blockchain finds its applications in fields as varied
as the energy sector, forestry, fisheries, mining, material recycling, air
pollution monitoring, supply chain management, and their associated operations.
In this paper, we present a survey of blockchain-based network applications.
Our goal is to cover the evolution of blockchain-based systems that are trying
to bring in a renaissance in the existing, mostly centralized, space of network
applications. While re-imagining the space with blockchain, we highlight
various common challenges, pitfalls, and shortcomings that can occur. Our aim
is to make this work as a guiding reference manual for someone interested in
shifting towards a blockchain-based solution for one's existing use case or
automating one from the ground up.Comment: Under Review in IEEE COMS
Decentralized Smart Surveillance through Microservices Platform
Connected societies require reliable measures to assure the safety, privacy,
and security of members. Public safety technology has made fundamental
improvements since the first generation of surveillance cameras were
introduced, which aims to reduce the role of observer agents so that no
abnormality goes unnoticed. While the edge computing paradigm promises
solutions to address the shortcomings of cloud computing, e.g., the extra
communication delay and network security issues, it also introduces new
challenges. One of the main concerns is the limited computing power at the edge
to meet the on-site dynamic data processing. In this paper, a Lightweight IoT
(Internet of Things) based Smart Public Safety (LISPS) framework is proposed on
top of microservices architecture. As a computing hierarchy at the edge, the
LISPS system possesses high flexibility in the design process, loose coupling
to add new services or update existing functions without interrupting the
normal operations, and efficient power balancing. A real-world public safety
monitoring scenario is selected to verify the effectiveness of LISPS, which
detects, tracks human objects and identify suspicious activities. The
experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.Comment: 2019 SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensin
Social Signals in the Ethereum Trading Network
Blockchain technology, which has been known by mostly small technological
circles up until recently, is bursting throughout the globe, with a potential
economic and social impact that could fundamentally alter traditional financial
and social structures. Issuing cryptocurrencies on top of the Blockchain system
by startups and private sector companies is becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon,
inducing the trading of these crypto-coins among their holders using dedicated
exchanges.
Apart from being a trading ledger for tokens, Blockchain can also be observed
as a social network. Analyzing and modeling the dynamics of the "social
signals" of this network can contribute to our understanding of this ecosystem
and the forces acting within in.
This work is the first analysis of the network properties of the ERC20
protocol compliant crypto-coins' trading data. Considering all trading wallets
as a network's nodes, and constructing its edges using buy--sell trades, we can
analyze the network properties of the ERC20 network. Examining several periods
of time, and several data aggregation variants, we demonstrate that the network
displays strong power-law properties. These results coincide with current
network theory expectations, however nonetheless, are the first scientific
validation of it, for the ERC20 trading data.
The data we examined is composed of over 30 million ERC20 tokens trades,
performed by over 6.8 million unique wallets, lapsing over a two years period
between February 2016 and February 2018
Blockchain for the Internet of Things: Present and Future
One of the key challenges to the IoT's success is how to secure and anonymize
billions of IoT transactions and devices per day, an issue that still lingers
despite significant research efforts over the last few years. On the other
hand, technologies based on blockchain algorithms are disrupting today's
cryptocurrency markets and showing tremendous potential, since they provide a
distributed transaction ledger that cannot be tampered with or controlled by a
single entity. Although the blockchain may present itself as a cure-all for the
IoT's security and privacy challenges, significant research efforts still need
to be put forth to adapt the computation-intensive blockchain algorithms to the
stringent energy and processing constraints of today's IoT devices. In this
paper, we provide an overview of existing literature on the topic of blockchain
for IoT, and present a roadmap of research challenges that will need to be
addressed to enable the usage of blockchain technologies in the IoT
BlendMAS: A BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Microservices Architecture for Smart Public Safety
Thanks to rapid technological advances in the Internet of Things (IoT), a
smart public safety (SPS) system has become feasible by integrating
heterogeneous computing devices to collaboratively provide public protection
services. While a service oriented architecture (SOA) has been adopted by IoT
and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it is difficult for a monolithic architecture
to provide scalable and extensible services for a distributed IoT based SPS
system. Furthermore, traditional security solutions rely on a centralized
authority, which can be a performance bottleneck or single point failure.
Inspired by microservices architecture and blockchain technology, this paper
proposes a BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Microservices Architecture for
Smart public safety (BlendMAS). Within a permissioned blockchain network, a
microservices based security mechanism is introduced to secure data access
control in an SPS system. The functionality of security services are decoupled
into separate containerized microservices that are built using a smart
contract, and deployed on edge and fog computing nodes. An extensive
experimental study verified that the proposed BlendMAS is able to offer a
decentralized, scalable and secured data sharing and access control to
distributed IoT based SPS system.Comment: Submitted to the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain
(Blockchain-2019
MOTIVE: Micropayments for trusted vehicular services
Increasingly, connected cars are becoming a decentralized data platform. With
greater autonomy, they have growing needs for computation and perceiving the
world around them through sensors. While todays generation of vehicles carry
all the necessary sensor data and computation on board, we envision a future
where vehicles can cooperate to increase their perception of the world beyond
their immediate view, resulting in greater safety, coordination and more
comfortable experience for their human occupants. In order for vehicles to
obtain data, compute and other services from other vehicles or road side
infrastructure, it is important to be able to make micro payments for those
services and for the services to run seamlessly despite the challenges posed by
mobility and ephemeral interactions with a dynamic set of neighboring devices.
We present MOTIVE, a trusted and decentralized framework that allows vehicles
to make peer to peer micropayments for data, compute and other services
obtained from other vehicles or road side infrastructure within radio range.
The framework utilizes distributed ledger technologies including smart
contracts to enable autonomous operation and trusted interactions between
vehicles and nearby entities
From Trend Analysis to Virtual World System Design Requirement Satisfaction Study
Virtual worlds have become global platforms connecting millions of people and
containing various technologies. The development of technology, shift of market
value, and change of user preference shape the features of virtual worlds. In
this paper, we first study the new features of virtual worlds and emergent
requirements of system development through trend analysis. Based on the trend
analysis, we constructed the new design requirement space. We then discuss the
requirement satisfaction of existing virtual world system architectures and
highlight their limitations through a literature survey. The comparison of
existing system architectures sheds some light on future virtual world system
development to match the changing trends of the user market. At the end of this
study, we briefly introduce our ongoing study, a new architecture, called
Virtual Net, and discuss its possibility in requirement satisfaction and new
research challenges.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, 2 table
Scalable and Secure Architecture for Distributed IoT Systems
Internet-of-things (IoT) is perpetually revolutionizing our daily life and
rapidly transforming physical objects into an ubiquitous connected ecosystem.
Due to their massive deployment and moderate security levels, those devices
face a lot of security, management, and control challenges. Their classical
centralized architecture is still cloaking vulnerabilities and anomalies that
can be exploited by hackers for spying, eavesdropping, and taking control of
the network. In this paper, we propose to improve the IoT architecture with
additional security features using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain
technology. We propose a novel architecture based on permissioned blockchain
technology in order to build a scalable and decentralized end-to-end secure IoT
system. Furthermore, we enhance the IoT system security with an AI-component at
the gateway level to detect and classify suspected activities, malware, and
cyber-attacks using machine learning techniques. Simulations and practical
implementation show that the proposed architecture delivers high performance
against cyber-attacks.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Technology &
Engineering Management Conference (TEMSCON'20), Detroit, USA, jun, 202
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