Decentralized Identity and Access Management Framework for Internet of Things Devices

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) domain is about connecting people and devices and systems together via sensors and actuators, to collect meaningful information from the devices surrounding environment and take actions to enhance productivity and efficiency. The proliferation of IoT devices from around few billion devices today to over 25 billion in the next few years spanning over heterogeneous networks defines a new paradigm shift for many industrial and smart connectivity applications. The existing IoT networks faces a number of operational challenges linked to devices management and the capability of devices’ mutual authentication and authorization. While significant progress has been made in adopting existing connectivity and management frameworks, most of these frameworks are designed to work for unconstrained devices connected in centralized networks. On the other hand, IoT devices are constrained devices with tendency to work and operate in decentralized and peer-to-peer arrangement. This tendency towards peer-to-peer service exchange resulted that many of the existing frameworks fails to address the main challenges faced by the need to offer ownership of devices and the generated data to the actual users. Moreover, the diversified list of devices and offered services impose that more granular access control mechanisms are required to limit the exposure of the devices to external threats and provide finer access control policies under control of the device owner without the need for a middleman. This work addresses these challenges by utilizing the concepts of decentralization introduced in Distributed Ledger (DLT) technologies and capability of automating business flows through smart contracts. The proposed work utilizes the concepts of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) for establishing a decentralized devices identity management framework and exploits Blockchain tokenization through both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to build a self-controlled and self-contained access control policy based on capability-based access control model (CapBAC). The defined framework provides a layered approach that builds on identity management as the foundation to enable authentication and authorization processes and establish a mechanism for accounting through the adoption of standardized DLT tokenization structure. The proposed framework is demonstrated through implementing a number of use cases that addresses issues related identity management in industries that suffer losses in billions of dollars due to counterfeiting and lack of global and immutable identity records. The framework extension to support applications for building verifiable data paths in the application layer were addressed through two simple examples. The system has been analyzed in the case of issuing authorization tokens where it is expected that DLT consensus mechanisms will introduce major performance hurdles. A proof of concept emulating establishing concurrent connections to a single device presented no timed-out requests at 200 concurrent connections and a rise in the timed-out requests ratio to 5% at 600 connections. The analysis showed also that a considerable overhead in the data link budget of 10.4% is recorded due to the use of self-contained policy token which is a trade-off between building self-contained access tokens with no middleman and link cost

Crypto and Blockchain Fundamentals

I believe blockchain will do for trusted transactions what the Internet has done for information. - Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM Since the 1990s, we have had an Internet of Information that allows us to seamlessly share information such as documents, images, emails, and videos over the Internet. While most Internet users do not need to understand the details of the technical protocols operating underneath user-friendly software interfaces, it is helplful to understand how they work at a high-level. With the Internet of Information, copies of information are routed over the Internet. If a sender emails a friend, the sender keeps the original email, and the friend receives a copy of the email. To transact value, i.e., money, over the Internet, one cannot send a copy. Instead, after the transfer of value is complete, the sender should no longer have the money, but rather the recipient should

Passport: Improving Automated Formal Verification Using Identifiers

Formally verifying system properties is one of the most effective ways of improving system quality, but its high manual effort requirements often render it prohibitively expensive. Tools that automate formal verification, by learning from proof corpora to suggest proofs, have just begun to show their promise. These tools are effective because of the richness of the data the proof corpora contain. This richness comes from the stylistic conventions followed by communities of proof developers, together with the logical systems beneath proof assistants. However, this richness remains underexploited, with most work thus far focusing on architecture rather than making the most of the proof data. In this paper, we develop Passport, a fully-automated proof-synthesis tool that systematically explores how to most effectively exploit one aspect of that proof data: identifiers. Passport enriches a predictive Coq model with three new encoding mechanisms for identifiers: category vocabulary indexing, subword sequence modeling, and path elaboration. We compare Passport to three existing base tools which Passport can enhance: ASTactic, Tac, and Tok. In head-to-head comparisons, Passport automatically proves 29% more theorems than the best-performing of these base tools. Combining the three Passport-enhanced tools automatically proves 38% more theorems than the three base tools together, without Passport's enhancements. Finally, together, these base tools and Passport-enhanced tools prove 45% more theorems than the combined base tools without Passport's enhancements. Overall, our findings suggest that modeling identifiers can play a significant role in improving proof synthesis, leading to higher-quality software

Sentiment Analysis Framework and Its Application in Geopolitical Scenarios

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining involves systamtically extracting, identifying and quantifying subjective information using text analysis and natural language processing algorithms. The paper explores the recent research work in the field of sentiment analysis and categorizes the work into five unique domains. This paper proposes a three stage sentiment analysis framework involving the data gathering, data preparation and the sentiment analysis phases. The proposed framework is applied to the tweets on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in order to understand the current sentiment of the twitterati towards the conflict. The analysis was performed using lexicon based approach and machine learning based approach. The results of the analysis indicate that the machine learning approach provides better performance compared to lexicon based approach. Sentiment analysis also shows that there is still an overall negative sentiment towards the war

Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds

The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition. Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops. A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology

Can Blockchain Revolutionize Tax Administration?

Experts predict that the use of smart contracts and other applications of blockchain technology could revolutionize the manner in which we do business. Blockchain technology promises the elimination of middlemen, increased trust and transparency, and improved access to shared information and records. Thus, it is no surprise that companies and entrepreneurs are developing blockchain solutions for an array of markets, ranging from real estate to health care. But can this new technology revolutionize tax administration? This Article is the first to consider blockchain technology’s role in addressing the shortcomings of our current administration system— namely, a large tax gap, high compliance and administrative costs, and operational inefficiencies. To mitigate these problems, this Article introduces two innovative uses of blockchain technology in the tax space: a blockchain-based platform for information returns and a blockchain-based platform for digital invoices. Implementing these blockchain-based platforms for tax administration presents significant opportunities to digitalize and automate certain tax processes, improve tax compliance and enforcement, and minimize many inefficiencies currently involved in the tax administration process. This Article also considers the broader implications of using technology to improve tax administration by demonstrating that any blockchain tax initiative is unlikely to make meaningful improvements to tax processes without additional government action. It, therefore, sets forth normative steps for policymakers to take in supporting the use of blockchain and other technologies in the tax space. By doing so, this Article promotes a proactive approach to exploring and understanding blockchain technology’s benefits, limitations, and implications to ultimately place the government in the best position to modernize our tax administration system