Kevin Daimi

Ioanna Dionysiou
Nour El Madhoun Editors

Principles
and Practice
of Blockchains
Principles and Practice of Blockchains
Kevin Daimi • Ioanna Dionysiou •
Nour El Madhoun
Editors

Principles and Practice of

Blockchains
Editors
Kevin Daimi Ioanna Dionysiou
University of Detroit Mercy Department of Computer Science
Detroit, MI, USA University of Nicosia
Nicosia, Cyprus
Nour El Madhoun
EPITA Engineering School
Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France

ISBN 978-3-031-10506-7 ISBN 978-3-031-10507-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4

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Preface

Blockchain is considered as distributed records or lists assigned to network nodes.

They store information in blocks where each block is linked to the previous one.
These blocks establish a chain (blockchain). Initially, blockchains were created
for cryptocurrency systems to sustain a secure and decentralized collection of
transactions. Soon after, many different applications of blockchains emerged.
Financial systems depend on key agencies and trustworthy intermediaries to
smoothen the progress of business transactions. Blockchain as a technology min-
imizes the need for such authorities. Blockchain assists in the authentication and
trackability of various transactions that need verification and traceability. It can
ensure secure transactions, minimize compliance costs, and accelerate data transfer
handling. The technology can assist in managing contracts and the auditing of the
source of an artifact.
Principles and Practice of Blockchains provides an essential compilation of
relevant and cutting-edge academic and industry work on key blockchain topics.
Further, it introduces blockchains to the public at large to develop their blockchain
knowledge and awareness. The book can be a valuable resource to blockchain
experts towards their professional development efforts and to students as a sup-
plement to their cybersecurity courses. It provides a glimpse of future directions
where blockchains are heading. The book is a rich collection of carefully selected
and reviewed manuscripts written by diverse blockchain experts in the listed fields
and edited by prominent blockchain researchers and specialists.
The first part of the book covers blockchain fundamentals. It starts by explan-
ing consensus protocols, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. It then
introduces a quantitative description of several experiments conducted with the
goal of investigating the elliptic dataset, and multidimensional blockchain and
its peculiarities including inner search and verification protocol for blocks and
transactions. The part concludes with an illustration of information workflow
mechanism for inter-organizational collaboration enforced via smart contract and
deployed on the blockchain network.
Part II concentrates on Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile phones. The location
privacy preservation problem in the context of both permissionless and permis-

v
vi Preface

sioned blockchain-based IoT systems is studied and quantified by considering the

scope of key distribution tasks, spatiotemporal correlation among location-based
transactions, and communication medium among the IoT devices. A blockchain-
based machine learning intrusion detection system for Internet of Things is later
introduced. This is then followed by a proof-of-concept prototype that is imple-
mented and evaluated on a physical network that uses Raspberry Pis to simulate IoT
devices. The last chapter in this part examines the relevancy of value dimensions and
the trustworthiness of blockchain-based mobile phone applications (BMPAs). Using
the dimension of customer value and customer behavior, the chapter recommends a
customer outcome framework for businesses that adopt the BMPAs.
Healthcare is a growing area for blockchains. Part III examines a blockchain
structure to develop a decentralized and secured healthcare system. The system
ensures that patients personalize and govern their healthcare data while others are
considered client with assigned liberty. Furthermore, a review on existing initiatives,
frameworks, theoretical research, and practical implementations of the blockchain
and smart contracts technologies in the healthcare industry’s facilities and activities
as well as a critical assessment of the security aspects of the various solutions related
to smart medicine of blockchain-based solutions are presented.
Part IV concentrates on the traditional use of blockchain. The first chapter in
this part presents a study of the main challenges associated with the design of a
quantum-resistant version of bitcoin that is based on any of the post-quantum digital
signatures selected as finalists and alternates of NIST third-round post-quantum
cryptography standardization process. The second chapter depicts an overview and
comparison of traditional and cyber money laundering methods and operationally
compares traditional and cyber money laundering. It also covers existing legal and
regulatory frameworks, identifies areas of necessary improvement, and proposes
potential technical and non-technical anti-cyber laundering remedies.
The last part of this book deals with blockchains in education, governance, supply
chain, and security. Education is covered via a blockchain-based homework grading
system to establish a transparent and fair platform for teacher-student interactions.
The goal is to ensure the fairness and transparency of the mutual interaction between
students and teachers to guarantee that all students are being treated equally in
grading. The next chapter focuses on the application of blockchain technology in
a supply chain to improve business performance and discusses the benefits and
challenges of blockchain technology in supply chain management. The corporate
governance chapter proposes a reflection on the relationship between blockchain
technology and corporate governance based on a review of the literature and
presents a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence of this relationship.
The book is concluded by the chapter on sociotechnical security of blockchain
technology that introduces the notion of “people security” to argue that blockchains
hold inherent limitations in offering accurate security guarantees to people as
participants in blockchain-based infrastructure due to the differing nature of the
threats to participants reliant on blockchain as secure digital infrastructure, as well
as the technical limitations between different types of blockchain architecture.
Preface vii

The editors of Principles and Practice of Blockchains are humbled to provide

a book that covers the state, principles, practice, methods, algorithms, techniques,
and applications of blockchains to furnish an excellent professional development
resource for educators and practitioners on the state-of-the-art blockchain materials
and contribute towards the enhancement of the community outreach and engage-
ment component of blockchains.
Acknowledgments

This book could not have emerged without the collaboration of many individuals. It
gives us great pleasure to thank the authors of the chapters who spent enormous time
working on producing their chapters and improving them based on the reviewers
and editors’ comments. We are indebted to our reviewers who invested their time,
knowledge, and expertise in reviewing the book chapters. We are grateful to Mary
James, Zoe Kennedy, and Brian Halm at Springer for their kind help and support.

