{"title":"A noncooperative game theory-based incentive model for scaling permissioned blockchain networks","authors":"Richard Lapin, Somnath Mazumdar","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100298","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100298","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Blockchain offers decentralization and data security in a trustless environment. Transaction details are logged to trace a transaction trail. Blockchain has multiple components that are crucial to overall performance. One such component is the consensus model. It is responsible for network scaling, and blockchain suffers from scaling problems. It is also important for the growth and existence of the network to satisfy the transaction proposers and validators. To maintain the network, incentives are given to validators in a digital asset form, commonly using cryptocurrency. A lack of appropriate incentives can lead to suboptimal network performance, preventing networks from reaching their full potential. This paper introduces a noncooperative game theory-based incentive model to improve network performance while enhancing the scaling feature of a permissioned blockchain network. The model is generic and focuses on the incentive structure of the network. The proposed model is based on five design goals. They are generability, scalability, energy awareness, fairness, and dynamism. The proposed model is not a consensus model but a complement to a suitable voting-based consensus model. An extensive simulation campaign was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100298"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145736741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feng Du, Junwei Ma, Liang Gu, Honglin Xue, Xiaowei Hao, Xin Gong, Rongsheng Li
{"title":"E-Guard: a vulnerability detection tool for smart contracts in electric power systems","authors":"Feng Du, Junwei Ma, Liang Gu, Honglin Xue, Xiaowei Hao, Xin Gong, Rongsheng Li","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100309","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100309","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The application of smart contracts in electric power systems is widespread. However, vulnerabilities in smart contracts can cause significant economic losses and require careful attention. Smart contracts in electric power systems have domain-specific characteristics that differ from traditional public blockchain applications. As a result, existing vulnerability detection tools cannot be directly applied to these systems. To address this challenge, we design a vulnerability detection tool called E-Guard specifically for smart contracts in electric power systems. E-Guard uses a tailored intermediate representation (IR) known as EIR, which provides control flow and data flow information more suited to the business logic of electric power systems than traditional static analysis tools.</div><div>We identify and summarize three types of vulnerabilities unique to electric power systems based on expert knowledge. Experimental results show that E-Guard significantly outperforms traditional static analysis tools in detecting these three types of vulnerabilities. Additionally, the extra overhead generated by using EIR is minimal and negligible. This demonstrates that E-Guard is an effective and efficient tool for enhancing the security of smart contracts in electric power systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100309"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145790095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Redactable blockchains with integer-valued polynomials","authors":"Udomsak Rakwongwan , Phiraphat Sutthimat , Rattiya Meesa","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100297","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100297","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Blockchain technology has rapidly ascended as a pivotal innovation in the financial sector, renowned for its robust tamper-resistant properties inherent in hash-based systems. Despite its strengths, the blockchain's rigidity poses significant challenges in the timely rectification of fraudulent transactions, as initiating a fork to correct the ledger is both resource-intensive and time-consuming. Such delays in addressing fraud can have detrimental effects on the broader economic landscape. Addressing this critical issue, this study introduces a novel polynomial-based blockchain architecture that uses integer-valued polynomials (IVPs) for data organization within each block. This novel structure allows for the modification of data while preserving the chronological integrity of the blockchain. IVPs provide a methodical framework that not only facilitates the necessary alterations but also implements nuanced control over the complexity of these modifications. Significantly, this approach demonstrates a substantial reduction in time consumption for data modifications compared to traditional Lagrange polynomial methods, enhancing the blockchain's responsiveness in dynamic financial environments. Our empirical analysis confirms the efficiency and practicality of the proposed blockchain model. Furthermore, a comprehensive theoretical examination coupled with practical assessments reveals that this adaptable blockchain framework, when integrated with advanced cryptographic and privacy-preserving methodologies, offers a versatile solution with extensive applicability across various transactional environments.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100297"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145684691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fernando Richter Vidal, Naghmeh Ivaki, Nuno Laranjeiro
