M. Merlini, Neil Veira, Ryan Berryhill, A. Veneris
{"title":"On Public Decentralized Ledger Oracles via a Paired-Question Protocol","authors":"M. Merlini, Neil Veira, Ryan Berryhill, A. Veneris","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751484","url":null,"abstract":"Blockchain technology enables the operation of fully decentralized applications without the need for a central authority to manage the execution of the underlying process. However, a critical limitation in the technology today is the inability for such applications to query information external to the blockchain. Applications must make use of a decentralized oracle, i.e. a trusted source of external information. In this work we propose the paired-question decentralized oracle protocol, designed to extract true answers from the public. When querying the oracle, a user submits pairs of antithetic questions and voting users answer them for the chance to receive rewards. This new protocol lends itself to a simple formal analysis, and it is shown to strongly incentivize a Nash equilibrium of truthful reporting. This paper also discusses a number of extensions to the base protocol to improve its cost-effectiveness, security, and applicability.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"103 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":"128586285","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":"Identification of Darknet Markets’ Bitcoin Addresses by Voting Per-address Classification Results","authors":"Kota Kanemura, Kentaroh Toyoda, T. Ohtsuki","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751391","url":null,"abstract":"Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency whose transactions are recorded in a common ledger, so called blockchain. Due to the anonymity and lack of law enforcement, Bitcoin has been misused in darknet markets which deal with illegal products, such as drugs and weapons. Therefore from the security forensics aspect, it is demanded to establish an approach to identify newly emerged darknet markets’ transactions and addresses. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze Bitcoin transactions and addresses related to darknet markets and propose a novel identification method of darknet markets’ addresses. To improve the identification performance, we propose a voting based method which decides the labels of multiple addresses controlled by the same user based on the number of the majority label. Through the computer simulation with more than 200K Bitcoin addresses, it was shown that our voting based method outperforms the nonvoting based one in terms of precision, recal, and F1 score. We also found that DNM’s addresses pay higher fees than others, which significantly improves the classification.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"56 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":"128256185","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":"A Landscape of Cryptocurrencies","authors":"Zhaofang Li, Q. Lu, Shiping Chen, Yue Liu, Xiwei Xu","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751469","url":null,"abstract":"Although cryptocurrencies have attracted a large amount of users and investors and there has been various researches in the area of distributed ledger technology (DLT), there is little work on cryptocurrency studies. Given the rapidly increasing number and diversity of cryptocurrencies, we present a landscape with a selective set of representative cryptocurrencies to holistically portray their characteristics and provide practitioners an analysis from both business and technical perspectives. The focused observations elaborate how the typical cryptocurrency are designed and operated in industry. This study offers a breakthrough understanding of the cryptocurrencies through the generated landscape which report the state of cryptocurrencies, and can be used as a framework for cryptocurrency analysis.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"22 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":"132471948","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}
Xuan Luo, Wei Cai, Zehua Wang, Xiuhua Li, Victor C. M. Leung
{"title":"A Payment Channel Based Hybrid Decentralized Ethereum Token Exchange","authors":"Xuan Luo, Wei Cai, Zehua Wang, Xiuhua Li, Victor C. M. Leung","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751454","url":null,"abstract":"Traditional centralized token exchange (CEX) is criticized for its security and privacy issues, since crypto currency users are required to surrender their private keys to the exchange. In contrast, decentralized token exchange (DEX) solves this issue by introducing additional trading gas fee and latency to the system. Hybrid decentralized token exchange (HEX) has been proposed to combine the advantages of CEX and DEX. However, existing HEX is still suffering from two issues. The first issue is that it is unfriendly for a trader who needs to exchange tokens frequently within a certain period of time, due to the fact that it is time-consuming and expensive. The second issue is the potential network congestion in Ethereum caused by excessive simultaneous transactions from the exchange. In this paper, we propose a payment channel based HEX, which extends existing solutions by adding a new payment channel layer to benefit frequent traders and alleviate network congestion.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"7 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":"128292465","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}
M. Król, A. Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Argyrios G. Tasiopoulos, I. Psaras
{"title":"Proof-of-Prestige: A Useful Work Reward System for Unverifiable Tasks","authors":"M. Król, A. Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Argyrios G. Tasiopoulos, I. Psaras","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751406","url":null,"abstract":"As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such contexts, users get rewards from the network after they have carried out some specific task useful for the network. While in some cases the proof of some utility or service can be proved, the majority of tasks are impossible to verify. In order to deal with such cases, we design “Proof-of-Prestige” (PoP)-a reward system that can run on top of Proof-of-Stake blockchains. PoP introduces “prestige” which is a volatile resource and, in contrast to coins, regenerates over time. Prestige can be gained by performing useful work, spent when benefiting from services and directly translates to users minting power. PoP is resistant against Sybil and Collude attacks and can be used to reward workers for completing unverifiable tasks, while keeping the system free for the end-users. We use two exemplar use-cases to showcase the usefulness of PoP and we build a simulator to assess the cryptoeconomic behaviour of the system in terms of prestige transfer between nodes.