Computer Sciences Commons^™

Toward A Sustainable Cybersecurity Ecosystem, Shahrin Sadik, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Leslie F. Sikos, A.K.M. Najmul Islam

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Cybersecurity issues constitute a key concern of today’s technology-based economies. Cybersecurity has become a core need for providing a sustainable and safe society to online users in cyberspace. Considering the rapid increase of technological implementations, it has turned into a global necessity in the attempt to adapt security countermeasures, whether direct or indirect, and prevent systems from cyberthreats. Identifying, characterizing, and classifying such threats and their sources is required for a sustainable cyber-ecosystem. This paper focuses on the cybersecurity of smart grids and the emerging trends such as using blockchain in …

Crowdsourcing Atop Blockchains, Yuan Lu

Dissertations

Traditional crowdsourcing systems, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), though once acquiring great economic successes, have to fully rely on third-party platforms to serve between the requesters and the workers for basic utilities. These third-parties have to be fully trusted to assist payments, resolve disputes, protect data privacy, manage user authentications, maintain service online, etc. Nevertheless, tremendous real-world incidents indicate how elusive it is to completely trust these platforms in reality, and the reduction of such over-reliance becomes desirable.

In contrast to the arguably vulnerable centralized approaches, a public blockchain is a distributed and transparent global "consensus computer" that is …

Analysis Of Blockchain-Based Storage Systems, Phillipe Austria

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Increasing storage needs has driven cloud storage to become a prevalent choice to store data for both business and personal use. Cloud service providers, such as Google, offer advantages over storing personal hard drives; however, customers lose privacy and require trust in the provider to act honestly with their data. This thesis explores an alternative to cloud storage using Blockchain technology. I focus on Sia, a blockchain-based storage platform that allows users to rent storage from other users.

In this study, I evaluate the security, performance and costs between the Sia and traditional cloud storage. I assessed security based on …

Recent Advances In Smart Contracts: A Technical Overview And State Of The Art, Victor Youdom Kemmoe, William Stone, Jeehyeong Kim, Daeyoung Kim, Junggab Son

School of Computing Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Smart contracts, as an added functionality to blockchain, have received increased attention recently. They are executable programs whose instance and state are stored in blockchain. Hence, smart contracts and blockchain enable a trustable, trackable, and irreversible protocol without the need for trusted third parties which generally constitute a single point of failure. If a user creates and distributes a smart contract, others will be able to interact with it while the underlying blockchain ensures a trustable execution. In this paper, we aim to introduce state-of-the-art technologies of the smart contract protocol. We firstly introduce the history of blockchain and smart …

Attribute Proxy Re-Encryption For Ciphertext Storage Sharing Scheme On Blockchain, Xiaohong Zhang, Lanlan Sun

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In order to implement the information storage sharing service safely and efficiently, a blockchain storage sharing scheme supporting the attribute proxy re-encryption and keyword retrieval is proposed. By the nodes classification and ciphertext storage separation, the anti-collusion attack is better implemented. The smart contract design of the information transaction is introduced and the information sharing parties can communicate spontaneously without the participation of the central organization. By the attribute-based proxy re-encryption algorithm, the information owner can share the information with other users without re-encrypting, uploading, and downloading information, and relieves the burden of the high-frequency access of the cloud …

Proof-Of-Activity Consensus Protocol Based On A Network's Active Nodes, Roman Belfer, Antonina Kashtalian, Andrii Nicheporuk, George Markowsky, Anatoliy Sachenko

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The paper proposes a new socially oriented protocol that avoids pseudo-decentralization and monopolization of the network, increases the availability of the system, provides a fair selection of potential validator nodes, and provides a fair reward for creating new blocks and adding them to the blockchain. Our proposed protocol provides for the creation and addition of new blocks to a blockchain. Defines a node validator, which will create the next block according to its useful activity in the network according to predefined conditions, which can be formed according to the requirements of the system and will satisfy the individual needs of …

Privacy-Preserving Protocol For Atomic Swap Between Blockchains, Kiran Gurung

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Atomic swap facilitates fair exchange of cryptocurrencies without the need for a trusted authority. It is regarded as one of the prominent technologies for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, helping to realize the idea of a decentralized blockchain introduced by Bitcoin. However, due to the heterogeneity of the cryptocurrency systems, developing efficient and privacy-preserving atomic swap protocols has proven challenging. In this thesis, we propose a generic framework for atomic swap, called PolySwap, that enables fair ex-change of assets between two heterogeneous sets of blockchains. Our construction 1) does not require a trusted third party, 2) preserves the anonymity of the swap …

