191 research outputs found

    Integration of blockchains with management information systems

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    In the era of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), many Management Information Systems (MIS) integrate real-time data collection and use technologies such as big data, machine learning, and cloud computing, to foster a wide range of creative innovations, business improvements, and new business models and processes. However, the integration of blockchain with MIS offers the blockchain trilemma of security, decentralisation and scalability. MIS are usually Web 2.0 clientserver applications that include the front end web systems and back end databases; while blockchain systems are Web 3.0 decentralised applications. MIS are usually private systems that a single party controls and manages; while blockchain systems are usually public, and any party can join and participate. This paper clarifies the key concepts and illustrates with figures, the implementation of public, private and consortium blockchains on the Ethereum platform. Ultimately, the paper presents a framework for building a private blockchain system on the public Ethereum blockchain. Then,integrating the Web 2.0 client-server applications that are commonly used in MIS with Web 3.0 decentralised blockchain applications

    Sapiens Chain: A Blockchain-based Cybersecurity Framework

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    Recently, cybersecurity becomes more and more important due to the rapid development of Internet. However, existing methods are in reality highly sensitive to attacks and are far more vulnerable than expected, as they are lack of trustable measures. In this paper, to address the aforementioned problems, we propose a blockchain-based cybersecurity framework, termed as Sapiens Chain, which can protect the privacy of the anonymous users and ensure that the transactions are immutable by providing decentralized and trustable services. Integrating semantic analysis, symbolic execution, and routing learning methods into intelligent auditing, this framework can achieve good accuracy for detecting hidden vulnerabilities. In addition, a revenue incentive mechanism, which aims to donate participants, is built. The practical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework

    Trust, Accountability, and Autonomy in Knowledge Graph-based AI for Self-determination

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    Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as fundamental platforms for powering intelligent decision-making and a wide range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) services across major corporations such as Google, Walmart, and AirBnb. KGs complement Machine Learning (ML) algorithms by providing data context and semantics, thereby enabling further inference and question-answering capabilities. The integration of KGs with neuronal learning (e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs)) is currently a topic of active research, commonly named neuro-symbolic AI. Despite the numerous benefits that can be accomplished with KG-based AI, its growing ubiquity within online services may result in the loss of self-determination for citizens as a fundamental societal issue. The more we rely on these technologies, which are often centralised, the less citizens will be able to determine their own destinies. To counter this threat, AI regulation, such as the European Union (EU) AI Act, is being proposed in certain regions. The regulation sets what technologists need to do, leading to questions concerning: How can the output of AI systems be trusted? What is needed to ensure that the data fuelling and the inner workings of these artefacts are transparent? How can AI be made accountable for its decision-making? This paper conceptualises the foundational topics and research pillars to support KG-based AI for self-determination. Drawing upon this conceptual framework, challenges and opportunities for citizen self-determination are illustrated and analysed in a real-world scenario. As a result, we propose a research agenda aimed at accomplishing the recommended objectives

    Providing Authentication and Privacy for University Certificates using Smart Contracts in Blockchain Technology

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    Traditional ways of distributing and verifying academic certificates are not efficient. Certificates are distributed as hard copy. Verifying the integrity of the certificate is a time and resource consuming process. As a result, forged certificates have become common. It is very difficult to differentiate between a real and a forged certificate. Through our system, we intend to make the certificate generation, distribution, and verification process seamless. Any student can enter his or her personal details, academic coursework details, and the university code, and thus submit a certificate request to the university. University admins can verify the certificate requests, and approve or reject the requests as per their policy. Any student or third party could verify the integrity of the certificate by entering the details of the certificate under scrutiny into the system. Data required to verify the integrity of the certificate will be stored on a blockchain. All verification data will be stored on the blockchain, so it will be tamper proof. This eliminates or limits the case of forged certificates to a large extend

    The enterprise blockchain design framework and its application to an e-Procurement ecosystem