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"1 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":"134639231","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":"Distributed Ledger Witness Selection in Bounded Width Directed Acyclic Graphs","authors":"Andrew Gorczyca, Audrey M. Decker","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751447","url":null,"abstract":"This work explores a new low-latency distributed ledger structure based on bounded width directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). In this design, each user has their own blockchain traceable back to a common root. These individual chains mutually witness each other to confirm transactions and form a global partially ordered set of events. The number of witness hashes required to establish new blocks is defined as the “DAG width”. This width has an upper bound which of the total number of users in the system, though the actual number of witnesses required is usually far less. In this paper we mathematically model the expected DAG width using analytical techniques from the near miss birthday problem and simulate expected widths for expected network latency and user activity.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"34 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":"123911597","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}
Shivika Narang, Megha Byali, Pankaj Dayama, Vinayaka Pandit, Y. Narahari
{"title":"Design of Trusted B2B Market Platforms using Permissioned Blockchains and Game Theory","authors":"Shivika Narang, Megha Byali, Pankaj Dayama, Vinayaka Pandit, Y. Narahari","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751472","url":null,"abstract":"Trusted collaboration satisfying the requirements of (a) adequate transparency and (b) preservation of privacy of business sensitive information is a key factor to ensure the success and adoption of online business-to-business (B2B) collaboration platforms. Our work proposes novel ways of stringing together game theoretic modeling, blockchain technology, and cryptographic techniques to build such a platform for B2B collaboration involving enterprise buyers and sellers who may be strategic. The B2B platform builds upon three ideas. The first is to use a permissioned blockchain with smart contracts as the technical infrastructure for building the platform. Second, the above smart contracts implement deep business logic which is derived using a rigorous analysis of a repeated game model of the strategic interactions between buyers and sellers to devise strategies to induce honest behavior from buyers and sellers. Third, we present a formal framework that captures the essential requirements for secure and private B2B collaboration, and, in this direction, we develop cryptographic regulation protocols that, in conjunction with the blockchain, help implement such a framework. We believe our work is an important first step in the direction of building a platform that enables B2B collaboration among strategic and competitive agents while maximizing social welfare and addressing the privacy concerns of the agents.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"2006 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":"123771963","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":"Scalable BFT Consensus Mechanism Through Aggregated Signature Gossip","authors":"Jieyi Long, Ribao Wei","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751327","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we present a new BFT consensus mechanism which enables thousands of nodes to participate in the consensus process, and supports very high transaction throughput. This is achieved via an aggregated signature gossip protocol which can significantly reduce the messaging complexity and thus allows a large number of nodes to reach consensus quickly. The proposed aggregated signature gossip protocol leverages a non-interactive leaderless BLS signature aggregation scheme. We have proven the correctness of the protocol, and analyzed its efficiency. In our analysis, each node only needs to send and receive $O(log n)$ messages to reach agreement, where each message just contains a couple kilobytes of data.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"2015 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":"128064757","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":"An Evaluation of Bitcoin Address Classification based on Transaction History Summarization","authors":"Yu-Jing Lin, Po-Wei Wu, Cheng-Han Hsu, I-Ping Tu, Shih-Wei Liao","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751410","url":null,"abstract":"Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address anonymity of the Bitcoin network have attracted many activities such as payments, investments, gambling, and even money laundering in the past decade. Unfortunately, some criminal behaviors which took advantage of this platform were not identified. This has discouraged many governments to support cryptocurrency. Thus, the capability to identify criminal addresses becomes an important issue in the cryptocurrency network. In this paper, we propose new features in addition to those commonly used in the literature to build a classification model for detecting abnormality of Bitcoin network addresses. These features include various high orders of moments of transaction time (represented by block height) which summarizes the transaction history in an efficient way. The extracted features are trained by supervised machine learning methods on a labeling category data set. The experimental evaluation shows that these features have improved the performance of Bitcoin address classification significantly. We evaluate the results under eight classifiers and achieve the highest Micro-Fl /Macro-F1 of 87% /86% with LightGBM.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129912392","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":"Permission less Block chains and Secure Logging","authors":"Chunpeng Ge, Siwei Sun, Pawel Szalachowski","doi":"10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BLOC.2019.8751306","url":null,"abstract":"The blockchain technology enables mutually untrusting participants to reach consensus on the state of a distributed and decentralized ledger (called a blockchain) in a permissionless setting. The consensus protocol of the blockchain imposes a unified view of the system state over the global network, and once a block is stable in the blockchain, its data is visible to all users and cannot be retrospectively modified or removed. Due to these properties, the blockchain technology is regarded as a general consensus infrastructure and based on which a variety of systems have been built.This article presents a study and survey of permissionless blockchain systems in the context of secure logging. We postulate the most essential properties required by a secure logging system and by considering a wide range of applications, we give insights into how the blockchain technology matches these requirements. Based on the survey, we motivate related research perspectives and challenges for blockchain-based secure logging systems, and we highlight potential solutions to some specific problems.","PeriodicalId":314490,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)","volume":"457 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122951476","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}