Iot Security With Blockchain Solution, Arber Murati

Theses and Dissertations

IoT është një teknologji me një potencial, impakt dhe rritje të jashtzakonshme. Sot, prodhimi momental i të dhënave nga paisjet teknologjike llogaritet të jetë rreth 2.5 quintillion bytes gjdo ditë. Për të pasur një kuptim më figurativ, 2.5 quntillion cent në monedha do të mbulonin sipërfaqën e globit për rreth 5 herë nëse token do ta përcaktonim si të sheshtë. Sipas hulumtimeve të fundit, deri në vitin 2025 diku rreth 41.6-miliard paisje IoT do të jenë online si dhe 30 % e të gjitha të dhënave do të duhen të procesohen në real-time. Hakerët shpesh fitojnë qasje në pajisje fundore …

Dependable And Scalable Public Ledger For Policy Compliance, A Blockchain Based Approach, Zhou Wu

Dissertations (1934 -)

Policies and regulations, such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), have been enforced to protect personal data from abuse during storage and processing. We design and implement a prototype scheme that could 1) provide a public ledger of policy compliance to help the public make informative decisions when choosing data services; 2) provide support to the organizations for identifying violations and improve their ability of compliance. Honest organizations could then benefit from their positive records on the public ledger. To address the scalability problem inherent in the Blockchain-based systems, we develop algorithms and leverage state channels …

Sdhcare: Secured Distributed Healthcare System, Mohammed R. S. Al Baqari

Information Security Theses

In the healthcare sector, the move towards Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems has been accelerating in parallel with the increased adoption of IoT and smart devices. This is driven by the anticipated advantages for patients and healthcare providers. The integration of EHR and IoT makes it highly heterogeneous in terms of devices, network standards, platforms, types of data, connectivity, etc. Additionally, it introduces security, patient and data privacy, and trust challenges. To address such challenges, this thesis proposes an architecture that combines biometric-based blockchain technology with the EHR system. More specifically, this thesis describes a mechanism that uses a patient’s …

The Adoption Of Cryptocurrency Technology Into The Us Banking Infrastructure, Trevor Melito

Senior Theses

This thesis examines the possibility of using Blockchain technology to permanently change the payment structure of the US banking system. First, I examine the current technology that dominates the banking sector. I introduce the most frequently used payments methods including Automatic Clearing House transfers and wire transfers, both domestically and internationally. In addition, I highlight the major players controlling these transactions. Under the current system, frictions between senders and receivers cause billions of dollars in losses each year.

Next, I examine Blockchain’s roots along with some similar cryptocurrency technology, namely Distributed Ledger Technology and Smart Contracts. The transparency, security, and …

A Generalized Formal Semantic Framework For Smart Contracts, Jiao Jiao, Shang-Wei Lin, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts can be regarded as one of the most popular blockchain-based applications. The decentralized nature of the blockchain introduces vulnerabilities absent in other programs. Furthermore, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to patch a smart contract after it has been deployed. Therefore, smart contracts must be formally verified before they are deployed on the blockchain to avoid attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities. There is a recent surge of interest in analyzing and verifying smart contracts. While most of the existing works either focus on EVM bytecode or translate Solidity contracts into programs in intermediate languages for analysis and verification, …

Deal: Differentially Private Auction For Blockchain Based Microgrids Energy Trading, Muneeb Ul Hassan, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Jinjun Chen

Publications

Modern smart homes are being equipped with certain renewable energy resources that can produce their own electric energy. From time to time, these smart homes or microgrids are also capable of supplying energy to other houses, buildings, or energy grid in the time of available self-produced renewable energy. Therefore, researches have been carried out to develop optimal trading strategies, and many recent technologies are also being used in combination with microgrids. One such technology is blockchain, which works over decentralized distributed ledger. In this paper, we develop a blockchain based approach for microgrid energy auction. To make this auction more …

A Cost Analysis Of Internet Of Things Sensor Data Storage On Blockchain Via Smart Contracts, Yesem Kurt Peker, Xavier Rodriguez, James Ericsson, Suk Jin Lee, Alfredo J. Perez

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Blockchain is a developing technology that can be utilized for secure data storage and sharing. In this work, we examine the cost of Blockchain-based data storage for constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We had two phases in the study. In the first phase, we stored data retrieved from a temperature/humidity sensor connected to an Ethereum testnet blockchain using smart contracts in two different ways: first, appending the new data to the existing data, storing all sensor data; and second, overwriting the new data onto the existing data, storing only a recent portion of the data. In the second phase, …

Supporting Blockchain-Based Cryptocurrency Mobile Payment With Smart Devices, Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Zhimin Gao, Larry Carranco, Xinxin Fan, Nolah Shah

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The smart device owning rate such as smart phone and smart watch is higher than ever before and mobile payment has become one of the major payment methods in many different areas. At the same time, blockchain-based cryptocurrency is becoming a nonnegligible type of currency and the total value of all types of cryptocurrency has reached USD 200 billion. Therefore, it is a natural demand to support cryptocurrency payment on mobile devices. Considering the poor infrastructure and low penetration of financial service in developing countries, this combination is especially attractive. The high storage cost and payment processing latency are the …