Aida Kammoun Abdelmoula, University of Sfax, Tunisia

Mohammed Akour, Yarmouk Universitym Jordan
Rachid Boudour, Badji Mokhtar-Annaba University, Algeria
Yu Chen, Binghamton University, USA
Kevin Daimi, University of Detroit Mercy, USA
George Dimitoglou, Hood College, USA
Ioanna Dionysiou, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Yeap Peik Foong, University of Newcastle, Australia
Harald Gjermundrod, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Line Guffond Le Goanvic, 360 V&P, France
Badis Hammi, EPITA, France
Elias Iosif, Institute for the Future, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Jaspreet Kaur, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India
Rida Khatoun, Telecom-ParisTech, France
Nour El Madhoun, EPITA Engineering School, France
Kelsie Nabben, RMIT University, Australia
Saurav Negi, Modern College of Business and Science, Oman
Jenny Torres, Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN), Ecuador
Patrice Van De Velde, Unblocked, France
Ja Ling Wu, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

ix
Contents

Part I Blockchain Fundamentals

Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Daniel Maldonado-Ruiz, Jenny Torres, and Nour El Madhoun
Identification of Illicit Blockchain Transactions Using
Hyperparameters Auto-tuning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Enrico Zanardo, Gian Pio Domiziani, Elias Iosif, and Klitos Christodoulou
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis . . . . . . . 39
Ilya Shilov and Danil Zakoldaev
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation . . . . . . . . . . 63
Samuel Ashaolu and Lei Chen

Part II Blockchains in Internet of Things and Mobile Phones

Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile
Internet of Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Abdur R. Shahid, Niki Pissinou, and Sajedul Talukder
A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning Intrusion Detection
System for Internet of Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Jaspreet Kaur and Gagandeep Singh
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Consensus Committee
Configuration for IoT Blockchains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Ronghua Xu, Deeraj Nagothu, and Yu Chen
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile
Phone Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Melissa Liow, Li Sa, and Yeap Peik Foong

xi
xii Contents

Part III Blockchains and Healthcare

A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System
Using Blockchain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Aderonke Thompson, Hafiz Odekunle, and Boniface Alese
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts
Deployment in Smart Medicine 4.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Anna Polubaryeva

Part IV Blockchains and Currency

Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Miguel Ángel León Chávez, Lucas Pandolfo Perin,
and Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to
Cryptocurrency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
Michael W. Calafos and George Dimitoglou

Part V Blockchains in Education, Governance, Supply Chain,

and Security
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading
System for Online Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Cheng Ting Tsai and Ja Ling Wu
Improving Supply Chain Management Performance
with Blockchain Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Saurav Negi
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Ikram Bensalah and Aïda Kammoun Abdelmoula
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying
Sociotechnical Security to Blockchain Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Kelsie Nabben

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
About the Editors

Kevin Daimi received his PhD from the University

of Cranfield, England. He has a long academic and
industry experience. His research interests include
computer and network security with emphasis on
vehicle network security, software engineering, data
science, and computer science and software engineer-
ing education. He has published a number of papers
on vehicle security. He is the editor of three books
in cybersecurity: Computer and Network Security
Essentials, Innovation in Cybersecurity Education,
and Advances in Cybersecurity Management which
were published by Springer. He has been chairing
the annual International Conference on Security and
Management (SAM) since 2012. He is also program
chair of the 2022 International Conference on Inno-
vations in Computing Research (ICR’22), Athens,
Greece. Kevin is a senior member of the Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM), a senior member
of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
(IEEE), and a fellow of the British Computer Society
(BCS). He is the recipient of the Outstanding Achieve-
ment Award from the 2010 World Congress in Com-
puter Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied
Computing (WORLDCOMP’10) in Recognition and
Appreciation of his Leadership, Service and Research
Contributions to the Field of Network Security. He
is currently Professor Emeritus of Computer Science
and Software Engineering at the University of Detroit
Mercy.

xiii
xiv About the Editors

Ioanna Dionysiou is Professor of Computer Science

at the University of Nicosia. She is currently the asso-
ciate head of the Department of Computer Science.
Dionysiou received her PhD from Washington State
University (2006), and during her graduate studies,
she held teaching and research assistant appointments.
Her PhD dissertation work investigated trust require-
ments and challenges for large-scale infrastructures,
with an exemplary infrastructure being the US Electric
Power Grid. Dionysiou’s research focuses on active
defenses, privacy, applied security standards, multi-
disciplinary security practices, and cybercrime. She is
the co-director of the Informatics Security Laboratory
(ISL) at the University of Nicosia, which aims on
devising new techniques to detect cyberattacks by ana-
lyzing attack patterns and visualizing attack attempts
in an intuitive manner. She is member of various
boards, including the Cyprus ECSC (European Cyber
Security Challenge) Advisory Board. She has partici-
pated in locally funded and European-funded research
projects.

Nour El Madhoun received her master’s degree

in networks/computer science from Sorbonne Uni-
versité/Télécom ParisTech in 2014, and her PhD
degree in cybersecurity/computer science from Sor-
bonne Université in 2018. In 2019, she joined ISEP –
School of Digital Engineers, Paris, as Associate Pro-
fessor of Cybersecurity in addition to overseeing the
engineering cycle – Digital Security and Networks.
In 2018, Nour gained industry experience by work-
ing as a postdoctoral researcher at Orange Labs. At
Sorbonne Université, she became an ATER in 2017.
From 2020 to 2022, Nour joined EPITA engineering
school in Paris as Associate Professor of Cyberse-
curity and Blockchain. Her current research focuses
on network security, cryptographic protocols, EMV
payment, NFC technology, and blockchain and smart-
contracts technologies. Nour is currently Associate
Professor of Computer Science, Cybersecurity, and
Blockchain at ISEP – School of Digital Engineers,
Paris. She is also an associate researcher at Sorbonne
Université (LIP6-PHARE Team).
 Part I
Blockchain Fundamentals
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology

Daniel Maldonado-Ruiz, Jenny Torres, and Nour El Madhoun

1 Introduction

When the Bitcoin white paper was published, the novel cryptocurrency offered not
only a transparent handling of transactions made with the new cryptocurrency but
also to solve the problem of double spending: the use or the spend of the same
digital asset by two different and independent transactions (the digital version of
money forgery). In order to do this, Bitcoin made use of the development of a ledger
that could store all transactions via peer-to-peer methods, making them public and
transparent to every user on the network. This was the best way to avoid having
a trusted third party (TTP) to review and validate transactions. In fact, this was
the first implementation of a fully functional blockchain as we understand it today.
Even though blockchain was not a new technology per se, it made blockchain a
trend in decentralisation and a tipping point for understanding modern peer-to-peer
interactions [1, 2].
Since then, there were two branches of blockchain developments: the first
is based on transactions represented by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and
is known as Blockchain 1.0. The second is based on storing of multiple types
of information and programmable features, also known as the smart contract
paradigm or Blockchain 2.0, where Ethereum is the main representative blockchain