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    The research work of this paper has been partially funded by the project VORTAL INTER DATA (n° 038361), co-financed by Vortal and COMPETE Program P2020. We would also like to thank UNIDEMI, DEMI, and LASI for providing us with the research infrastucture and resources to conduct this research. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Elsevier LtdBlockchain technologies have seen a steady growth in interest from industries as the technology is gaining maturity. It is offering a novel way to establish trust amongst multiple stakeholders without relying or trusting centralised authorities. While its use as a decentralised store of value has been validated through the emergence of cryptocurrencies, its use case in industrial applications with multiple stakeholder ecosystems such as industrial supply chain management, is still at an early stage of design and experimentation where private blockchains are used as opposed to public blockchains. Many enterprise blockchain projects failed to gain traction after initial launches, due to inefficient design, lack of incentives to all stakeholders or simply because the use of blockchain was not really necessary in the first place. There has been a need for a framework that allows blockchain designers and researchers to evaluate scenarios when a blockchain solution is useful and design the key configurations for an enterprise blockchain solution. Literature on blockchain architectures are sparse and only applicable to specific use cases or functionalities. This paper proposes a comprehensive Enterprise Blockchain Design Framework (EBDF), that not only identifies the relevant use cases when a blockchain must be utilised, but also details all the characteristics and configurations for designing an enterprise blockchain ecosystem, applicable to multiple industries. To validate the EBDF, we apply the same to the Vortal e-Procurement ecosystem allowing for multiple platforms to interoperate with greater transparency and accountability over the proposed blockchain framework. In this use case, many vendors bid for procurement procedures, often for publicly managed funds where it is extremely vital that full transparency and accountability is ensured in the entire process. Ensuring that certain digital certification functions, such as timestamps are independent from e-Procurement platform owners has been a challenge. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for not only ensuring transparency and immutability of records, but also providing for interoperability across different platforms by acting as a trusted third-party. The applied framework is used to design a Hyperledger based blockchain solution with some of the key architectural elements that could fulfil these needs while presenting the advantages of such a solution.publishersversionpublishe