Analysis Of Blockchain Protocol Against Static Adversarial Miners Corrupted By Long Delay Attackers, Quan Yuan, Puwen Wei, Keting Jia, Haiyang Xue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bitcoin, which was initially introduced by Nakamoto, is the most disruptive and impactive cryptocurrency. The core Bitcoin technology is the so-called blockchain protocol. In recent years, several studies have focused on rigorous analyses of the security of Nakamoto’s blockchain protocol in an asynchronous network where network delay must be considered. Wei, Yuan, and Zheng investigated the effect of a long delay attack against Nakamoto’s blockchain protocol. However, their proof only holds in the honest miner setting. In this study, we improve Wei, Yuan and Zheng’s result using a stronger model where the adversary can perform long delay attacks and corrupt …

Diota: Decentralized Ledger Based Framework For Data Authenticity Protection In Iot Systems, Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Zhimin Gao, Xinxin Fan, Taeweon Suh, Weidong Shi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

It is predicted that more than 20 billion IoT devices will be deployed worldwide by 2020. These devices form the critical infrastructure to support a variety of important applications such as smart city, smart grid, and industrial internet. To guarantee that these applications work properly, it is imperative to authenticate these devices and data generated from them. Although digital signatures can be applied for these purposes, the scale of the overall system and the limited computation capability of IoT devices pose two big challenges. In order to overcome these obstacles, we propose DIoTA, a novel decentralized ledger-based authentication framework for …

Fpga Based Blockchain System For Industrial Iot, Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Zhimin Gao, Hanyee Kim, Taeweon Suh, Weidong Shi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Industrial IoT (IIoT) is critical for industrial infrastructure modernization and digitalization. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to provide adequate protection of the IIoT system. A modern IIoT system usually consists of a large number of devices that are deployed in multiple locations and owned/managed by different entities who do not fully trust each other. These features make it harder to manage the system in a coherent manner and utilize existing security mechanisms to offer adequate protection. The emerging blockchain technology provides a powerful tool for IIoT system management and protection because the IIoT nature of distributed deployment and involvement …

Blockchain Based End-To-End Tracking System For Distributed Iot Intelligence Application Security Enhancement, Lei Xu, Zhimin Gao, Xinxin Fan, Lin Chen, Hanyee Kim, Taeweon Suh, Weidong Shi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

IoT devices provide a rich data source that is not available in the past, which is valuable for a wide range of intelligence applications, especially deep neural network (DNN) applications that are data-thirsty. An established DNN model in turn provides useful analysis results that can improve the operation of IoT systems. The progress in distributed/federated DNN training further unleashes the potential of integration of IoT and intelligence applications. When a large number of IoT devices deployed in different physical locations, distributed training allows training modules to be deployed to multiple edge data centers that are close to the IoT devices …

A Tutorial And Future Research For Building A Blockchain-Based Secure Communication Scheme For Internet Of Intelligent Things, Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, Minho Jo

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Internet of Intelligent Things (IoIT) communication environment can be utilized in various types of applications (for example, intelligent battlefields, smart healthcare systems, the industrial internet, home automation, and many more). Communications that happen in such environments can have different types of security and privacy issues, which can be resolved through the utilization of blockchain. In this paper, we propose a tutorial that aims in desiging a generalized blockchain-based secure authentication key management scheme for the IoIT environment. Moreover, some issues with using blockchain for a communication environment are discussed as future research directions. The details of different types of …

A Blockchain Simulator For Evaluating Consensus Algorithms In Diverse Networking Environments, Peter Foytik, Sachin Shetty, Sarada Prasad Gochhayat, Eranga Herath, Deepak Tosh, Laurent Njilla

VMASC Publications

The massive scale, heterogeneity and distributed nature of Internet-of-Things (IoT) presents challenges in realizing a practical and effective security solution. Blockchain empowered platforms and technologies have been proposed to address aspects of this challenge. In order to realize a practical Blockchain deployment for IoT, there is a need for a testing and evaluation platform to evaluate performance and security of Blockchain applications and systems. In this paper, we present a Blockchain simulator that evaluates the consensus algorithms in a realistic and configurable network environment. Though, there are several Blockchain evaluation platforms, they are either wedded to a specific consensus protocol …

Measuring Decentrality In Blockchain Based Systems, Sarada Prasad Gochhayat, Sachin Shetty, Ravi Mukkamala, Peter Foytik, Georges A. Kamhoua, Laurent Njilla

VMASC Publications

Blockchain promises to provide a distributed and decentralized means of trust among untrusted users. However, in recent years, a shift from decentrality to centrality has been observed in the most accepted Blockchain system, i.e., Bitcoin. This shift has motivated researchers to identify the cause of decentrality, quantify decentrality and analyze the impact of decentrality. In this work, we take a holistic approach to identify and quantify decentrality in Blockchain based systems. First, we identify the emergence of centrality in three layers of Blockchain based systems, namely governance layer, network layer and storage layer. Then, we quantify decentrality in these layers …