D. Maldonado-Ruiz () · J. Torres

Departamento de Informática y Ciencias de la Computación, Facultad de Ingeniería en Sistemas,
Informáticos y Computación, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
N. E. Madhoun
EPITA Engineering School, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 3

K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_1
4 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

distribution. Both developments are applications of the same principle: an inter-

connected succession of information-storing blocks related to the previous one by
cryptographic tools that make the chain an immutable ledger [3, 4].
In the last few years, blockchain technology has received an increasing attention
in several areas such as electronic voting, healthcare, insurance or data verification
for several types of information technology (IT) applications (explained in Sect. 5)
because of its features of tamper-resistant distributed storage system. With this
attention, it comes a ‘hype’ where blockchain is made to appear as the solution
to all the problems that may arise in the network. However, the use of blockchain
technology to implement in an IT application requires the consideration of several
conditions, the first of them is the capability of the network to decentralise their stor-
age infrastructure and the information to be accessible for every interested user [5].
In centralised environments, the communication between users and the exchange
of information need to be regulated by a TTP, acting like the handler of every
communication and enabling the verification of every exchange. Instead, every
distributed communication, specially blockchain, allows the exchange without
the mandatory validation by the TTPs or any of the centralised security layers
associated with them. With the same concepts of P2P interactions, blockchain
handles the communication only between the other users but implements several
security distributed layers to secure every communication, as well as smart contract
technology that allows the automation of agreements between users [6–8].
Blockchain is based on the ‘non-intervention of a central regulation entity in
every interaction between user’ concept, which represents that each transaction is
the responsibility, in creation and transmission, of each user, while validation and
acceptance are supported by network algorithms. That is, much of the system’s trust
is based on the network itself, implicitly, rather than on any explicit authority. Not
all the IT applications can be suitable to implement all the benefits of blockchain.
In this chapter, we present all the concept features that allow blockchain to
create decentralised, secure and transparent networks and in which application this
technology is suitable to create a new paradigm of information [9].

2 Blockchain Features and Architecture

A blockchain is a set of linked blocks where the creation of a block requires

data from the previous one, creating an immutable link between them. For that,
blockchain needs a process to create and link new blocks to the ledger safely.
Figure 1 shows how a block is created. This process is analogue in all known
blockchains, even when block types and capabilities of every block are different.
When a user A needs to transact with another user B, the transaction is created (1)
and then stored (2) in a temporary buffer with the other transactions from other
users. These transactions are validated and turned into a block, with a variable
number of transactions per block. The validation/block creation is accomplished
by a third independent user known as a miner (3). The miner is a type of user (or
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 5

Fig. 1 Blockchain block creation [10]

node) that inverts computational time to group several transactions together and turn
them into a block. After the creation, the new block is broadcast on the network (4)
and the other nodes in the network check the validity of this new block (5), and after
validation, this new block will be added to the blockchain (6). From the new block,
the user B can validate the transaction made by A and finally receive the currency
[4, 10].
In order to study how a blockchain is implemented besides the basic theory
shown in Figs. 1 and 2 shows the blockchain layer architecture, which explains how
every blockchain operational function is grouped and classified, layer by layer. This
layer division is important to understand how ‘physical’ structures, like Merkle trees
or hash functions (Layer 1), build the system that will be broadcast by the network
layer (Layer 2) and trusted by the consensus layer (Layer 3). The definitions of
Layers 1 and 2 are beyond the scope of this chapter, so the explanation of how
blockchain works will start with Layer 3. One of the main features of blockchain is
that it allows users to interact even if they do not trust each other (at the beginning
or during the transaction). This means that when users transact with each other,
the trust is based only on the network and the functions specified in the first three
layers [10].
The network internal trust allows each user, also known as a node, to read, write,
create, validate and interact with the network, without worrying about other users
or transactions. This internal trust is achieved in blockchain using an algorithm that
prevents malicious users/nodes from gaining access to the network and hijacking the
6 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

Fig. 2 Blockchain layer architecture [10]

internal trust. The process that makes the trust possible is based on the Byzantine
General problem and is called consensus. The consensus algorithms allow users to
create and validate new blocks with the confidence that all blocks are true by relying
only on the internal processes of the network. In addition, consensus prevents the
blockchain network from creating unwanted or fraudulent branches when adding
new blocks, maintaining the blockchain as a unique decentralised structure [11].
There are several types of consensus algorithms, and the most common imple-
mentations are proof of work (PoW) and proof of stake (PoS):

2.1 Proof of Work (PoW)

It is the first and most extensive consensus algorithm used in the blockchain world.
Deployed originally for Bitcoin, it is based on the work of untrustworthy nodes
and public networks. PoW has the particularity of allowing only one ‘winner’ to
involve in the generation process of the block. This means that, even when all the
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 7

nodes in the network can create the correct block to be stored on the blockchain,
only one block is considered valid. All other coincidences created by other nodes
are discarded. When a new block is about to be created, several nodes (or groups
of nodes) challenge the network to achieve the creation of the new block. This is
illustrated in Fig. 1, where nodes use some of the transactions stored in the temporal
data buffer and attempt to create a block using their computational power to guess
a unique number called nonce, which is part of the header of every block. In this
process, the nodes compete with each other to find the right nonce ahead of other
ones. This nonce, hashed with all the block, makes the entire block complex enough
to be equivalent to some predefined complexity threshold. The competition to find
the right nonce, and therefore a valid block, is known as mining. The first node to
achieve the mining ‘wins’ the creation of the block [1, 10, 12].
Several, if not all the miners in the network, can create the same block. All the
miners must compete to store their block in the blockchain, as shown in Fig. 3a,

Fig. 3 Longest chain creation. (a) Blockchain mining blocks creation. (b) Creation of following
blocks. (c) Consolidation of the Longest Chain
8 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

where different blocks (created by different miners) compete to be the block d. The
miner attempting to create the next block (e) must perform two tasks before creating
the new block: (a) create the next block following a specific branch, which means a
block that follows the chain of some previous block chosen as a landmark and (b)
check the network to see if the chosen branch selected by the miner is still part of
the canonical network. For example, Fig. 3b illustrates how the miner assumes that
Block d1 (chosen as landmark) is the valid block in the blockchain and so the Block
e1 must be the next block to be created. But this node must be sure that the chain that
it is creating is the valid chain for every node in the network. The problem is how the
miner knows which chain is valid. PoW defines the chain validation by the ‘longest
chain’ rule. Before creating a new block, miners must perform a double validation
on the network to know which block is a part of the longest chain. Figure 3c shows
how the longest chain consolidates. After the challenge, the nodes know which
blocks are part of the longest chain. The ‘winning’ miners finally add the new blocks
they created to the valid chain. With this method, the Bitcoin blockchain can avoid
any central validation of miners and trust the network to remain valid on its own.
Because the trustworthiness of the entire network is based within the network and
not in the nodes, every miner is considered as an anonymous party in the network.
In other words, besides their addresses to receive the mining fees, the miners do not
need to share any identification to engage in mining or in the validation of the new
created blocks. Most public blockchains use this consensus protocol to maintain full
decentralisation of the network and full anonymity in every transaction.

