Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models

Revealing the Landscape of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in the Context of Data Markets for the IoT: A Systematic Literature Review

IoT data markets in public and private institutions have become increasingly relevant in recent years because of their potential to improve data availability and unlock new business models. However, exchanging data in markets bears considerable challenges related to disclosing sensitive information. Despite considerable research focused on different aspects of privacy-enhancing data markets for the IoT, none of the solutions proposed so far seems to find a practical adoption. Thus, this study aims to organize the state-of-the-art solutions, analyze and scope the technologies that have been suggested in this context, and structure the remaining challenges to determine areas where future research is required. To accomplish this goal, we conducted a systematic literature review on privacy enhancement in data markets for the IoT, covering 50 publications dated up to July 2020, and provided updates with 24 publications dated up to May 2022. Our results indicate that most research in this area has emerged only recently, and no IoT data market architecture has established itself as canonical. Existing solutions frequently lack the required combination of anonymization and secure computation technologies. Furthermore, there is no consensus on the appropriate use of blockchain technology for IoT data markets and a low degree of leveraging existing libraries or reusing generic data market architectures. We also identified significant challenges remaining, such as the copy problem and the recursive enforcement problem that-while solutions have been suggested to some extent-are often not sufficiently addressed in proposed designs. We conclude that privacy-enhancing technologies need further improvements to positively impact data markets so that, ultimately, the value of data is preserved through data scarcity and users' privacy and businesses-critical information are protected.Comment: 49 pages, 17 figures, 11 table

A Free Exchange e-Marketplace for Digital Services

The digital era is witnessing a remarkable evolution of digital services. While the prospects are countless, the e-marketplaces of digital services are encountering inherent game-theoretic and computational challenges that restrict the rational choices of bidders. Our work examines the limited bidding scope and the inefficiencies of present exchange e-marketplaces. To meet challenges, a free exchange e-marketplace is proposed that follows the free market economy. The free exchange model includes a new bidding language and a double auction mechanism. The rule-based bidding language enables the flexible expression of preferences and strategic conduct. The bidding message holds the attribute-valuations and bidding rules of the selected services. The free exchange deliberates on attributes and logical bidding rules for automatic deduction and formation of elicited services and bids that result in a more rapid self-managed multiple exchange trades. The double auction uses forward and reverse generalized second price auctions for the symmetric matching of multiple digital services of identical attributes and different quality levels. The proposed double auction uses tractable heuristics that secure exchange profitability, improve truthful bidding and deliver stable social efficiency. While the strongest properties of symmetric exchanges are unfeasible game-theoretically, the free exchange converges rapidly to the social efficiency, Nash truthful stability, and weak budget balance by multiple quality-levels cross-matching, constant learning and informs at repetitive thick trades. The empirical findings validate the soundness and viability of the free exchange

Anonymizing and Trading Person-specific Data with Trust

In the past decade, data privacy, security, and trustworthiness have gained tremendous attention from research communities, and these are still active areas of research with the proliferation of cloud services and social media applications. The data is growing at a rapid pace. It has become an integral part of almost every industry and business, including commercial and non-profit organizations. It often contains person-specific information and a data custodian who holds it must be responsible for managing its use, disclosure, accuracy and privacy protection. In this thesis, we present three research problems. The first two problems address the concerns of stakeholders on privacy protection, data trustworthiness, and profit distribution in the online market for trading person-specific data. The third problem addresses the health information custodians (HICs) concern on privacy-preserving healthcare network data publishing. Our first research problem is identified in cloud-based data integration service where data providers collaborate with their trading partners in order to deliver quality data mining services. Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) enables data integration to serve the demands of data consumers. Data providers face challenges not only to protect private data over the cloud but also to legally adhere to privacy compliance rules when trading person-specific data. We propose a model that allows the collaboration of multiple data providers for integrating their data and derives the contribution of each data provider by valuating the incorporated cost factors. This model serves as a guide for business decision-making, such as estimating the potential privacy risk and finding the sub-optimal value for publishing mashup data. Experiments on real-life data demonstrate that our approach can identify the sub-optimal value in data mashup for different privacy models, including K-anonymity, LKC-privacy, and ϵ-differential privacy, with various anonymization algorithms and privacy parameters. Second, consumers demand a good quality of data for accurate analysis and effective decision- making while the data providers intend to maximize their profits by competing with peer providers. In addition, the data providers or custodians must conform to privacy policies to avoid potential penalties for privacy breaches. To address these challenges, we propose a two-fold solution: (1) we present the first information entropy-based trust computation algorithm, IEB_Trust, that allows a semi-trusted arbitrator to detect the covert behavior of a dishonest data provider and chooses the qualified providers for a data mashup, and (2) we incorporate the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction mechanism for the valuation of data providers’ attributes into the data mashup process. Experiments on real-life data demonstrate the robustness of our approach in restricting dishonest providers from participation in the data mashup and improving the efficiency in comparison to provenance-based approaches. Furthermore, we derive the monetary shares for the chosen providers from their information utility and trust scores over the differentially private release of the integrated dataset under their joint privacy requirements. Finally, we address the concerns of HICs of exchanging healthcare data to provide better and more timely services while mitigating the risk of exposing patients’ sensitive information to privacy threats. We first model a complex healthcare dataset using a heterogeneous information network that consists of multi-type entities and their relationships. We then propose DiffHetNet, an edge-based differentially private algorithm, to protect the sensitive links of patients from inbound and outbound attacks in the heterogeneous health network. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method in terms of information utility and efficiency on different types of real-life datasets that can be modeled as networks. Experimental results suggest that DiffHetNet generally yields less information loss and is significantly more efficient in terms of runtime in comparison with existing network anonymization methods. Furthermore, DiffHetNet is scalable to large network datasets