Software Engineering Commons^™

The Development Of Decentralized Ticketing System Using Web3, Yu-Xian Cheng, Kah-Ong Michael Goh, Check-Yee Law, Connie Tee, Yong-Wee Sek, Md Ismail Hossen

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Traditional ticketing systems often suffer from major drawbacks such as ticket fraud, duplication, inflated resale prices, lack of transparency, and centralized control over transactions. These issues result in reduced trust and limited flexibility for both event organizers and ticket buyers, especially in unregulated secondary markets. To address these gaps, this paper presents the design and development of a Decentralized Ticketing System (DTS) using Web3 technologies. The system leverages Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts written in Solidity, and NFT-based ticket issuance to ensure security, transparency, and verifiable ownership. Features include wallet-based login via MetaMask, multi-ticket purchasing, QR-based validation, controlled resale pricing, and …

Editorial: Ai-Enhanced Computing And Digital Transformation, Hairulnizam Mahdin

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and advanced computing techniques are now central to the digital transformation journey, reshaping industries, academia, and society. This special issue of the Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering on AI-Enhanced Computing and Digital Transformation brings together contributions that reflect both technical innovation and societal applications. The featured articles span optimization methods, software quality improvements, data augmentation techniques, intelligent mobile applications, blockchain-based governance systems, and disaster management platforms. Together, they illustrate how computational advances not only strengthen efficiency and accuracy but also enable resilience in the face of global challenges. From a technical standpoint, metaheuristic …

Societies’ Funds Management System Using Blockchain, Jun Xiang Lau, Nur Ziadah Harun, Suziyanti Marjudi, Abd Samad Hasan Basari, Nur Amlya Abd Majid, Roziyani Setik

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Lack of transparency of the funds and lack of immutability of the funds’ records are large problems today, especially in the societies’ funds. Leveraging the Ethereum Blockchain, the system ensures complete transparency and security in recording and accessing financial transactions for any society. Advanced encryption and blockchain consensus protocols guarantee data privacy and resilience against fraud or tampering. The information entered in the system helps the treasurer to effectively manage funds and accurately and transparently pass appropriate financial transactions. This project meets the challenges of transparency and immutability in society’s fund records, providing an assurance system and promoting growth for …

Ponzilens+: Visualizing Bytecode Actions For Smart Ponzi Scheme Identification, Xiaolin Wen, Tai D. Nguyen, Shaolun Ruan, Qiaomu Shen, Jun Sun, Feida Zhu, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the prevalence of smart contracts, smart Ponzi schemes have become a common fraud on blockchain and have caused significant financial loss to cryptocurrency investors in the past few years. Despite the critical importance of detecting smart Ponzi schemes, a reliable and transparent identification approach adaptive to various smart Ponzi schemes is still missing. To fill the research gap, we first extract semantic-meaningful actions to represent the execution behaviors specified in smart contract bytecodes, which are derived from a literature review and in-depth interviews with domain experts. We then propose PonziLens+, a novel visual analytic approach that provides an intuitive …

Editorial Preview For February 2025 Issue, Su-Cheng Haw

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Effective from Volume 3, JIWE has transitioned to a triannual publication release effort. Specifically, releases occur each February, June, and October. This change would thus ensure steady and timely publication of research articles in the fast-changing domains of informatics and web engineering. This issue contains a diverse collection of 24 papers that demonstrate the recent developments and innovative applications in various fields such as Information Systems (IS), Web Technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Data Mining (DM), Blockchain, IoT, Cybersecurity, Healthcare and Software Engineering that persist in moulding the digital landscape.

