4,644 research outputs found
On the Convergence of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of
our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and
objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical
world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there
are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be
addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy,
energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and
its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of
these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without
considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth
overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the
main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies
and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the
shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.Comment: Includes 11 Pages, 3 Figures, To publish in Journal of Strategic
Innovation and Sustainability for issue JSIS 14(1
A smart contract system for decentralized borda count voting
In this article, we propose the first self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol for a ranked-choice voting system based on Borda count. Our protocol does not need any trusted setup or tallying authority to compute the tally. The voters interact through a publicly accessible bulletin board for executing the protocol in a way that is publicly verifiable. Our main protocol consists of two rounds. In the first round, the voters publish their public keys, and in the second round they publish their randomized ballots. All voters provide Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) proofs to show that they have been following the protocol specification honestly without revealing their secret votes. At the end of the election, anyone including a third-party observer will be able to compute the tally without needing any tallying authority. We provide security proofs to show that our protocol guarantees the maximum privacy for each voter. We have implemented our protocol using Ethereum's blockchain as a public bulletin board to record voting operations as publicly verifiable transactions. The experimental data obtained from our tests show the protocol's potential for the real-world deployment
Combining Blockchain and Swarm Robotics to Deploy Surveillance Missions
Current swarm robotics systems are not utilized as frequently in surveillance missions due to the limitations of the existing distributed systems\u27 designs. The main limitation of swarm robotics is the absence of a framework for robots to be self-governing, secure, and scalable. As of today, a swarm of robots is not able to communicate and perform tasks in transparent and autonomous ways. Many believe blockchain is the imminent future of distributed autonomous systems. A blockchain is a system of computers that stores and distributes data among all participants. Every single participant is a validator and protector of the data in the blockchain system. The data cannot be modified since all participants are storing and watching the same records. In this thesis, we will focus on blockchain applications in swarm robotics using Ethereum smart contracts because blockchain can make a swarm globally connected and secure. A decentralized application (DApp) is used to deploy surveillance missions. After mission deployment, the swarm uses blockchain to communicate and make decisions on appropriate tasks within Ethereum private networks. We set a test swarm robotics system and evaluate the blockchain for its performance, scalability, recoverability, and responsiveness. We conclude that, although blockchain enables a swarm to be globally connected and secure, there are performance limitations that can become a critical issue
Proof-of-Prestige: A Useful Work Reward System for Unverifiable Tasks
As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as
utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to
number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such
contexts, users get rewards from the network after they have carried out some
specific task useful for the network. While in some cases the proof of some
utility or service can be proved, the majority of tasks are impossible to
verify. In order to deal with such cases, we design Proof-of-Prestige (PoP) - a
reward system that can run on top of Proof-of-Stake blockchains. PoP introduces
prestige which is a volatile resource and, in contrast to coins, regenerates
over time. Prestige can be gained by performing useful work, spent when
benefiting from services and directly translates to users minting power. PoP is
resistant against Sybil and Collude attacks and can be used to reward workers
for completing unverifiable tasks, while keeping the system free for the
end-users. We use two exemplar use-cases to showcase the usefulness of PoP and
we build a simulator to assess the cryptoeconomic behaviour of the system in
terms of prestige transfer between nodes.Comment: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency
(ICBC 2019
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