2.2 Proof of Stake (PoS)

It is currently implemented on Ethereum Casper and Ethereum 2.0 blockchains and

is designed to avoid the anonymity issues of PoW. Moreover, PoW has several
electricity consumption issues, which are solved with PoS to avoid the random
competition of the nodes. PoS allows blocks to be created only by nodes that can
be validated from the network. These nodes are called validators. Each validator
creates its chance to produce the new block by determining (a) how many coins or
tokens are in its wallet and (b) how many of those coins or tokens can be locked as
a stake for the creation of the new block. This means that the biggest stake has the
greatest chance of being the creator of the new block. As for the other validators
that can create the same block (as happens on PoW), and instead of competing to
be the longest chain, they combine their blocks as one and each creator receives a
reward based on each stack made for the block. This way, the mining actions in the
network are improved, as every effort has a reward and also avoids any unnecessary
branches in the blockchain [10, 12, 13].
One of the main issues of PoS lies precisely in the principle of creating
new blocks. A user with sufficient capacity to contribute tokens could effectively
‘purchase’ most of the chances for the creation of new blocks, which would defeat
the decentralisation principle of blockchain in the creation of new blocks, and
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 9

Table 1 Comparison between PoW and PoS

PoW PoS
Security It is needed the 51% of It is needed the 51% of the total
computational power to tamper stake to tamper the network
the network
Decentralisation Miners ‘win’ the creation chance The user with the more stake in
by executing mathematical the network can ‘purchase’ their
problems. Full decentralised chances to create a block
system
Energy consumption High Comparatively low
Participation costs Every miner needs to invest in Every validator needs to invest
energy and computational cryptocurrency to create a block
equipment to create a block

turning that user as the master of the network, which would defeat the principle
of equality among the validators.
Both PoW and PoS are the main consensus protocols used in many mainstream
implementations of blockchain because they are the fundamentals of Bitcoin and
Ethereum (Ethereum 2.0 implements PoS widely to replace PoW in the new fork).
Table 1 shows how these two protocols are related, focusing on the energy and secu-
rity features, which are the most important consideration in a new implementation.
There are other consensus algorithms slightly based on the PoS concept and
more scarcely implemented but are still part of the new research on blockchain
and consensus and which are classified by the resource that is used to increase the
probability of creating the block. The most important ones are:

2.3 Proof of Burn (PoB)

Instead of using a stake, validators on PoB ‘burn’ their cryptocurrency or tokens at

an unreachable but public and verifiable address, also known as eater address, to
have their chances to create the new block. Unlike PoS, the burned cryptocurrency
is not returned to the validator even if it created the valid block. The fund address
‘eats’ every token stored, making it unreachable for its previous owner. Instead, it
remains as a fund to create the trust needed to create more blocks. In a way, every
validator must invest in the blockchain in order to show the commitment with the
network and its growing [12, 14].
PoB was created to improve PoW, in order to avoid the limitations of acquisition
of the processing power needed to create new blocks in traditional blockchain.
Instead, the resource choses the cryptocurrency associated with the system that
is used to ensure the possibility of creating new blocks. The acquisition of the
aforementioned cryptocurrency is independent of the creation of the blocks. A user
could use real money to acquire the amount of tokens needed to secure their place in
the block creation. Every block creation is an investment performed by the validator.
10 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

However, PoB has several disadvantages over its utilisation. The first is financial,
since like any investment, the validator may lose the tokens invested if he/she does
not reach sufficient tokens to ensure the creation of new blocks. And also, a validator
can ‘purchase’ their chance of creation every time, braking the decentralisation
concept of the entire network.
The most important cryptocurrency scheme using PoB is SlimCoin, an open-
source cryptocurrency that is currently in the development phase by its community.
Besides PoB, SlimCoin uses PoW and PoS as consensus protocols, being the first
cryptocurrency to use three native protocols in their block creation process[15].

2.4 Proof of Capacity (PoC)

It is also known as proof of space. Instead of using cryptocurrency to lock the

block creation chance, PoC uses node’s hard disc space or RAM-type memory (a
computational space where the consensus files/processes can be stored) to generate
their capacity and ability to create a block in a blockchain. When PoC is performed,
a list of possible solutions of the mining process are stored into the computational
space used to mining. The larger the computational space designed, the list of
possible solutions is bigger, and therefore, the chances to have the correct solution
of the mining process are larger [16, 17].
This list of possible solutions are nonces result of successive hashing processes of
user-related data. According to [17], each nonce contains 8192 hashes, every one of
them related to their adjacent (0–1, 2–3 and so on) into a tuple called ‘scoop’ (there
are 8192 hashes and 4096 scoops). The mining process consists of calculating one of
the scoops and with the scoop calculate what is called a ‘deadline value’. A deadline
is basically the amount of time (in seconds) between the creation of the last block
and the new one. The process to calculate the deadline is repeated until it found the
minimum deadline based on the nonces stored in the computational space. If, during
the calculated period of time, no other miner creates a block in the blockchain, the
miner wins the possibility and creates the new block.
This mining process has proven to be energy efficient compared to other mining
processes, as well as running on any system that runs on physical computing space,
including smartphones. Additionally, the computational space used to store the list
of nonces is not permanently compromised, allowing the device’s RAM or storage
space to be reused without inconvenience. Nevertheless, PoC as being stored on
hard discs or RAM slots, it is vulnerable to malware attacks or other attacks where
the storage is compromised. Additionally, its implementation is not so easy as PoW
or PoS, so not many developers have implemented this protocol. PoC is mostly
implemented in SpaceMint, a Bitcoin-related cryptocurrency which bases all the
implementation of their blockchain in PoC, establishing the condition to reward the
miners to maintain the blockchain [18].
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 11