Agchain: A Blockchain-Based Gateway For Trustworthy App Delegation From Mobile App Markets, Mengjie Chen, Xiao Yi, Daoyuan Wu, Jianliang Xu, Yingjiu Li, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The popularity of smartphones has led to the growth of mobile app markets, creating a need for enhanced transparency, global access, and secure downloading. This paper introduces AGChain, a blockchain-based gateway that enables trustworthy app delegation within existing markets. AGChain ensures that markets can continue providing services while users benefit from permanent, distributed, and secure app delegation. During its development, we address two key challenges: significantly reducing smart contract gas costs and enabling fully distributed IPFS-based file storage. Additionally, we tackle three system issues related to security and sustainability. We have implemented a prototype of AGChain on Ethereum and Polygon …

Secure Room-Sharing Decentralized App Development On Ethereum Block Chain Using Smart Contracts, Hasnain Raza, Reqad Ali, Jawaid Iqbal, Muhammad Awais

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The purpose of this research is to analyze whether Blockchain technology can affect the share-economy. Apart from that, blockchain technology has been innovating the whole of the industries and so the academics are discovering the possibilities and starting to incorporate them in order to provide additional tech possibilities. The sharing economic system is the system which enables to share asset among the one person to the other person. It has seen the remarkable growth in the last few years, Uber, Careem, Airbnb, Zostel, Hostel World are some companies to mention which have fueled this growth. Yet, the majority of the …

Designing A Blockchain-Empowered Telehealth Artifact For Decentralized Identity Management And Trustworthy Communication: Interdisciplinary Approach, Xueping Liang, Nabid Alam, Tahmina Sultana, Eranga Bandara, Sachin Shetty

VMASC Publications

Background: Telehealth played a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to function as an essential component of health care. Existing platforms cannot ensure privacy and prevent cyberattacks.

Objective: The main objectives of this study are to understand existing cybersecurity issues in identity management and trustworthy communication processes in telehealth platforms and to design a software architecture integrated with blockchain to improve security and trustworthiness with acceptable performance.

Methods: We improved personal information security in existing telehealth platforms by adopting an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining design science, social science, and computer science in the health care domain, with prototype …

Towards Securing Smart Contracts Systematically, Duy Tai Nguyen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Smart contracts are a groundbreaking technique that allows users to programmatically modify the state of the blockchain. They are essentially self-enforcing programs that are deployed and executed on top of the blockchain. In recent years, we have witnessed various smart contract incidents that led to substantial financial losses and even business closures. These incidents mainly arise from design flaws in Solidity, a dominant programming language for writing smart contracts, which complicates the process of detecting and repairing vulnerabilities. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in attacking smart contracts by the attackers. This thesis is dedicated to developing effective methods to …

The Future Of Cryptocurrency And Blockchain Technology In Finance, Wanyi Wong, Alan @ Ali Madjelisi Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cryptocurrencies have been all the rage in recent years, with many being drawn to their appeal as speculative investment assets. Its proponents also champion the secure and decentralised nature of the technology it is based on, called the blockchain. Given the secure nature of blockchain technology, the idea of adopting cryptocurrencies as legal tender currency has also been mooted and experimented with – with the most famous example being the Central American nation of El Salvador’s bold move to adopting the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021. In theory, this would provide a solution to the high transaction …

Code Will Tell: Visual Identification Of Ponzi Schemes On Ethereum, Xiaolin Wen, Kim Siang Yeo, Yong Wang, Ling Cheng, Feida Zhu, Min Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ethereum has become a popular blockchain with smart contracts for investors nowadays. Due to the decentralization and anonymity of Ethereum, Ponzi schemes have been easily deployed and caused significant losses to investors. However, there are still no explainable and effective methods to help investors easily identify Ponzi schemes and validate whether a smart contract is actually a Ponzi scheme. To fill the research gap, we propose PonziLens, a novel visualization approach to help investors achieve early identification of Ponzi schemes by investigating the operation codes of smart contracts. Specifically, we conduct symbolic execution of opcode and extract the control flow …

