Management plane for differential privacy preservation through smart contracts

International audienceBlockchain has emerged as a novel solution addressing a plethora of industrial issues in domains spanning from financial to educational. However, several challenges restrict the widespread adoption of the technology and data privacy, with throughput and scalability issues, ranks amongst the foremost. In this paper, we introduce a novel privacy management plane which integrates differential privacy to query existing relational databases through the blockchain as well as spearheads the use of blockchain for local differential privacy. The distinguishing feature in the latter is that the privacy management plane gives the data owners the right to perturb their data with the desired privacy budget, while in the former it gives the right to the data curator to change the privacy budget dynamically while answering queries through the blockchain. The paper also includes experimental evaluation of the developed privacy management plane and integrates management operations in it through another smart contract. The paper addresses the issue of GDPR and it's implications in the context of blockchain data, while highlighting the compliance of the proposed implementation

Key characteristics to create optimized blockchain consensus algorithms

Blockchain is a fairly new technology and still in its infancy. As a result, many research papers are creating optimized consensus algorithms. Therefore, a need for key characteristics to create optimized blockchain consensus algorithms has been identified. This research paper presents the results of a systematic literature on identifying the main blockchain consensus algorithms and their associated advantages and disadvantages. Papers from four different databases were retrieved and after exclusion criteria were applied, 44 papers were ultimately included in the review. Results indicated that the five main consensus algorithms were Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and Delegated Proof-of-Stake. The results further indicated that efficiency was the main advantage of the PoS, PBFT, PoA and hybrid consensus algorithms. The main disadvantage was “energy wastage” and was attributed to the PoW algorithm. Security concerns were the main disadvantage of the PoS algorithm. These findings were used to present key characteristics that future researchers can have in mind when creating optimized blockchain consensus algorithms.https://www.springer.com/series/558hj2022Informatic

Electronic media management with the use of blockchain technology in scholarly communication

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology, which has the potential to fundamentally change many areas of activities, including scientific research and scholarly communication, together with the publishing industry. This paper focuses on the blockchain’s potential to transform scholarly communication and research in general. It highlights, how blockchain can touch many critical aspects of scholarly communication, including transparency, trust, reproducibility and credit. Moreover, blockchain could change the future role of every stakeholder, and it could have an important role in all research processes, not only scholarly communication. The paper shows that blockchain technology has the potential to solve some of the most prominent issues the scholarly communication is currently facing, such as issues around costs, trust and credibility, openness, and universal accessibility to scholarly information. The research presents basic information about blockchain technology. Based on the literature, an attempt was made to create a model, how to use this technology as a disruptive innovation in scholarly communication

Блокчейн для науки: революционные возможности, перспективы внедрения, потенциальные проблемы

В статье рассматриваются перспективы применения технологии блокчейна (распределенного реестра) в сфере науки. Объясняется, чем ключевые свойства технологии (децентрализация, гарантия неизменности данных, доверие среди не доверяющих друг другу субъектов) могут быть полезны в организации науки. Подробно рассказывается о том, насколько реально работающие проекты в Европе, США и России смогли воплотить в жизнь обещания новой технологии. Описываются четыре области, где применение блокчейна идет наиболее активно: работа с первичными данными и выход из кризиса воспроизводимости исследований; оптимизация издательских процессов и рецензирования; снижение пристрастности, коррумпированности и бюрократизма в экспертизе и финансировании науки; выстраивание более комплексной, гибкой и «низовой» наукометрии. Наконец, автор обсуждает главные сложности и проблемы, возникающие при интеграции блокчейна в повседневные практики ученых: конфликт между демократическим потенциалом новой технологии и ее использованием в новых инструментах отчетности и контроля над исследователями; опасность исключительно денежной мотивации для ученых (токенизация); плюсы и минусы анархической, коммерческой и государственной «блокчейнизации» науки. Благодарность. Статья подготовлена при финансовой поддержке Российского фонда фундаментальных исследований (РФФИ) в рамках научного проекта «Сетевые договоры (смарт-контракты) как способ регулирования и организации научной деятельности» (№ 18-29-16184). Автор выражает благодарность Ивану Тарханову (ГАУГН) за ценные советы, высказанные при обсуждении рукописи статьи

Investigating the themes in supply chain finance: the emergence of blockchain as a disruptive technology