2.5 Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET)

Emulating a time-division multiplexing system, PoET is a theoretical consensus

protocol proposed by Intel and developed over Hyperledger in 2016, which gives
each node a randomly chosen time slot to create its block, while the other nodes are
registered as waiting nodes (waiting for their turn in validating the new block). If
the node spends the least amount of time when creating the block, it is considered
the winner for being attached to the chain. This time slot is assigned randomly to a
node, avoiding the competition between the nodes and obviously reducing the power
consumption of the whole network. In fact, PoET must assure the true randomness
of the time slots (not only the assignment of a slot in a way that the users can choose
one suitable slot for the block creation) and that the user which creates the block
effectively uses all the time assigned to it (called waiting time) to create the block
[10, 19].
The only application known for PoET is Sawtooth, which currently is under
development, and no other blockchain or cryptocurrency uses this PoW variation
consensus protocol.
All current blockchains work with the first three layers as shown in Fig. 2 and
implement, through miners or validators, several systems of rewards for the creation
of blocks, paid in Bitcoins for the miners or in gas for the validators, in order to keep
users incentivised in the maintenance and upkeep of the network. These processes
are grouped in Layer 4. Each block created and consolidated generates a reward
to encourage the creation of new blocks. The last two layers, the contract layer
(Layer 5) and the application layer (Layer 6) shown in Fig. 2, are the creations of
Ethereum blockchain and of its derivatives as well, where the chain evolves and
allows generating a new type of blockchain, known as Blockchain 3.0, where not
only information will tamper-proof but also the company involved in the blockchain
and its records [1, 3, 4, 13].
Figure 4 shows the main structure of a blockchain block, where the header
and the body are two different structures, not only in terms of size but also in
terms of hash execution. The body of the block contains all the transactions that
have been recorded and confirmed by the network. The number of transactions
on the block is variable, and every transaction needs to be tracked individually
inside the block, which makes it impossible to use a classical hash algorithm, such
as SHA-256. Consequently, the transactions use Merkle Hash Trees. The header,
on the other hand, always has the same size, containing the SHA-256 or similar
hash of itself, the hash of the previous block header, the nonce used for PoW, a
creation timestamp, and the final Merkle hash tree for the body. Every block in
every blockchain, regardless of its development, contains the same structure. This
provides an easy way to find information about transactions or smart contracts
across all blockchains [12].
12 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

Fig. 4 Blockchain structure block [20]

3 Smart Contracts

The term ‘smart contract’ was defined by the programmer and cryptographer Nick
Szabo in 1994 as ‘a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols
within which the parties perform on the other promises’. Basically, it is a program
that, using all decentralised and tamper-resistant features of blockchain, allows the
execution of several embedded codes over the blockchain. This code, designed
specifically to store or calculate several values like a regular coding program, keeps
immutable inside a block, where any modification requires the mandatory creation
of a new block in the blockchain, with the references to the modified smart contract
[21, 22].
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 13

Fig. 5 Smart contract basic structure [22]

As a portion of code running over the blockchain, it is based on transactions made

by the users or other smart contracts stored in the blockchain. Figure 5 shows a basic
functional structure of a smart contract. As any other computational program, it
depends on some inputs that can come from some external registered users (as non-
node accounts) or from other smart contract information in the form of data/value
pair. That is the information that triggers the execution of the smart contract. In
general, every smart contract has four main components: (a) values, which update
the fields of the smart contract, (b) state, which is the final state of the execution
of the smart contract before its storage in the blockchain, (c) address, which is the
address of the smart contract inside the blockchain and the update chain for every
new smart contract based on the first-linked and (d) functions, which are the actual
code executed when the smart contract is invoked and fed with the data, value pair.
The output of the code execution inside the smart contract is also a data, value
pair. The difference is the output that generates the storage of data inside the smart
contract or the triggering of varied events defined in the smart contract functions.
After all the execution, the final output is stored inside the blockchain and its result
becomes immutable. These results can be modified in a new linked smart contract,
with the same functions but with different address, data and states [22].
Every smart contract, as a part of blockchain, has all the properties of the ledger
including the self-verification, tamper resistance and auditability over the whole
transaction. That means that even when the transaction is secure, all the data are
transparent for every user that utilises the specific blockchain. As blockchain itself,
is not designed by default for data privacy.
Figure 6 shows how the process explained in Fig. 5 allows two parties to interact
without a TTP. Both users A and B need to interact over some resources or assets,
which are validated over the source code of the smart contract (there is a specific
smart contract for every need of the network). This smart contract is designed to
check if the parameters established for every transaction must be fulfilled before
performing the transaction. Users A and B requirements are the input of the code and
the information to be validated before confirming the transaction. If the terms and
conditions of the smart contract and the input match, the transaction is considered
valid and the smart contract is stored in the blockchain with the validation on the
resources’ interaction. If the input does not match the terms, the smart contract
rejects the transaction and store the error message. As it is seen, there is no TTP
14 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

Fig. 6 Smart contract basic functioning

or external entity validating the transaction. A and B trust directly in the smart
contract, implying that trust is placed in the algorithms and processes that conform
the network, and not in its components.

4 Security Features

There are two considerations to explain all the security features of blockchain:
infrastructure and transactions, regardless of the technology or type of blockchain
being implemented. The following sections explain every one of these considera-
tions and its features [10, 23].

4.1 Security on Infrastructure

The main security features of the blockchain infrastructure are as follows:

4.1.1 Decentralisation

The main characteristic of blockchain is to avoid by all means any centralised

system or certification authority (CA), such as banks or government entities.
Consensus protocols allow blockchain networks to achieve this main characteristic
without any trustworthiness between the participant nodes. This paradigm also
changes the network from the traditional client–server architecture and implements
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 15

a decentralised network where all nodes have the same amount of information to
provide to the network. All of this solves the very important security flaw of having
a single point of failure, one that could be compromised, hijacked or misused.

4.1.2 Transparency

One of the main characteristics of any blockchain is to allow transactions to be

carried out with any user without directly using their identity. All transactions
are performed using encrypted and hashed addresses, which means that every
identity remains private and anonymous. However, the transactions stored in the
ledger are not private. The blockchain designed for Bitcoin, and all branches
since it, were created to show all stored transactions, without any protection or
cloaking algorithms. All users can verify all transactions at any time, but when the
information stored is sensitive (such as identity information on a smart contract),
transparency may be a security issue for some users or implementations.

