{"title":"Detection of Tampered Images Using Blockchain Technology","authors":"Nour Jnoub, W. Klas","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751300","url":null,"abstract":"Multimedia data, especially images are increasing dramatically. Images published on the Web are more often facing the risk of being tampered or manipulated since their content is easily mutable. Using blockchain technology provides advantages and, at the same time, challenges when dealing with this issue due to the following reasons: (a) data in a blockchain are well saved and immutable and (b) adding the data directly to a blockchain may consume much time which makes it computationally and economically expensive. Thus, we propose a blockchain-based solution which considers two key aspects: First, using a blockchain to register information about ownership and copyrights for authors, as well as descriptive information of an image, used to detect copyright violations. Second, avoiding insertion of raw image data into the blockchain, but storing only unique descriptive metadata about the images, allowing for a more efficient implementation of the system. This work considers different well-known image matching approaches to validate the power of the proposed approach, which allows for an efficient checking of violations of copyrights for a given image.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115348066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Integration of Fog Computing and Blockchain Technology Using the Plasma Framework","authors":"M. H. Ziegler, Marcel Großmann, U. Krieger","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751308","url":null,"abstract":"Considering the Internet-of-Things, the blockchain technology has recently become a major focus of research. One of its major drawbacks is given by the poor performance of blockchain systems subject to heavy load. In particular, systems which use Proof-of-Work as leader election strategy are not suitable for an active participation of IoT devices. We propose a new system architecture which uses the Plasma framework to integrate blockchain technology and fog computing and evaluate the performance of its prototype. The Plasma framework has the advantage to provide a scalable hierarchical design based on sidechains and an off-chain scaling strategy which is agnostic with regard to the architecture of the employed root chain.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115106337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Risks and Challenges of Implementing Ethereum Smart Contracts","authors":"Christopher G. Harris","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751493","url":null,"abstract":"Smart contracts are designed to facilitate the performance of trackable and irreversible transactions without the need for third party involvement. Therefore, as a result of this lack of oversight, it is essential that these smart contracts are written and properly tested. In this paper, we examine some of the prominent risks and challenges involved with writing and implementing smart contracts and discuss how each of these challenges can be overcome. We focus on contracts executed on Ethereum, the most prominent smart contract platform.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128341762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexander Marsalek, Christian Kollmann, Thomas Zefferer, Peter Teufl
{"title":"Unleashing the Full Potential of Blockchain Technology for Security-Sensitive Business Applications","authors":"Alexander Marsalek, Christian Kollmann, Thomas Zefferer, Peter Teufl","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751444","url":null,"abstract":"Companies are eager to invest in the emerging blockchain technology, but often fail to integrate this technology into real-world business applications that go beyond cryptocurrencies or pure demonstrators. The reason often lies in specific requirements related to data security and privacy. Current blockchain solutions are not able to meet these requirements, preventing a broad adoption of blockchain technology in business applications. To tackle this problem, we introduce UBI: a Universal Blockchain Integrator. UBI acts as a middleware between a company’s legacy IT infrastructure and off-the-shelf blockchain solutions. UBI enriches the functionality of these solutions so that they meet specific security and privacy requirements. Its successful implementation shows the feasibility of the proposed solution. First evaluation results demonstrate its potential for real-world business applications.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124017800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elasticoin: Low-Volatility Cryptocurrency with Proofs of Sequential Work","authors":"Yuhao Dong, R. Boutaba","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751402","url":null,"abstract":"Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have gained increasing adoption in recent years, and many hope that they may usher in a new era of decentralized electronic money. Unfortunately, they perform the core functions of money quite poorly due to their extremely volatile market value. On the other hand, blockchain “stablecoins” aiming to reduce this volatility, usually through a peg to an external currency like the US dollar, tend to greatly sacrifice decentralization of the money supply that make cryptocurrencies so attractive in the first place. Elasticoin is a novel currency issuance algorithm which greatly reduces price volatility by using the cryptographic puzzle of proofs of sequential work to fix the cost of minting a coin to sequential computation time. This causes coin supply to be highly elastic, quickly responding to demand for new coins and greatly dampening price swings. We argue that Elasticoin’s fixed-minting-cost approach to low volatility has significant advantages over using pegs or explicit measurement of demand to adjust supply.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122875684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chander Govindarajan, P. Deshpande, Sandip Chakraborty
