{"title":"A Competent and Accurate BlockChain based E-Voting System on Liquid Democracy","authors":"Samika Kashyap, A. Jeyasekar","doi":"10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223308","url":null,"abstract":"In order to avoid the demerits of Direct Democracy (DD) and Representative Democracy (RD), recently a democratic reform called Liquid Democracy (LD) was introduced which is a combination of DD and RD that gives the people full decisional control either by voting directly or by entrusting their voting power to a representative for some political ideologies or bills. Our work attempts to study the democratic models based on accuracy and competence parameters. Further a liquid democracy voting protocol is proposed and implemented on a block chain based distributed ledger which is capable of fighting attacks of integrity and non-repudiation while ensuring authenticity of the votes. This system would be transparent thus ensuring people about the legitimacy of their delegation of votes and direct votes. This is a big step up from the current existing system of EVM’s that do not guarantee this level of security.","PeriodicalId":315392,"journal":{"name":"2020 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127662740","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. Soud, Sigurður Helgason, G. Hjálmtýsson, Mohammad Hamdaqa
{"title":"TrustVote: On Elections We Trust with Distributed Ledgers and Smart Contracts","authors":"M. Soud, Sigurður Helgason, G. Hjálmtýsson, Mohammad Hamdaqa","doi":"10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223306","url":null,"abstract":"Electronic voting (e-voting) plays a crucial role in democratic countries. Unfortunately, implementing a trusted e-voting system is always a challenge. Scholars have been trying to propose solutions to improve e-voting systems. However, existing e-voting approaches still need to adopt new technologies to maintain their integrity and modernity. Unlike other technologies that were used in e-voting, blockchain has the potential for perfecting e-voting requirements and fostering trust in e-voting systems. The first part of this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of blockchain-based e-voting implementations. The second part proposes a blockchain-based e-voting system (TrustVote). TrustVote was realised using public and permissioned blockchain. This work results show that the permissioned blockchain-based implementation of TrustVote outperforms the identical version of the same system that uses public blockchain. The results also show that while several challenges and requirements still need to be addressed, using permissioned blockchain for implementing an e-voting system can help to satisfy many of the requirements for e-voting and pave the road for a new generation of e-voting systems that people can trust.","PeriodicalId":315392,"journal":{"name":"2020 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132173309","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":"Equilibrium of Blockchain Miners with Dynamic Asset Allocation","authors":"G. Yamamoto, Aron Laszka, F. Kojima","doi":"10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223284","url":null,"abstract":"We model and analyze blockchain miners who seek to maximize the compound return of their mining businesses. The analysis of the optimal strategies finds a new equilibrium point among the miners and the mining pools, which predicts the market share of each miner or mining pool. The cost of mining determines the share of each miner or mining pool at equilibrium. We conclude that neither miners nor mining pools who seek to maximize their compound return will have a financial incentive to occupy more than 50% of the hash rate if the cost of mining is at the same level for all. However, if there is an outstandingly cost-efficient miner, then the market share of this miner may exceed 50% in the equilibrium, which can threaten the viability of the entire ecosystem.","PeriodicalId":315392,"journal":{"name":"2020 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128063700","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}
Z. Lux, Dirk Thatmann, Sebastian Zickau, Felix Beierle
{"title":"Distributed-Ledger-based Authentication with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials","authors":"Z. Lux, Dirk Thatmann, Sebastian Zickau, Felix Beierle","doi":"10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223292","url":null,"abstract":"Authentication with username and password is becoming an inconvenient process for the user. End users typically have little control over their personal privacy, and data breaches effecting millions of users have already happened several times. We have implemented a proof of concept decentralized OpenID Connect Provider by marrying it with Self-Sovereign Identity, which gives users the freedom to choose from a very large pool of identity providers instead of just a select few corporations, thus enabling the democratization of the highly centralized digital identity landscape. Furthermore, we propose a verifiable credential powered decentralized Public Key Infrastructure using distributed ledger technologies, which creates a straightforward and verifiable way for retrieving digital certificates.","PeriodicalId":315392,"journal":{"name":"2020 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117028145","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}
Francesco Zola, Jan L. Bruse, Xabier Etxeberria Barrio, M. Galar, Raul Orduna Urrutia
{"title":"Generative Adversarial Networks for Bitcoin Data Augmentation","authors":"Francesco Zola, Jan L. Bruse, Xabier Etxeberria Barrio, M. Galar, Raul Orduna Urrutia","doi":"10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223269","url":null,"abstract":"In Bitcoin entity classification, results are strongly conditioned by the ground-truth dataset, especially when applying supervised machine learning approaches. However, these ground-truth datasets are frequently affected by significant class imbalance as generally they contain much more information regarding legal services (Exchange, Gambling), than regarding services that may be related to illicit activities (Mixer, Service). Class imbalance increases the complexity of applying machine learning techniques and reduces the quality of classification results, especially for underrepresented, but critical classes.In this paper, we propose to address this problem by using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for Bitcoin data augmentation as GANs recently have shown promising results in the domain of image classification. However, there is no “one-fits-all” GAN solution that works for every scenario. In fact, setting GAN training parameters is non-trivial and heavily affects the quality of the generated synthetic data. We therefore evaluate how GAN parameters such as the optimization function, the size of the dataset and the chosen batch size affect GAN implementation for one underrepresented entity class (Mining Pool) and demonstrate how a “good” GAN configuration can be obtained that achieves high similarity between synthetically generated and real Bitcoin address data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study presenting GANs as a valid tool for generating synthetic address data for data augmentation in Bitcoin entity classification.","PeriodicalId":315392,"journal":{"name":"2020 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114948611","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":"Engineering Economics in the Conflux Network","authors":"Yuxi Cai, Fan Long, A. Park, A. Veneris","doi":"10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223310","url":null,"abstract":"Proof-of-work blockchains need to be carefully designed so as to create the proper incentives for miners to faithfully maintain the network in a sustainable way. This paper describes how the economic engineering of the Conflux Network, a high throughput proof-of-work blockchain, leads to sound economic incentives that support desirable and sustainable mining behavior. In detail, this paper parameterizes the level of income, and thus network security, that Conflux can generate, and it describes how this depends on user behavior and “policy variables” such as block and interest inflation. It also discusses how the underlying economic engineering design makes the Conflux Network resilient against double spending and selfish mining attacks.","PeriodicalId":315392,"journal":{"name":"2020 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129733831","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":"Vyper: A Security Comparison with Solidity Based on Common Vulnerabilities","authors":"Mudabbir Kaleem, Aron Laszka","doi":"10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS49436.2020.9223278","url":null,"abstract":"Vyper has been proposed as a new high-level language for Ethereum smart contract development due to numerous security vulnerabilities and attacks witnessed on contracts written in Solidity since the system’s inception. Vyper aims to address these vulnerabilities by providing a language that focuses on simplicity, auditability and security. We present a survey where we study how well-known and commonly-encountered vulnerabilities in Solidity feature in Vyper’s development environment. We analyze all such vulnerabilities individually and classify them into five groups based on their status in Vyper. To the best of our knowledge, our survey is the first attempt to study security vulnerabilities in Vyper.","PeriodicalId":315392,"journal":{"name":"2020 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115318717","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}