Trustworthiness Evaluation for Permissioned Blockchain-Enabled Applications

As permissioned blockchain becomes a common foundation of blockchain-based circumstances for current organizations,related stakeholders need a means to assess the trustworthiness of the applications involved within.It is extremely important to consider the potential impact brought by the Blockchain technology in terms of security and privacy.Therefore,this study proposes a rigorous security risk management framework for permissioned blockchain-enabled applications.The framework divides itself into different implementation domains,i.e.,organization security,application security,consensus mechanism security,node management and network security,host security and perimeter security,and simultaneously provides guidelines to control the security risks of permissioned blockchain applications with respect to these security domains.In addition,a case study,including a security testing and risk evaluation on each stack of a specific organization,is demonstrated as an implementation instruction of our proposed risk management framework.According to the best of our knowledge,this study is one of the pioneer researches that provide a means to evaluate the security risks of permissioned blockchain applications from a holistic point of view.If users can trust the applications that adopted this framework,this study can contribute to the adoption of permissioned blockchain-enabled technologies.Furthermore,application providers can use the framework to perform gap analysis on their existing systems and controls and understand the risks of their applications.

A Review of Consensus Protocols in Permissioned Blockchains

Consensus protocols are used for the distributed management of large databases in an environment without trust among participants.The choice of a specific protocol depends on the purpose and characteristics of the system itself.The subjects of the paper are consensus protocols in permissioned blockchains.The objective of this paper is to identify functional advantages and disadvantages of observed protocol.The analysis covers a total of six consensus protocols for permissioned blockchains.The following characteristics were compared:security,trust among participants,throughput and scalability.The results show that no protocol shows absolute dominance in all aspects of the comparison.Paxos and Raft are intended for systems in which there is no suspicion of unreliable users,but only the problem of a temporary shutdown.Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance is intended for systems with a small number of nodes.Federated Byzantine Fault Tolerance shows better scalability and is more suitable for large systems,but can withstand a smaller number of malicious nodes.Proof-of-authority can withstand the largest number of malicious nodes without interfering with the functioning of the system.When choosing a consensus protocol for a blockchain application,one should take into account priority characteristics.

Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain: Secure and Efficient Solution for Electronic Health Records

Background:Electronic Health Record(EHR)systems are used as an efficient and effective technique for sharing patient’s health records among different hospitals and various other key stakeholders of the healthcare industry to achieve better diagnosis and treatment of patients globally.However,the existing EHR systems mostly lack in providing appropriate security,entrusted access control and handling privacy and secrecy issues and challenges in current hospital infrastructures.Objective:To solve this delicate problem,we propose a Blockchain-enabled Hyperledger Fabric Architecture for different EHR systems.Methodology:In our EHR blockchain system,Peer nodes from various organizations(stakeholders)create a ledger network,where channels are created to enable secure and private communication between different stakeholders on the ledger network.Individual patients and other stakeholders are identified and registered on the network by unique digital certificates issued by membership service provider(MSP)component of the fabric architecture.Results:We created and implemented different Chaincodes to handle the business logic for executing separate EHR transactions on the network.The proposed fabric architecture provides a secure,transparent and immutable mechanism to store,share and exchange EHRs in a peer-to-peer network of different healthcare stakeholders.It ensures interoperability,scalability and availability in adapting the existing EHRs for strengthening and providing an effective and secure method to integrate and manage patient records among medical institutions in the healthcare ecosystem.

Blockchain Management in Smart Grid

Power Supply and Smart Grid represent specific business,which must be managed by permissioned(private)blockchain.Despite its disadvantages-time consuming,expensive,and losing from network effect-the permissioned blockchain offers balance,guarantees stability,and provides physical limitations for usage of validating nodes only in the network.The management of permissioned blockchain is necessary for tracing the processes in it.The author has represented the moment following topics:the idea for applying blockchain in business environment,blockchain technology-as a linked list with a new key on each step,node structure and information models for node management with a large granularity,detail models for node management with accent on configuration and performance and managed objects classes for installation of blockchain network with accent on security and performance,models for blockchain network management and five scenarios for blockchain transactions management.The paper represents a stage of project Blockchain in Smart Grid:describing of Managed Objects classes for functional areas of blockchain life cycle:Provision,Configuration,Maintenance,Security(developed),Accounting,Performance,and Subscriber control.The author uses the life cycle of telecommunications networks as a reference.The models are designed for user interface developers,university professors,and students.