Strategies For Reducing Adverse Medical Events From Implanted Medical Devices, Gary John Zack

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Managing medical device monitoring processes is challenging and lacks a realtime, life cycle tracking strategy to reduce adverse medical events and revision costs for hospital administrators, physicians, and patients. Understanding the malfunctions of medical devices for cardiac and orthopedic patients could save lives and reduce hospital liability. Grounded in the business process reengineering conceptual framework, the purpose of this single qualitative case study was to explore strategies hospital managers used to redesign the implant recall surveillance process at one hospital in Pennsylvania. The 5 participants selected successfully implemented a medical device surveillance process that reduced adverse medical events and revision …

Secure Blockchains For Cyber-Physical Systems, Matthew Edward Wagner

Doctoral Dissertations

“Blockchains are a data structure used to perform state agreement in a distributed system across an entire network. One unique trait of blockchains is the lack of a centralized trusted third-party to control the system. This prevents a corrupted trusted third party from being able to control the entire blockchain. All nodes can reach agreement in an untrusted network where nodes do not need to trust one another to believe the accuracy of the information stored. Two main issues occur when trying to apply this technology to other applications: verifiability and scalability. In previous blockchain architectures, there is no way …

Blockchain Based Access Control For Enterprise Blockchain Applications, Lei Xu, Isaac Markus, Subhod I, Nikhil Nayab

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Access control is one of the fundamental security mechanisms of IT systems. Most existing access control schemes rely on a centralized party to manage and enforce access control policies. As blockchain technologies, especially permissioned networks, find more applicability beyond cryptocurrencies in enterprise solutions, it is expected that the security requirements will increase. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an access control system that works in a decentralized environment without compromising the unique features of a blockchain. A straightforward method to support access control is to deploy a firewall in front of the enterprise blockchain application. However, this approach does not …

Kcrs: A Blockchain-Based Key Compromise Resilient Signature System, Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Zhimin Gao, Xinxin Fan, Kimberly Doan, Shouhuai Xu, Weidong Shi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Digital signatures are widely used to assure authenticity and integrity of messages (including blockchain transactions). This assurance is based on assumption that the private signing key is kept secret, which may be exposed or compromised without being detected in the real world. Many schemes have been proposed to mitigate this problem, but most schemes are not compatible with widely used digital signature standards and do not help detect private key exposures. In this paper, we propose a Key Compromise Resilient Signature (KCRS) system, which leverages blockchain to detect key compromises and mitigate the consequences. Our solution keeps a log of …

The Information Disclosure Trilemma: Privacy, Attribution And Dependency, Ping Fan Ke

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information disclosure has been an important mechanism to increase transparency and welfare in various contexts, from rating a restaurant to whistleblowing the wrongdoing of government agencies. Yet, the author often needs to be sacrificed during information disclosure process – an anonymous disclosure will forgo the reputation and compensation whereas an identifiable disclosure will face the threat of retaliation. On the other hand, the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) lessens the tradeoff between privacy and attribution while introducing dependency and potential threats. This study will develop the desirable design principles and possible threats of an information disclosure system, and discuss how …

Quantum Consensus, Jorden Seet, Paul Griffin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel consensus mechanism utilizing the quantum properties of qubits. This move from classical computing to quantum computing is shown to theoretically enhance the scalability and speed of distributed consensus as well as improve security and be a potential solution for the problem of blockchain interoperability. Using this method may circumvent the common problem known as the Blockchain Trilemma, enhancing scalability and speed without sacrificing de-centralization or byzantine fault tolerance. Consensus speed and scalability is shown by removing the need for multicast responses and exploiting quantum properties to ensure that only a single multicast is …

Cybersecurity Framework And Algorithms For Prioritized Vulnerability Mitigation (Cyfer): An Adoption To Blockchain Systems, Sri Nikhil Gupta Gourisetti

Theses and Dissertations

Cybersecurity vulnerability assessment tools, frameworks, methodologies, and processes are commonly used to understand the cybersecurity maturity and posture of a system or a facility. Those tools are strictly developed based on standards defined by organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Department of Energy, and the majority of these tools and frameworks do not provide a platform to prioritize the requirements to reach a desired cybersecurity maturity. To address that challenge, we used multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques to develop a framework and a software application family called the Cybersecurity Framework and Algorithms …

Csci49379: Intro To Blockchain (Syllabus), Wendy Mock, Nyc Tech-In-Residence Corps

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for the course: CSCI 49397 - Blockchain. Delivered at Hunter College in Fall 2019 by Wendy Mock as part of the Tech-in-Residence Corps program.