Differentiated Security Architecture For Secure And Efficient Infotainment Data Communication In Iov Networks, Jiani Fan, Lwin Khin Shar, Jiale Guo, Wenzhuo Yang, Dusit Niyato, Kwok-Yan Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper aims to provide differentiated security protection for infotainment data commu- nication in Internet-of-Vehicle (IoV) networks. The IoV is a network of vehicles that uses various sensors, software, built-in hardware, and communication technologies to enable information exchange between pedestrians, cars, and urban infrastructure. Negligence on the security of infotainment data commu- nication in IoV networks can unintentionally open an easy access point for social engineering attacks. The attacker can spread false information about traffic conditions, mislead drivers in their directions, and interfere with traffic management. Such attacks can also cause distractions to the driver, which has a potential implication …

One Ubiquitous Digital, But Social, Identity, Byron Moore

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Creating a digital identity in the Solana ecosystem is composed of creating accounts across multiple platforms with similar pseudo-names. Using public ledger technology (blockchain), digital identities can be developed so they are seamlessly applied across applications. Creating one such identity enables the individual to express themselves and build their personal brand. Blockchain technology automates this process by creating snapshots of an individual’s digital footprint within the scope of the ecosystem and enables a user to create a digital profile inspired by facets of self-sovereign identity principles. A digital identity should be controlled by the individual, but also allow for the …

Etherlearn: Decentralizing Learning Via Blockchain, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Tian Jun Joel Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In institutes of higher learning, most of the time course material development and delivery follow a centralized model which is fully lecturer-controlled. In this model, engaging students as partners in learning is a challenging problem as: 1) students are usually hesitant to contribute due to the fear of getting it wrong, 2) not much incentive for them to put in the extra effort, and 3) current online learning systems lack adequate facilities to support seamless and anonymous interactions between students. In this work, we propose EtherLearn, a blockchain based peer-learning system to distribute the control of how course material and …

Checking Smart Contracts With Structural Code Embedding, Zhipeng Gao, Lingxiao Jiang, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts have been increasingly used together with blockchains to automate financial and business transactions. However, many bugs and vulnerabilities have been identified in many contracts which raises serious concerns about smart contract security, not to mention that the blockchain systems on which the smart contracts are built can be buggy. Thus, there is a significant need to better maintain smart contract code and ensure its high reliability. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to learn characteristics of smart contracts in Solidity, useful for repetitive contract code, bug detection and contract validation. Our new approach is based on …

Smart Contract Development: Challenges And Opportunities, Weiqin Zou, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xuan-Bach D. Le, Xin Xia, Yang Feng, Zhenyu Chen, Baowen Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contract, a term which was originally coined to refer to the automation of legal contracts in general, has recently seen much interest due to the advent of blockchain technology. Recently, the term is popularly used to refer to low-level code scripts running on a blockchain platform. Our study focuses exclusively on this subset of smart contracts. Such smart contracts have increasingly been gaining ground, finding numerous important applications (e.g., crowdfunding) in the real world. Despite the increasing popularity, smart contract development still remains somewhat a mystery to many developers largely due to its special design and applications. Are there …

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, …

Blocks' Network: Redesign Architecture Based On Blockchain Technology, Moataz Hanif

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The Internet is a global network that uses communication protocols. It is considered the most important system reached by humanity, which no one can abandon. However, this technology has become a weapon that threatens the privacy of users, especially in the client-server model, where data is stored and managed privately. Additionally, users have no power over their data that store in a private server, which means users’ data may interrupt by government or might be sold via service provider for-profit purposes. Furthermore, blockchain is a technology that we can rely on to solve issues related to client-server model if appropriately …

Deviant: A Mutation Testing Tool For Solidity Smart Contracts, Patrick Chapman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Blockchain in recent years has exploded in popularity with Ethereum being one of the leading blockchain platforms. Solidity is a widely used scripting language for creating smart contracts in Ethereum applications. Quality assurance in Solidity contracts is of critical importance because bugs or vulnerabilities can lead to a considerable loss of financial assets. However, it is unclear what level of quality assurance is provided in many of these applications.