4.1.3 Immutability

The information already stored in the ledger cannot be modified or altered without
affecting all the following blocks. This is possible thanks to Merkle trees and hash
functions, in particular the ‘avalanche’ effect of hashing. As illustrated in Fig. 3a,
any change to a block, for example, Block b, after its confirmation and storage,
will modify the whole following chain, creating, consequently, an illegal and
unconfirmed branch. The ability of blockchain to store all data with an unbreakable
security at all times is one of the most important features, not only in the financial
field but also in all applications of Blockchain 3.0.

4.1.4 Consistency

This property refers to the ability of the network to have the same ledger in all
registered nodes at the same time. The total consistency property differs among
implementations due to the consensus algorithm used by each implementation. PoW
provides less consistency than PoS or PoB because it depends on all nodes to agree
on the longest chain. Small or back-to-back transactions are not a problem, but
large transactions require a general agreement. This could open up three specific
vulnerabilities (attacks), as described below:

DDoS Attack

This is a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where a large number of nodes

execute a distributed flooding attack on the network. This attack can compromise
16 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

the availability of the network, or part of it, to execute the PoW and gain access
to the longest chain. The fully decentralised structure of the blockchain provides a
countermeasure to this attack, but if an attacker is able to gather enough computing
power on the network, he/she can effectively compromise larger portions of it,
creating illegal branches of the blockchain that could masquerade as a longer
chain [10].

Double-Spending Attacks

This refers to the ability of the entire network to make each transaction unique,
so that the same transaction cannot be performed twice or that two different
transactions will be performed with the same currency. Transaction inconsistencies
are solved by the consensus algorithm, which is added to each transaction and is
sent, signed by the creator. Consensus algorithms ensure that the consistency of the
ledger is resistant to any malicious double-spending attack [8, 10].

Majority (51%) Attack

This is perhaps the most dangerous attack on consistency on the blockchain. The
way blockchain is built makes it almost impossible to modify a branch or a specific
block when it was consolidated in the chain. However, if a group of malicious
attackers can impersonate or hijack at least 51% of the network computational
power, the attackers can effectively modify the information in the blockchain. In
fact, they will be able to create a fraudulent ‘longest’ chain or a new group of
validators. Consensus protocols help in maintaining a single ledger because the
majority of nodes confirm the longest chain or validators in the network. The success
of this attack is inversely proportional to the size of the network, as it is almost
impossible to control the 51% of a blockchain. Nevertheless, this is a security issue
for any blockchain implementation [8, 23].

4.2 Security on Transactions

Blockchain transactions extend the infrastructure security because the ledger can
also be considered as local network security between all nodes and entities that are
part of the entire blockchain network. This means that the availability and integrity
of each transaction can be maintained on any communication platform. This also
includes the consistency and immutability of the entire network, which prevents
double-spending and majority (51%) attacks. Transaction security relies on the
decentralisation of each node and the anonymity of each user, making it impossible
to track where or when transactions are generated or in which point the consensus
is implemented.
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 17

The security of transactions can also be related to the anonymity and confidential-
ity of the transactions over the network, as it is explained in the following items [10]:

1. Every transaction in the blockchain, especially in Bitcoin, is anonymous (i.e.

there is no identity information exchange during the transaction, only the wallet
directions). However, as the transparency of the ledger grows, so does the ability
to track the origins and destinations of almost every transaction stored in the
ledger. The idea of unlinkability is to prevent the establishment of a relation
between two or more users/nodes that are interacting in some transaction. This
leads to understand that blockchain is based on a pseudo-anonymity to work. This
can be seen as a vulnerability over de-anonymisation interference attacks (where
attackers track the transactions to try obtaining the user’s identity) [1].
2. Blockchain, as we know it, was designed to be fully transparent. With the creation
of smart contracts over blockchain, we have also seen the appearance of several
concepts of data privacy and confidentiality. That is because smart contracts
can handle and implement more complex transactions than only-cryptocurrency
exchanges. Based on this, smart contracts implement several security features
that guarantee the privacy of not only the data but also the code of every smart
contract and of the miner/validator that executes the contract and stores it into the
blockchain.

5 Applications

The definitions of Blockchain 1.0 (only for cryptocurrencies) and 2.0 (limited smart
contracts) made blockchain technology a new curiosity with important but limited
applications. With the advent of Blockchain 3.0 (extended smart contracts), several
new implementations of blockchain have emerged and are aimed to diversify the
application of the decentralised ledger. The authors of [3] summarise six main
applications of blockchain as a part of the ‘hype’ of the technology and not related
to cryptocurrencies:

5.1 Electronic Voting

One of the ‘natural’ implementations of blockchain is the storage of voting ballots

in political elections. The study of the electronic voting as the replacement of
voting must be differentiated from polls or other informal voting systems. Based
primarily on Ethereum and BallotChain, the main idea of this application is to create
a decentralised system that stores ballots without the involvement of third parties for
validation and presentation of results. The main features of this implementation are
based on (a) the possibility of remote voting, where users can use their devices
to vote with a secure channel verifiable from end to end, where anonymity is well
18 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

needed and (b) the auditability of the system, to verify that the system is tamper-
proof in each node and maintain the anonymity of voters at each stage of the voting
system. All of this means that the blockchain can guarantee that no information will
be altered, leaked or lost during the election process.
In a way, electronic ballots and cryptocurrency have some similarities in their
concepts because both share the ‘double spending’ problem. A user can neither vote
twice in the same election nor can a user spend the same amount of cryptocurrency
twice. Also, both results must be public and auditable (the vote and the currency
transaction), but the identity of the owner of the transaction must remain private
and secure. To define better the idea of voting, the researchers have divided it into
three phases: the registration of the voters, the vote casting and the result of the vote
process. The registration is very important because define not only the addresses of
every user but the addresses of every candidate as well, so the voters can cast their
votes in specific addresses corresponding to every candidate in the process. The
voting process is performed with voting tokens stored by users at the addresses of
their chosen candidates, ensuring that users can spend that token only once for each
candidate’s address, and without exceeding the possible number of eligible voters
(invalid voting processes would occur when a user submits more voting tokens than
he/she is authorised to, if such a function is available in the system). The third
phase consists of counting how many tokens each candidate has. However, very
simple, this scheme helps to show the advantages and challenges of electronic voting
and how blockchain would help to implement a tamper-proof auditable system to
implement an efficient and secure electronic vote system.