{"title":"Analyzing the impact of elusive faults on blockchain reliability","authors":"Fernando Richter Vidal, Naghmeh Ivaki, Nuno Laranjeiro","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100295","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100295","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Blockchain has recently become very popular due to its use in cryptocurrencies and potential application in various domains (e.g., retail, healthcare, and insurance). The smart contract is a key part of blockchain systems and specifies an agreement between transaction participants. Nowadays, smart contracts are being deployed to carry residual faults, including severe vulnerabilities that lead to different types of failures at runtime. Fault detection tools can be used to detect faults that may then be removed from the code before deployment. However, in the case of smart contracts, the common opinion is that tools are immature and ineffective. In this work, we carry out a fault injection campaign to empirically analyze the runtime impact that realistic faults present in smart contracts may have on the reliability of blockchain systems. We pay particular attention to the faults that elude popular smart contract verification tools and show if and in which ways the faults lead the blockchain system to fail at runtime. We map the observations to the fault detection capabilities of three state-of-the-art fault detection tools, namely Mythril, Slither, and Securify. The results show that the tools individually have poor detection capabilities (e.g., Securify with 6.4% accuracy and Mythril with 60% accuracy) or tend to generate false alerts (i.e., only 1.74% of Slither's alerts are correct). The results also show several elusive faults responsible for severe blockchain failures, such as A_MCV, which impacts the integrity of the ledger, and I_MVMSV, which causes gas depletion, just to name a few.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100295"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145617874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Smart contract classification based on neural clustering and semantic feature enhancement","authors":"Gang Tian , Pengxiang Wang , Rui Wang , Yidong Du","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100303","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100303","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Smart contract classification holds significant application value in the field of blockchain. However, existing methods suffer from inefficiencies and high computational complexity when dealing with smart contract data. To address these issues, this paper proposes a cluster-BERT model based on neural clustering techniques. The model reduces the computational burden of self-attention mechanisms by clustering attention heads, thereby improving training efficiency. The cluster-BERT model comprises multiple modules. Module 1 preprocesses smart contract data, converting abstract syntax trees and graph structure features into text representations suitable for BERT models. Module 2 serves as the core of the model, introducing neural clustering methods to reduce computational complexity. Module 3 further optimizes the model by finding the optimal number of centroids, achieving a balance between training efficiency and classification accuracy. Experimental results show that our proposed cluster-BERT achieves an accuracy of 91.42%, a recall of 91.44%, and an F1 score of 91.43%, which indicates a noticeable improvement over the baseline model. Our model reduces computational complexity from quadratic to linear, resulting in an average reduction of 8.48% in training time and 7.88% in prediction time compared to the baseline model. On the smart contract dataset, the accuracy and precision of our model outperformed other models proposed in recent years by 1–2 percentage points on average.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100303"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145736740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blockchain and emerging technologies for next generation secure healthcare: A comprehensive survey of applications, challenges, and future directions","authors":"Omar Cheikhrouhou , Khaleel Mershad , Maryline Laurent , Anis Koubaa","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100305","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100305","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Faced with multiple societal challenges, the healthcare sector has been compelled to leverage recent and emerging technologies to adapt. Blockchain is one of the leading technologies, offering transparency, process automation, immutability of traces and the ability to scale up in terms of both the volume of processes and the number of players interacting. The goal of the paper is to show the potential of blockchain technology—alone or merged with other technologies—to help the healthcare system evolve and provide scalable, efficient, and secure solutions to four healthcare applications: electronic health record (EHR) storage, health data sharing, remote patient monitoring, and pharmaceutical supply chains. After identifying the functional and security requirements of healthcare systems, the paper conducts an in-depth review of the literature. The survey assesses the effectiveness of blockchain-based solutions in meeting functional, privacy, and security needs. It is completed by an analysis of the synergies that can be expected between blockchain and emerging technologies, e.g., artificial intelligence, federated learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and large language models (LLMs), to the benefit of security or privacy in healthcare.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100305"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145790209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yuxin Cui , Chen Wang , Bing Yang , Wei Tong , Jian Shen
{"title":"BCDAS: Blockchain-assisted classifiable data auditing scheme with dynamic operations","authors":"Yuxin Cui , Chen Wang , Bing Yang , Wei Tong , Jian Shen","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100307","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100307","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As cloud computing gains widespread adoption, cloud storage services have become the primary means of data management for users. Authenticated data structures (ADS) are a novel computational model designed to address data authentication problems in distributed environments. With the growing demand for robust data security, vulnerability detection in storage systems has become a critical area of focus to ensure resilience against potential threats. However, traditional ADS, while ensuring consistency between cloud data and source data, have limitations in handling dynamic data operations on multiple types of files, storage space expansion, and single-point failure issues. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-assisted classifiable data auditing scheme with dynamic operations. First, trapdoor hash functions are used to construct a binary tree. During dynamic data operations, the impact of hash updates is confined to a subset of nodes, ensuring global stability and reducing computational resource consumption. Second, innovative data structures and verification mechanisms are introduced, reducing the risk of single-point failures by decentralizing the dependency on verification paths. Finally, data types are confirmed based on data identifiers, and corresponding path information is recorded, enabling efficient and rapid dynamic operations on specific types of files within multi-source data. Both security analysis and performance assessment demonstrate that BCDAS conducts data auditing with reliability and efficiency.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100307"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145684699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jiazhen Gan , Jianzhong Su , Kaixin Lin , Zibin Zheng