Mutation testing is the process of intentionally injecting faults into a target program and then running the provided test suite against the various injected faults. Mutation testing is used to evaluate …

Decentralise Me, Paul Robert Griffin

MITB Thought Leadership Series

If you are in need of a reminder of the levels of hype surrounding blockchain, then look no further than Japan’s J-Pop sensation Kasotsuka Shojo, otherwise known as the Virtual Currency Girls who, with their debut track “The Moon and Cryptocurrencies and Me”, aim to educate fans about cryptocurrencies in an entertaining way.

Near Real-Time Rf-Dna Fingerprinting For Zigbee Devices Using Software Defined Radios, Frankie A. Cruz

Theses and Dissertations

Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network(s) (LR-WPAN) usage has increased as more consumers embrace Internet of Things (IoT) devices. ZigBee Physical Layer (PHY) is based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 specification designed to provide a low-cost, low-power, and low-complexity solution for Wireless Sensor Network(s) (WSN). The standard’s extended battery life and reliability makes ZigBee WSN a popular choice for home automation, transportation, traffic management, Industrial Control Systems (ICS), and cyber-physical systems. As robust and versatile as the standard is, ZigBee remains vulnerable to a myriad of common network attacks. Previous research involving Radio Frequency-Distinct Native Attribute …

Microbtc: Efficient, Flexible And Fair Micropayment For Bitcoin Using Hash Chains, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng, David Kuo Chuen Lee, Ying Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While Bitcoin gains increasing popularity in different payment scenarios, the transaction fees make it difficult to be applied to micropayment. Given the wide applicability of micropayment, it is crucial for all cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin to provide effective support therein. In light of this, a number of low-cost micropayment schemes for Bitcoin have been proposed recently to reduce micropayment costs. Existing schemes, however, suffer from drawbacks such as high computation cost, inflexible payment value, and possibly unfair exchanges. The paper proposes two new micropayment schemes, namely the basic MicroBTC and the advanced MicroBTC, for Bitcoin by integrating the hash chain technique …

Gradubique: An Academic Transcript Database Using Blockchain Architecture, Thinh Nguyen

Master's Projects

Blockchain has been widely adopted in the last few years even though it is in its infancy. The first well-known application built on blockchain technology was Bitcoin, which is a decentralized and distributed ledger to record crypto-currency transactions. All of the transactions in Bitcoin are anonymously transferred and validated by participants in the network. Bitcoin protocol and its operations are so reliable that technologists have been inspired to enhance blockchain technologies and deploy it outside of the crypto-currency world. The demand for private and non-crypto-currency solutions have surged among consortiums because of the security and fault tolerant features of blockchain. …

Exploring Confidentiality Issues In Hyperledger Fabric Business Applications, Shivam Bajpayi, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Donghang Lu, Sihao Yin

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The rise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies over the last decade have made its underlying technology (blockchain) come into the spotlight. Blockchain is a secure ledger of linked records called blocks. These records are cryptographically immutable and any tampering with the block is evident through a change in the cryptographic signature of the block. Among the blockchains deployed in practice today, Hyperledger Fabric is a platform that allows businesses to make use of blockchains in their applications. However, confidentiality issues arise with respects to the blocks in this blockchain network due to the fact that blocks might contain sensitive information accessible …

Bug Characteristics In Blockchain Systems: A Large-Scale Empirical Study, Zhiyuan Wan, David Lo, Xin Xia, Liang Cai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bugs severely hurt blockchain system dependability. A thorough understanding of blockchain bug characteristics is required to design effective tools for preventing, detecting and mitigating bugs. We perform an empirical study on bug characteristics in eight representative open source blockchain systems. First, we manually examine 1,108 bug reports to understand the nature of the reported bugs. Second, we leverage card sorting to label the bug reports, and obtain ten bug categories in blockchain systems. We further investigate the frequency distribution of bug categories across projects and programming languages. Finally, we study the relationship between bug categories and bug fixing time. The …