5.2 Healthcare Services

The first implementation of the concepts of Blockchain 3.0, and the first one
designed to solve a problem of users’ personal information, in this case, healthcare
personal data. With every medical procedure, a user generate an important amount
of sensitive information which is currently ‘owned’ by healthcare services (doctors,
pharmacies, insurance services and so on), making it difficult to share between
services, and the user cannot know how much of their information is in fact held
by health schemes. Efforts are currently underway to create a single transferable
medical information scheme, called Electronic Health Record (EHR), where all user
information can be stored in a consolidated in a single exportable format. In that way
a patient, regardless of their country of origin or residence, can access to a reliable
health service. However, patients still do not own the information stored in the EHR.
With blockchain, the health information of every user can be stored in the networks
in a decentralised way, so that although doctors are able to access and modify patient
information, the ownership of the information remains with the smart contract, i.e.
it belongs directly to the user.
This concept, while decentralising information and keeping it with its owner,
presents two major problems in its implementation. First of all, and as it was seen
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 19

in Sect. 3, all the information stored in a smart contract is public, meaning that
any user of the network can access the information, although without modification
permissions. Personal health information must remain private for every party,
except the patient and his/her medical doctor. So, the challenge is having all the
information of the user not only secure but also private. The amount of stored
information resulting from the medical records of a lifetime is another problem for
the implementation of a healthcare blockchain, not only in the amount of memory
needed to store all the data but also because of the processing time of this large
amount of information on the part of the medical provider.
This second problem nowadays has been solved by keeping information off-chain
(in the traditional way) and using blockchain only for hashes and references, which
is a temporary solution for the problem, but the transparency problem is still an
issue for the wide implementation of a universal blockchain (or set of blockchains)
for health data, according to the researchers.

5.3 Identity Management

Directly related to healthcare systems, identity management with blockchain aims

to create a user-centric system where everyone’s identity can be secure and cross-
functional for any entity. The main feature of this implementation is that the user
should have control of his identity, with full access to all its data. This eliminates
malicious claims of identities, and hence, identity theft can be minimised. Moreover,
decentralised systems must maintain the persistence and transparency of typical
blockchain implementations to secure the user identity information, as is shown
in [24, 25].
In order to keep the decentralisation scheme and the security needed by the user
identities managed by a blockchain, it is important to consider how it must be done
the management of the identity inside the network. To avoid any TTP, the users
must have full control and access to their identities, meaning that the modification
of stored information is the prerogative of the user, without any intermediary. Also,
the system must assure the existence of the stored identity (no one except the owner
can deregister its own identity), and also only the owner can provide the agreement
in the use of his/her identity. In the same idea, every identity must be portable
(interchangeable between analogue systems) and must be persistent (the storage of
the identity must be able to be preserved over time), and the rights of every identity
owner must be protected. Finally, the network itself must provide the algorithms to
keep the network transparent [26].
Even though these features must be implemented in the identity management
networks, it still remains the problem of healthcare systems: the amount of
information stored could compromise the storage systems of the network and all
this information is stored publicly. Additionally, the decentralisation of the identity
managers implies new and different ways to interact with the identity requesters,
20 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

which could lead to security breaches, not because of the network itself but because
of the inexperience that users may have with it.

5.4 Access Control

The information security management theory explains how the assets must be stored
in secure facilities, where only the users with a specific clearance can access. The
main idea of using a smart contract to implement a new access control system
is to replace the traditional logs of people and devices with specific blockchain-
based ones when the interaction is with systems such as IoT recordings or corporate
access control logs. The policies about access control, like request of permissions,
authorisations or revocation of permissions, will be stored for each user interaction
with the respective smart contract, leaving a transparent log available for any kind
of audit. In addition, as the result of the smart contract execution cannot be forged
easily, the result of the access control transaction can also be used as a part of
the physical access control and not only as the enforcement of the access policy.
Blockchain technology offers to minimise the computational time to store and keep
immutable the access log that can be directly audited and controlled. Although this
system offers transparent logging, it can still be vulnerable by making too much
information available to all users, potentially creating a privacy problem within the
access control scheme.

5.5 Decentralised Notaries

The cryptographic suite of the blockchain (primarily the hash functions) allows
the ledger to be used as a decentralised trust witness that can verify and certify
agreements between mutually untrustworthy parties, using the blockchain as a
replacement of the trusted third party, which means achieving the same level of trust
without relying on a TTP. By keeping every agreement stored in the ledger, each
party has the security of any agreement that was made, and any non-compliance
issues can be probed without relying on a TTP.
The most important feature to consider is the validation of timestamps when the
information to be validated is stored on the blockchain. It means the decentralised
notary must be able to prove that in one point of time, the stored information existed.
Or, if the information stored is a hash or a digest of a document, that hash proves
that the information was untampered when the consensus finishes the creation of
the block. The proof of hashing is known as proof of ownership because it is based
on the concept that only the owner of the document could have generated the hash
that allows validation by making a positive comparison between the hash of the
document (physical or digital) and the hash stored in the blockchain.
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 21

The main application of decentralised notaries is the validation of existence

and ownership of digital contents in the context of intellectual property claims.
The smart contracts could be programmed to analyse the timestamps in a chain
of contracts to validate that the owner effectively owns the digital asset. In the
same idea, the smart contract can allow other users to consume the digital asset
(for example, a portion of licenced code or a song) if those users have ‘purchased’
the rights to do it. All of that increasing the transparency of the intellectual property
claims while reducing the energy consumption and eliminating the intermediaries
between an owner and the costumer.

