Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017, Boston, MA, US

Philosophy of Blockchain Technology - Ontologies

About the necessity and usefulness of developing a philosophy specific to the blockchain technology, emphasizing on the ontological aspects. After an Introduction that highlights the main philosophical directions for this emerging technology, in Blockchain Technology I explain the way the blockchain works, discussing ontological development directions of this technology in Designing and Modeling. The next section is dedicated to the main application of blockchain technology, Bitcoin, with the social implications of this cryptocurrency. There follows a section of Philosophy in which I identify the blockchain technology with the concept of heterotopia developed by Michel Foucault and I interpret it in the light of the notational technology developed by Nelson Goodman as a notational system. In the Ontology section, I present two developmental paths that I consider important: Narrative Ontology, based on the idea of order and structure of history transmitted through Paul Ricoeur's narrative history, and the Enterprise Ontology system based on concepts and models of an enterprise, specific to the semantic web, and which I consider to be the most well developed and which will probably become the formal ontological system, at least in terms of the economic and legal aspects of blockchain technology. In Conclusions I am talking about the future directions of developing the blockchain technology philosophy in general as an explanatory and robust theory from a phenomenologically consistent point of view, which allows testability and ontologies in particular, arguing for the need of a global adoption of an ontological system for develop cross-cutting solutions and to make this technology profitable. CONTENTS: Abstract Introducere Tehnologia blockchain - Proiectare - Modele Bitcoin Filosofia Ontologii - Ontologii narative - Ontologii de intreprindere Concluzii Note Bibliografie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24510.3360

Towards Secure Blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles: Optimizing Consensus Management Using Reputation and Contract Theory

In Internet of Vehicles (IoV), data sharing among vehicles is essential to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. To ensure data sharing security and traceability, highefficiency Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus scheme as a hard security solution is utilized to establish blockchain-enabled IoV (BIoV). However, as miners are selected from miner candidates by stake-based voting, it is difficult to defend against voting collusion between the candidates and compromised high-stake vehicles, which introduces serious security challenges to the BIoV. To address such challenges, we propose a soft security enhancement solution including two stages: (i) miner selection and (ii) block verification. In the first stage, a reputation-based voting scheme for the blockchain is proposed to ensure secure miner selection. This scheme evaluates candidates' reputation by using both historical interactions and recommended opinions from other vehicles. The candidates with high reputation are selected to be active miners and standby miners. In the second stage, to prevent internal collusion among the active miners, a newly generated block is further verified and audited by the standby miners. To incentivize the standby miners to participate in block verification, we formulate interactions between the active miners and the standby miners by using contract theory, which takes block verification security and delay into consideration. Numerical results based on a real-world dataset indicate that our schemes are secure and efficient for data sharing in BIoV.Comment: 12 pages, submitted for possible journal publicatio