Blockchain-Based Data Sharing System for AI-Powered Network Operations

The explosive development of mobile communications and networking has led to the creation of an extremely complex system,which is difficult to manage.Hence,we propose an AI-powered network framework that uses AI technologies to operate the network automatically.However,due to the separation between different mobile network operators,data barriers between diverse operators become bottlenecks to exploit the full power of AI.In this paper,we establish a mutual trust data sharing framework to break these data barriers.The framework is based on the distributed and temper-proof attributes of blockchain.We implement a prototype based on Hyperledger Fabric.The proposed system combines supervision and fine-grained data access control based on smart contracts,which provides a secure and trustless environment for data sharing.We further compare our system with existing data sharing schemes,and we find that our system provides a better functionality.

A blockchain architecture for industrial applications

Blockchain and the programs running on it,called smart contracts,are increasingly applied in all fields where trust and strong certifications are required.Our work focuses on industrial applications of blockchains and not on cryptocurrencies or tokens.We use frameworks to compare public and permissioned blockchains specifically suited for industrial applications.We also propose a complete solution based on Ethereum to implement a decentralized application,putting together in an original way,components and patterns already used and proven.This solution is characterized by a set of validator nodes running the blockchain using Proof-of-Authority or similar efficient consensus algorithms,by the use of an explorer enabling users to check the blockchain state,and the source code of the smart contracts running on it.From time to time,the hash digest of the last mined block is written into a public blockchain to guarantee immutability.The right to send transactions is granted by validator nodes to users by endowing them with the Ethers mined locally.Overall,the proposed approach has the same transparency and immutability as a public blockchain,largely reducing its drawbacks.

Optimal blockchain network construction methodology based on analysis of configurable components for enhancing Hyperledger Fabric performance

Presently,blockchain technology has been widely applied in various application domains such as the Internet of Things(IoT),supply chain management,healthcare,etc.So far,there has been much confusion about whether blockchain performs with scale,and admittedly,a lack of information about best practices that can improve the performance and scale.This paper proposes a novel blockchain network construction methodology to improve the performance of Hyperledger Fabric.As a highly scalable permissioned blockchain platform,Hyperledger Fabric supports a wide range of enterprise use cases from finance to governance.A comprehensive evaluation is performed by observing various configurable network components that can affect the blockchain performance.To demonstrate the significance of the proposed methodology,we set up the experiment environment for the baseline and the test network using optimized parameters,respectively.The experimental results indicate that the test network's performance is enhanced effectively compared to the baseline in transaction throughput and transaction latency.

State synchronization in process-oriented chaincode

Business processes often involve operational processes,contracts,and regulations.The modeling of such processes must address regulation monitoring and enforcement and maintain a reliable history of data for evidence.This study proposes modeling business processes as chaincode(CC)on permissioned blockchains(BCs).The challenges encountered by the proposed approach are state synchronizations among distributed nodes(called authnodes)and realtime requirements.This study separates CC executions from the state management of multiple BCs and demonstrates the validity of the proposed approach with a payment authorization system at a Chinese bank.

Privacy preserving transparent supply chain management through Hyperledger Fabric

The revolution of blockchain technology started in the form of a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin.In recent years,this decentralized technology has attained worldwide adoption and growth in multiple sectors,including egovernance,e-commerce,and asset management.Having disrupted these sectors,the choice of blockchain technology to solve real-world problems concerning supply chain seems to be an innovative strategy.In this paper,an attempt is made to analyze blockchain's ability to improve the standards of supply chain management.This paper includes a methodology to implement the suggested idea using a permissioned blockchain platform—Hyperledger Fabric.For the paper's scope,the existing supply chain problems,such as data integrity,provenance transparency,privacy,and security,are given emphasis more specifically in the context of the coffee supply chain industry,while also concurrently attempting to generalize the solution to manage other supply chain activities effectively.Thus,the final objective of this research is to identify whether permissioned blockchain platforms could help stakeholders in the supply chain industry engage in a less-corruptible alternative to traditional web technology and whether they could enable a more positively nuanced blockchain system that draws the best balance between traditional web technology and a public blockchain,including privacy protection and security.