Blockchain has gained momentum as a disruptive technology in supply chain management against its introduction as a finance-related instrument. Nevertheless, the developing academic understanding and the limited practical implications lead to insufficient insights into the use of blockchain technology, particularly in the supply chain finance (SCF) domain. Thus, the expected potential of blockchain technology remains underexplored. Accordingly, this study explicates this situation by examining the extant literature findings and web-based big data that can provide evidence about the real needs in supply chains, and investigating how blockchain emerges as a disruptive SCF-oriented technology. The study employs a web analytics method, Search Engine Results Page (SERP) analysis which considers the trends in blockchain technology use and the interactions between blockchain, supply chain and finance appearing in Google searches. The SERP method examined real-time clicks, web traffics and most commonly asked questions about blockchain. The SERP findings revealed that the interest in blockchain technology neither focused on finance nor data privacy as emphasised in the literature but mainly on the benefits of increasing digitalisation and efficiency in supply chains. The results offered practical implications for capturing recent blockchain- and supply chain-related trends and designing more digital and efficient supply chains

Blockchain. A systematic literature review on its application in the field of scientific publication

RESUMEN: La tecnología blockchain, al permitir la gestión de datos descentralizados y autorregulados a través de transacciones seguras basadas en criptografía, provee a las áreas de la ciencia, tecnología y empresa un amplio abanico de futuras posibilidades. Por su parte, el campo de la producción científica es un sector dinámico de datos, información y conocimiento que requiere soluciones eficaces a importantes dificultades como la reproducibilidad de las investigaciones, la transparencia en la trazabilidad o la gestión eficaz de tiempos en la revisión por pares y disponibilidad de revisores. El objetivo de esta investigación es realizar una revisión sistemática de literatura (RSL) sobre la aplicación de la tecnología blockchain al campo de la publicación científica: determinar ventajas, desafíos y potencialidad. Se realiza a través de un proceso sistemático en el que se definen criterios de elegibilidad: inclusión y exclusión. A través de estos criterios se evalúa y seleccionan las publicaciones que por su investigación interesan para el objetivo principal de este documento. Siguiendo los lineamientos de la Declaración PRISMA, se identifican 12 artículos científicos para ser analizados como parte de la revisión. Los resultados muestran que, si bien no todos las publicaciones presentan diseños metodológicos de aplicaciones prácticas que superen algunas de las dificultades en este campo, sí proponen y discuten reflexiones sobre cómo se podrían implementar sistemas en los que se solucionen o al menos se mitiguen estas problemáticas. La mayoría de las publicaciones recogidas fueron publicadas en la revista Information Services and Use valorada en cuartil 2 e indexada en 3 categorías como ciencias de la computación, aplicaciones de la ciencia de la computación y sistemas de información. Asimismo, se observa que se empieza a publicar sobre la temática de la publicación científica y blockchain en el año 2017. Esto tiene un incremento notable en el año 2018 con 8 publicaciones y en los transcurrido del año 2019 se detectan 3 investigaciones. Sin embargo, la recuperación de información se realiza hasta el día 23 de julio, por lo que una propuesta de mejora se consiera una investigación futura incluyendo la totalidad xdel 2019 y lograr detectar otras conclusiones sobre el interés de investigaciones en este campo. Se puede concluir además, que existen gran variedad de aplicaciones que se están desarrollando en este campo, así como la concordancia observada en la discusión que realizan los investigadores sobre las dificultades y retos pendientes por mitigar o superar en la publicación cientifíca y el gran potencial que se reconoce de la tecnología blockchain para aliviar estos retos. ABSTRACT: Blockchain technology, by allowing the management of decentralized and self-regulated data through secure transactions based on cryptography, provides to the areas of science, technology, and business with a broad range of future opportunities. At the same time, the production and scientific communication is a dynamic sector of knowledge and information that requires effective solutions to some crucial problems such as research reproducibility, transparency in editorial procedures, and peer review needs related to efficient time management and availability of human resources. The objective of this research is to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) on the application of blockchain technology to the field of scientific publication and to determine its advantages, challenges and future potential. It is carried out through a systematic process in which eligibility is defined by means of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Through these criteria, publications that are of interest to the main objective of this document are selected and evaluated given their research topics. Following the guidelines of the PRISMA Declaration, 12 scientific articles are identified to be analyzed in this SLR. The results show that, although not all articles provide methodological designs of possible applications that overcome some of the difficulties in this field, they do discuss how particular systems could be implemented to deal with and to mitigate such problematics. Most of the collected publications were published in the Information Services and Use Magazine. This journal is ranked in quartile 2 and it is indexed in 3 categories such as computer science, applications of computer science and information systems. Likewise, it is observed that in the year 2017 some publications about the subject of scientific publishing and blockchain technology began to appear. There was a notable increase in 2018 with 8 publications. In the year 2019, 3 academic publications were detected. However, since the information retrieval is carried out until July 23, a proposal for future improvement would be an investigation including completely the year 2019, in order to be able to detect other developments about the research interests in this field. It can be concluded that there are a wide variety of applications that are being developed in this field, as well as the academic agreement observed in the discussion carried out by researchers about the difficulties and challenges pending to mitigate or overcome in the scientific publication, and the great potential that it is recognized from blockchain technology to alleviate these challenges.Máster en Empresa y Tecnologías de la Informació