{"title":"A Fault Resilient Consensus Protocol for Large Permissioned Blockchain Networks","authors":"Chander Govindarajan, P. Deshpande, Sandip Chakraborty","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751439","url":null,"abstract":"Permissioned blockchains have evolved as an alternative to permissionless blockchains for various closed business environments. In this paper, we develop FRChain, a scalable and high-performant consensus protocol for permissioned blockchains, which is resilient to different types of node and network failures. FRChain uses collective signing over multicast trees for block propagation and block validation. The protocol ensures safety and liveness as long as a majority of the nodes can participate in the protocol correctly. Further, we also demonstrate a technique for replacing failed nodes with correct ones. We have implemented and tested FRChain spread across a 5000 node blockchain network over two different data centers – (a) 35 Softlayer Cloud VMs located across Melbourne, Milan and San Jose, (b) Amazon VPC with 30 Amazon EC2 instances spread across Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo and Frankfurt. Our experiments show that FRChain is scalable in terms of both transaction throughput and network size.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125364307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BlockONS: Blockchain based Object Name Service","authors":"Wondeuk Yoon, Indal Choi, Daeyoung Kim","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751464","url":null,"abstract":"Today, Internet of Things (IoT) technology is applied to everywhere providing tremendous amounts of IoT service such as home control, facility management, and social public services. The GS1, a non-profit international standard organization, standardized an Object Name Service (ONS) which enables users to manage and discover services in the midst of tremendous amounts of service. However, it has a vulnerability in security and fault tolerance of providing service, because the ONS operates based on the DNS protocol. It is weak against data tampering attacks caused by DNS cache poisoning, spoofing, and local DNS cracking. It has a weak fault tolerance from problems with attack or malfunction. In this paper, we propose a BlockONS, which is novel ONS based on a blockchain. It provides a strength in data tampering attacks allowing a fault tolerance for sustainable service. The BlockONS consists of new service data modeling for an off-chain scaling, data tampering validation method, and fault tolerance mechanism. We designed the BlockONS into two parts: a BlockONS Node part to valid data tampering, and a BlockONS Agent part for scaling and fault tolerance. Finally, we implement the BlockONS prototype using a Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain and intel i5 NUC. We proof the feasibility of the BlockONS by comparing with performance of an existing ONS.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128481206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transparent Logging with Hyperledger Fabric","authors":"C. Schaefer, Christine Edman","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751339","url":null,"abstract":"Today a massive amount of data is used for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to derive knowledge about the world and do automated decision making. All this data contains personal and/or sensitive data, and thus privacy is becoming more and more important. The European Union’s GDPR [9] recognizes the importance of transparency with respect to the handling of personal data. Hence it is desirable to devise means for increasing the transparency of personal data handling within an organization besides documenting processes of personal data handling. We employ blockchains as a basic building block to increase transparency with respect to personal data handling. A public blockchain serves as a trust anchor for a private blockchain, whereas the private blockchain serves as a log storage for the handling (i.e., access to and processing of) of personal and/or sensitive data. By giving the customer access to the private blockchain the customer’s trust in the enterprise is increased.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123216899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Muhammad Anas Imtiaz, D. Starobinski, A. Trachtenberg, Nabeel Younis
{"title":"Churn in the Bitcoin Network: Characterization and Impact","authors":"Muhammad Anas Imtiaz, D. Starobinski, A. Trachtenberg, Nabeel Younis","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751297","url":null,"abstract":"Efficient and reliable propagation of blocks is vital for ensuring the scalability of the Bitcoin network. As a result, several schemes have been proposed over the last few years to speed up the block propagation, most notably the compact block protocol (BIP 152). Despite this, we show experimental evidence that (i) the vast majority (97%) of Bitcoin nodes exhibit intermittent network connectivity (churn), and (ii) this churn results in significant numbers of unsuccessful compact blocks, roughly twice the figure for continuously connected nodes. Specifically, we conduct experiments on the Bitcoin network that show that churn results in a 135% average increase in block propagation time (i.e., 336.57 ms vs 142.62 ms), and can lead to as high as an 800-fold increase in the worst case. To effect our analysis, we develop a statistical model for churn based on empirical network data, and use this model to actuate the live test nodes on the Bitcoin network. The performance of the system is measured by means of a novel framework that we develop for logging the internal behavior of a Bitcoin node and share for public use.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114532916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ICBC 2019 Final Program","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/bloc.2019.8751438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/bloc.2019.8751438","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133460098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}