71 research outputs found
On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles
The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in
technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging
mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage
the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To
this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient,
secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and
auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be
applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure,
efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the
distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a
new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their
batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of
billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT),
a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our
proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the
feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that
the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)
Cryptocurrencies Are Taxable and Not Free From Fraud
In this report, the authors discuss cryptocurrencies — especially bitcoin — and argue that because the IRS lists them as property, they are taxable, and because they are not as anonymous as once thought, they are not free from fraud.
Cryptocurrencies are digital assets used as a medium of exchange, but they are not really coins. They can be sent electronically from one entity to another almost anywhere in the world with an internet connection. There are many cryptocurrencies in the market, including bitcoin, ethereum, ethereum classic, litecoin, nem, dash, iota, bitshares, monero, neo, and ripple. Many of the cryptocurrency networks are not controlled by a single entity or company; instead, a decentralized network of computers keeps track of the currency using a token ID. A ledger maintains a continuously growing list of date stamped transactions in real time called “blocks.” This technology is known as blockchain, which records, verifies, and stores transactions without a trusted central authority. The network instead relies on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) with uncertain legal standing
Revisiting the security model for aggregate signature schemes
Aggregate signature schemes combine the digital signatures of multiple users on different messages into one single signature. The Boneh-Gentry-Lynn-Shacham (BGLS) aggregate signature scheme is one such scheme, based on pairings, where anyone can aggregate the signatures in any order. We suggest improvements to its current chosen-key security model. In particular, we argue that the scheme should be resistant to attackers that can adaptively choose their target users, and either replace other users' public keys or expose other users' private keys. We compare these new types of forgers to the original targeted-user forger, building up to the stronger replacement-and-exposure forger. Finally, we present a security reduction for a variant of the BGLS aggregate signature scheme with respect to this new notion of forgery. Recent attacks by Joux and others on the discrete logarithm problem in small-characteristic finite fields dramatically reduced the security of many type I pairings. Therefore, we explore security reductions for BGLS with type III rather than type I pairings. Although our reductions are specific to BGLS, we believe that other aggregate signature schemes could benefit from similar changes to their security models
An architecture for distributed ledger-based M2M auditing for Electric Autonomous Vehicles
Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) promise to be an effective way to solve
transportation issues such as accidents, emissions and congestion, and aim at
establishing the foundation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. For this to be
possible, the market should be able to offer appropriate charging services
without involving humans. The state-of-the-art mechanisms of charging and
billing do not meet this requirement, and often impose service fees for value
transactions that may also endanger users and their location privacy. This
paper aims at filling this gap and envisions a new charging architecture and a
billing framework for EAV which would enable M2M transactions via the use of
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)
Formalizing and safeguarding blockchain-based BlockVoke protocol as an ACME extension for fast certificate revocation
Certificates are integral to the security of today’s Internet. Protocols like BlockVoke allow secure, timely and efficient revocation of certificates that need to be invalidated. ACME, a scheme used by the non-profit Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority to handle most parts of the certificate lifecycle, allows automatic and seamless certificate issuance. In this work, we bring together both protocols by describing and formalizing an extension of the ACME protocol to support BlockVoke, combining the benefits of ACME’s certificate lifecycle management and BlockVoke’s timely and secure revocations. We then formally verify this extension through formal methods such as Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) and conduct a risk and threat analysis of the ACME/BlockVoke extension using the ISSRM domain model. Identified risks and threats are mitigated to secure our novel extension. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept implementation of the ACME/BlockVoke extension is provided, bridging the gap towards deployment in the real world
- …