ARPA Whitepaper

We propose a secure computation solution for blockchain networks. The correctness of computation is verifiable even under malicious majority condition using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC), and the privacy is preserved using Secret-Sharing. With state-of-the-art multiparty computation protocol and a layer2 solution, our privacy-preserving computation guarantees data security on blockchain, cryptographically, while reducing the heavy-lifting computation job to a few nodes. This breakthrough has several implications on the future of decentralized networks. First, secure computation can be used to support Private Smart Contracts, where consensus is reached without exposing the information in the public contract. Second, it enables data to be shared and used in trustless network, without disclosing the raw data during data-at-use, where data ownership and data usage is safely separated. Last but not least, computation and verification processes are separated, which can be perceived as computational sharding, this effectively makes the transaction processing speed linear to the number of participating nodes. Our objective is to deploy our secure computation network as an layer2 solution to any blockchain system. Smart Contracts\cite{smartcontract} will be used as bridge to link the blockchain and computation networks. Additionally, they will be used as verifier to ensure that outsourced computation is completed correctly. In order to achieve this, we first develop a general MPC network with advanced features, such as: 1) Secure Computation, 2) Off-chain Computation, 3) Verifiable Computation, and 4)Support dApps' needs like privacy-preserving data exchange

Archival Study of Blockchain Applications in the Construction Industry From Literature Published in 2019 and 2020

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate proposed blockchain applications in the construction industry from contemporary literature. Methodology: Archival studies will be used to obtain academic content from secondary sources. An explorative strategy will be adopted with no preconception or biases on the preferred route of execution. Blockchain is a fast-evolving technology with a high rate of yearly progression; therefore, this paper refines the search to recently published material in 2019 and 2020. Data is collected in two stages, firstly, categories of research are extrapolated from secondary literature and recorded into a table, and afterwards, the corresponding proposed application of blockchain is documented and reviewed. Findings: An adequate breadth and variety of categories are substantiated from archival literature, which effectively contributes to the extraction of proposed blockchain applications for construction. The data collection extracts 19 categories from the explorative study, in which 19 proposed solutions (one per category) is presented. All of the advisory content for the proposed solutions were obtained from a deliberated selection of 21 academic study papers. Limitations: The study is limited to one proposed application per category, totalling 19 proposed solutions; however, assessing various approaches per category could not be researched comparatively due to voluminous information. Thus, recommendations incorporate a holistic case study of one subject category which incorporates a multitude of various proposed applications. Originality: This paper contributes to new knowledge through extrapolating proposed blockchain applications from academic literature in 2019 and 2020

Blockchain based Access Control for Enterprise Blockchain Applications

Access control is one of the fundamental security mechanisms of IT systems. Most existing access control schemes rely on a centralized party to manage and enforce access control policies. As blockchain technologies, especially permissioned networks, find more applicability beyond cryptocurrencies in enterprise solutions, it is expected that the security requirements will increase. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an access control system that works in a decentralized environment without compromising the unique features of a blockchain. A straightforward method to support access control is to deploy a firewall in front of the enterprise blockchain application. However, this approach does not take advantage of the desirable features of blockchain. In order to address these concerns, we propose a novel blockchain‐based access control scheme, which keeps the decentralization feature for access control–related operations. The newly proposed system also provides the capability to protect user\u27s privacy by leveraging ring signature. We implement a prototype of the scheme using Hyperledger Fabric and assess its performance to show that it is practical for real‐world applications

A Business-to-Business Collaboration System That Promotes Data Utilization While Encrypting Information on the Blockchain

Ensuring the reliability of data gathering from every connected device is an essential issue for promoting the advancement of the next paradigm shift, i.e., Industry 4.0. Blockchain technology is becoming recognized as an advanced tool. However, data collaboration using blockchain has not progressed sufficiently among companies in the industrial supply chain (SC) that handle sensitive data, such as those related to product quality, etc. There are two reasons why data utilization is not sufficiently advanced in the industrial SC. The first is that manufacturing information is top secret. Blockchain mechanisms, such as Bitcoin, which uses PKI, require plaintext to be shared between companies to verify the identity of the company that sent the data. Another is that the merits of data collaboration between companies have not been materialized. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a business-to-business collaboration system using homomorphic encryption and blockchain techniques. Using the proposed system, each company can exchange encrypted confidential information and utilize the data for its own business. In a trial, an equipment manufacturer was able to identify the quality change caused by a decrease in equipment performance as a cryptographic value from blockchain and to identify the change one month earlier without knowing the quality value

STAIBT: Blockchain and CP-ABE Empowered Secure and Trusted Agricultural IoT Blockchain Terminal

The integration of agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain has become the key technology of precision agriculture. How to protect data privacy and security from data source is one of the difficult issues in agricultural IoT research. This work integrates cryptography, blockchain and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) technologies, and proposes a general IoT blockchain terminal system architecture, which strongly supports the integration of the IoT and blockchain technology. This research innovatively designed a fine-grained and flexible terminal data access control scheme based on the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm. Based on CP-ABE and DES algorithms, a hybrid data encryption scheme is designed to realize 1-to-N encrypted data sharing. A "horizontal + vertical" IoT data segmentation scheme under blockchain technology is proposed to realize the classified release of different types of data on the blockchain. The experimental results show that the design scheme can ensure data access control security, privacy data confidentiality, and data high-availability security. This solution significantly reduces the complexity of key management, can realize efficient sharing of encrypted data, flexibly set access control strategies, and has the ability to store large data files in the agricultural IoT

On the Integration of Blockchain and SDN: Overview, Applications, and Future Perspectives

Blockchain (BC) and software-defined networking (SDN) are leading technologies which have recently found applications in several network-related scenarios and have consequently experienced a growing interest in the research community. Indeed, current networks connect a massive number of objects over the Internet and in this complex scenario, to ensure security, privacy, confidentiality, and programmability, the utilization of BC and SDN have been successfully proposed. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey regarding these two recent research trends and review the related state-of-the-art literature. We first describe the main features of each technology and discuss their most common and used variants. Furthermore, we envision the integration of such technologies to jointly take advantage of these latter efficiently. Indeed, we consider their group-wise utilization—named BC–SDN—based on the need for stronger security and privacy. Additionally, we cover the application fields of these technologies both individually and combined. Finally, we discuss the open issues of reviewed research and describe potential directions for future avenues regarding the integration of BC and SDN. To summarize, the contribution of the present survey spans from an overview of the literature background on BC and SDN to the discussion of the benefits and limitations of BC–SDN integration in different fields, which also raises open challenges and possible future avenues examined herein. To the best of our knowledge, compared to existing surveys, this is the first work that analyzes the aforementioned aspects in light of a broad BC–SDN integration, with a specific focus on security and privacy issues in actual utilization scenarios