{"title":"FinanceFuzz: fuzzing smart contracts with financial properties","authors":"Jiazhen Gan , Jianzhong Su , Kaixin Lin , Zibin Zheng","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100301","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100301","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that run on blockchain technology, are capable of managing on-chain assets according to predefined logic, and become immutable once deployed on the blockchain. In recent years, the value of smart contracts on blockchains, notably Ethereum, has been on the rise. However, the hiding vulnerabilities make the substantial value of smart contracts a target of many hackers, leading to numerous attack incidents. Therefore, vulnerability detection in smart contracts before deployment is essential. Currently, many fuzzers for detecting smart contract vulnerabilities can identify vulnerabilities only based on the execution patterns of the underlying opcodes, overlooking the financial semantic properties of the contracts, which leads to many vulnerabilities being difficult to detect or resulting in a high rate of false positives. To this end, we focus on the financial characteristics of contracts, define contract vulnerability patterns starting from the high-level semantic properties of contracts, and combine fuzzers using evolutionary algorithms and symbolic constraint solving to detect vulnerabilities, culminating in the development of FinanceFuzz. Specifically, FinanceFuzz defines invariant and equivalence properties of finance that contracts should satisfy. Using these properties, FinanceFuzz can generate transaction sequences for testing and identify vulnerable contracts that violate the properties. We conduct experiments on a dataset containing 437 smart contracts from the real world, and the experimental results demonstrate that our tool outperforms other state-of-the-art tools in detecting vulnerabilities, achieving a higher recall rate without false positives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100301"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145736603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blockchain smart contracts for decentralized matching of counterparties and automatic settlement of financial derivatives","authors":"Hua Wang , Jinjing Liu , Jian Zhao","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100300","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100300","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Financial derivatives are widely recognized for their effectiveness in managing interest rate risk, demonstrating the principle of comparative advantage in finance. However, traditional financial derivative transactions are often complex and can expose participants to market and credit risks. To mitigate these risks, reduce transaction costs, and enhance liquidity, this paper proposes a blockchain-based matching mechanism for financial derivatives that uses smart contracts for decentralized counterparty matching and settlement. Smart contracts facilitate secure data sharing among participants, ensuring the integrity and immutability of transaction data. We design a transaction pool mechanism-based smart contracts for counterparty matching and automatic settlement of financial derivatives involving real fiat currencies and introduce an efficient peer-to-peer counterparty matching method, where the entire trading process is conducted on a decentralized blockchain, ensuring greater security and transparency. A prototype implementation based on Ethereum smart contracts validates the effectiveness of our proposed model, demonstrating its potential to streamline and secure financial derivative transactions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 4","pages":"Article 100300"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145468052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Peixuan Feng , Wenrui Cao , Siqi Lu , Yongjuan Wang , Haoyuan Xue , Runnan Yang
{"title":"ACOFuzz: An ant colony algorithm-based fuzzer for smart contracts","authors":"Peixuan Feng , Wenrui Cao , Siqi Lu , Yongjuan Wang , Haoyuan Xue , Runnan Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100279","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100279","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In today's blockchain landscape, smart contracts are assuming a pivotal role, albeit accompanied by a heightened risk of exploitation by attackers. As smart contracts grow in complexity, vulnerabilities lurking within deeper layers of code become more prevalent. Existing analysis tools primarily focus on data flow and a priori knowledge based on symbolic execution as a test case generation strategy, often falling short in uncovering vulnerabilities nested within intricate conditional statements. To address this challenge, we present ACOFuzz, an advanced fuzzer for Ethereum smart contracts. ACOFuzz employs the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to traverse the control flow graph (CFG) of smart contracts, systematically exploring execution paths and generating test cases. Subsequently, it strategically directs the search towards paths that are more susceptible to vulnerabilities within the CFG, leveraging block coverage data obtained from executing the test cases. In a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that ACOFuzz excels in covering a wider array of paths within a contract while exhibiting enhanced accuracy in pinpointing specific vulnerabilities compared to contemporary fuzzers.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":53141,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain-Research and Applications","volume":"6 3","pages":"Article 100279"},"PeriodicalIF":5.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144861166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}