    Certitex: a Textile Certified Supply Chain

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    The appearance of blockchain technologies and their growth and development have led to the exploration of applications of the technology in new areas, in addition to the original, cryptocurrencies, areas such as product management and traceability in supply chains are being explored. Initially, this technology was explored with the aim of providing food supply chains with traceability and transparency for the consumer. Currently, solutions for a larger variety of supply chains are being studied and developed. Current studies have proven that the technology has powerful properties to promote traceability and nonrepudiation of information related to products in a supply chain, as well as providing liability of entities for damages caused to products, which in the past has been notoriously difficult. The current structure of these supply chains, several different entities located in different physical spaces, is prone to the application of blockchain solutions as it also fits the architecture of the technology itself. All of this leads to a strong interest in applying blockchain technology to supply chains. Unfortunately, all the blockchain based solutions found to solve similar problems in the research phase of this project were developed by private entities, with little to no divulgation about their development and many times not even about how they function. This led to this project being mainly about researching the base technology and developing a solution from scratch. The problems of currently used traditional solutions are related to the use of non-standardized information registration strategies and ease of repudiation of information, but current consumer demands for knowledge of the origin of products has led to the exploration of new solutions to overcome this. Additionally, it is common for products, at the end of their production cycle, to be damaged and it is practically impossible to locate where the damage occurred in the chain. The idea of adapting blockchain technology as a solution for product traceability in the supply chain presents some points of concern, as blockchains are generally associated with distributed and public systems to maintain a given cryptocurrency, thus making information public. Although this is the initial purpose of its creation, other blockchain technologies oriented to data storage in a business to business model have emerged. These blockchains have access control measures, and are therefore called private. Only allowing access by a select group of entities. Additionally, information stored on a blockchain is also often associated with high costs, and when we refer to public blockchains like Ethereum this is a reality, but by using private solutions we can mitigate this cost. It is also often a concern the computational costs associated with cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Etherum. Again, it is possible to get around this limitation by using private solutions where we can use more light weight algorithms, because the environment in which the system will be inserted, does not benefit from the properties of such algorithms. With the usage of blockchain to certify and record the progress of products as they travel through the supply chain, it is also interesting to explore the collected data, and how it could be used to make the supply chain itself more efficient. The purpose of this dissertation is to study how blockchain technology can be combined with a supply chain to offer product traceability and information collection. To achieve this goal, a prototype of a blockchain-based application was developed to collect data in a supply chain, as well as a prototype of an application for remote viewing of the data entered and a prototype of a Machine Learning module able to make use of the information collected by the blockchain.O aparecimento das tecnologias blockchain e o seu crescimento e desenvolvimento, têm levado à exploração de aplicações da tecnologia em novas áreas. Inicialmente, e relativamente ao tema desta tese, esta tecnologia foi explorada com o objetivo de prover cadeias de fornecimento alimentícias de rastreabilidade e transparência para o consumidor. Estudos atuais têm provado que a tecnologia apresenta propriedades poderosas para promover a rastreabilidade e não repúdio de informação. Infelizmente todas as soluções baseadas em blockchain encontradas na fase de pesquisa são soluções desenvolvidas por entidades privadas não havendo qualquer divulgação de informação relativa ao seu desenvolvimento, e também na maioria esmagadora dos casos sobre o seu funcionamento. Isto levou a que esta dissertação fosse maioritariamente um trabalho de investigação da tecnologia base, e desenvolvimento de raiz de uma solução funcional. Os problemas das soluções tradicionais, prendem-se com o uso de estratégias de registo de informação não estandardizadas e facilidade de repúdio de informação isto porque cada entidade por norma age independentemente das outras e apenas comunica com aquelas que lhe estão diretamente ligadas. Adicionalmente, é comum verificar que produtos no final da sua cadeia de produção estão danificados e de ser praticamente impossível localizar onde na cadeia os danos ocorreram. A ideia de adaptar a tecnologia blockchain como uma solução para a rastreabilidade de produtos na cadeia de fornecimento apresenta alguns pontos preocupantes, pois as blockchains são geralmente associadas a sistemas distribuídos e públicos para manter uma dada criptomoeda. Apesar de este ser o propósito inicial para a sua criação têm vindo a surgir outras tecnologias blockchain orientadas para o armazenamento e processamento de dados num modelo business to business. Estas blockchains possuem medidas de controlo de acesso, e são, portanto chamadas de privadas permitindo apenas acesso por parte de um grupo seleto de entidades. Adicionalmente, o armazenamento de informação numa blockchain é também muitas vezes associado a custos elevados, e quando nos referimos a blockchains públicas como a Ethereum isto é uma realidade, mas pelo uso de soluções privadas podemos colmatar este custo. É também uma preocupação os custos computacionais associados a blockchains de criptomoeadas como a Bitcoin e Etherum. Novamente é possível contornar esta limitação pelo uso de soluções privativas onde podemos usar algoritmos mais leves, pois o ambiente em que o sistema se vai inserir, não carece de tantos cuidados. Através do uso de blockchain para certificar a origem e percurso de produtos numa cadeia de fornecimento é também interessante explorar os dados recolhidos no processo e como estes podem ser utilizados para tornar a própria cadeia de fornecimentos mais eficiente. O objetivo desta dissertação é estudar como a tecnologia blockchain pode ser conjugada com uma cadeia de fornecimento para oferecer rastreabilidade de produtos e recolha de informação. Para alcançar este objetivo foi desenvolvido um protótipo de uma aplicação baseada em blockchain para recolha de dados numa cadeia de fornecimento, bem como um protótipo de uma aplicação para a visualização e interação remota com os dados e também um protótipo de um módulo de Machine Learning capaz de fazer uso da informação recolhida pela blockchain
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