5.6 Supply Chain Management

The agreement on the creation of a product or service based on natural resources

uses blockchain as a tool that allows guaranteeing the auditability and transparency
of each process, without spending a lot of resources between mutually untrustworthy
parties. The resources can include human intellect, certifications, legal standards and
regulations, all of which can be stored on a specific smart contract, without the need
for an impartial witness (a notary) to validate the production and specification of a
particular product or service.
In Sect. 5.5, it is presented a system that provides a timestamped proof of
ownership and the existence of a digital asset through smart contracts. With the same
idea, the record of creation of an asset, from the acquisition of its raw production
material through all the transport and product validation schemes to its arrival at
the final consumer, can be validated at each inspection point, verifying (through
the smart contract parameters) that all preestablished agreements for the given asset
have been fulfilled. In this case, the asset is a physical product and all its transport
process. In order to improve the traditional supply chains, the decentralised system
must increase the transparency over every asset, which is fulfilled by transparency
of the smart contract and the traceability of all changes made on the asset by the
producer or by those responsible for transport and handling. Both transparency and
traceability help to keep an easier auditability of every asset without the traditional
inspections. With that, the cost and speed of management and verification of every
product in the supply chain will be improved, by eliminating several middlemen
and other parties that helped to maintain the established parameters of production
but slowed down the creation and transport of products.
Figure 7 shows the full supply chain for a product and what is the information
that must need to be stored in every iteration of the smart contract, from the factory
to the costumer store. Every raw material producer (1) needs to certificate the
data of origin and processing of its materials before the correspondent packaging.
When the materials are packaged, every package must certificate the shipment
information, and the order over which those products are packaged (2). With all
this information, the materials are stored in a main storage facility, where the data
of origin, processing and transport are validated for the first time (3). The smart
 22

Fig. 7 Supply chain management system though blockchain records [27]

D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.
Fundamentals of Blockchain Technology 23

contracts of every raw material are validated and updated for the storage facility
system in order to check whether the raw material complies with the parameters
according to which it was created and/or requested for transport. After this first
validation, the materials are packaged again for shipping (4), grouping them already
according to their final destinations. For this first shipping (4), the system must
validate the dates and the order numbers, to validate the origin of the shipment,
and also all the features of the transported product, like temperature or packaging.
When the shipment is transported (5), every order number must be validated to
redirect all the shipments to their correct destinations, in such a way that there is no
confusion between the packages in transport (6 and 8). In the intermediate storage
facility (7), the information of order numbers, production and delivery dates and all
the packaging specifications are checked again before the shipment continues to the
final destination. For this example, the costumer store (9) is the final destination,
where the final seller needs to check again all the dates and order numbers, and
also if the conditions of the received product matches with the stored in the smart
contract, completing the whole process [27].
With this process based on decentralised supply chains, validation processes
that can currently take weeks are completed in a few days, and the end user has
the certainty that there were no errors or failures during the transportation of their
product, because given the security of blockchain, the validation information cannot
be modified or tampered by rogue parties during the shipment.

6 Conclusion and Future Works

The appearance of Bitcoin and its corresponding blockchain, opened up a new

perspective on information management in open environments, not because of the
new technology presented or the novelty of its possible applications, explained
in this chapter, in Sect. 5, but because it changed the paradigm of application
management to a version where the user and the control of his or her data allowed
the network to exchange information. We moved from a network based on large data
managers (servers) to a network based entirely on the user and the relationships he or
she could establish between peers. It was the origin of the user-centric network [1].
Since then, this new paradigm leads to the creation of new ways to understand
decentralisation and also how complicated it is in front of a simpler but centralised
network, where all the services are concentrated. Blockchain is an emerging
technology which could lead to a revolution in the way of how we understand
the network and how we can improve our own interactions not only with the
network itself but also with other real-world applications, where blockchain is
actually an improver of every function and implementation. However, it is important
to understand not only the benefits of the technology but also their limitations
and improvements. In this way, blockchain can become a tool that allows the
development of secure interactions between users and that users feel comfortable
24 D. Maldonado-Ruiz et al.

interacting with a blockchain; without thinking that the technology is the solution
to all the problems of the Internet.
The future developments of blockchain include several perspectives over its
functioning and implementation. One of the big challenges of the decentralised
applications is to find efficient ways to handle the information from both perspec-
tives: (a) the security and privacy of the data, because as it was explained, blockchain
allows the store of information in such a way that it is almost impossible to modify it.
All of this information, however, is public and transparent, creating a privacy issue,
especially in applications where the information stored corresponds to the identities
of the users. (b) The energy consumption to keep the network working. Consensus
protocols as PoW achieving the full decentralisation and anonymity in the creation
of the new blocks, but with a high energy consumption, which is an environmental
issue nowadays. The consensus based on stakes, like PoS or PoC, are more energy
efficient but ignore the decentralisation in the creation of the new blocks, which
could lead to the hijacking of the network by resourceful rogue parties, like in
OpenPGP [28].
Another challenge in the evolution of blockchain relates not so much to technical
improvements to the system but to its use within a decentralised network. In Sect. 5,
it is explained how the current blockchains allow the improvement of systems
where the information storage and the chain of procedures are the main examples.
However, the storage of information, offline or online, can be part of new security
developments where the time immutability is critical. It means using the tamper-
proof of blockchain to store information that it not only remains unchanged from
present changes but also maintains its form and codification for future revisions,
especially on issues of encryption and encryption of information and the ability to
keep information encrypted and secure regardless of when cryptographic suites are
modified in the future. All of these features can lead to a secure-by-design network
where all the information can be decentralised and remain secure in a future where,
with quantum cryptography in the near horizon, we do not really know how much
of our current security can remain functional and with that how much of our now
secure information can retain that feature. The future improvements of blockchain
can lead us to a new way to understand network itself and all of our relation with it.

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Identification of Illicit Blockchain
Transactions Using Hyperparameters
Auto-tuning

Enrico Zanardo, Gian Pio Domiziani, Elias Iosif, and Klitos Christodoulou

1 Introduction

In a blockchain framework, individuals are able to exchange generic form of chunk

of data through a distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Such distributed P2P
is established by the peers following the given protocol. The validity of each
transaction in terms of ownership and correctness is entrusted by the network itself,
in a distributed way without the necessity of a trusted third part. In a sense, the
trusted third part’s role is played by the distributed peers, following a particular
consensus protocol. However, even if the used consensus protocol assures reliability
for each transaction, it is unknown to users if the addresses with which they have
exchanged content deserve trust or not because the identity of such address may be
unknown.
For instance, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, each wallet has its own address (public
key), and other wallets (users) can exchange transactions, with it sending forward
that address, without the necessity to know who is behind that address. This
means that anyone can exchange bitcoin transactions without directly public reveal
his/her identity [7]. Such possibility has already opened serious legal problems, as
money laundering, ransomware demands, and the purchase of contraband goods and
services [18].
In particular, Bitcoin seems to be the most widely used cryptocurrency exploited
for criminal activity, where ransomware victims are pressed to exchange the ransom

E. Zanardo () · E. Iosif · K. Christodoulou

Dept. of Digital Innovation, School of Business & Institute For the Future, University of Nicosia,
Nicosia, Cyprus
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
G. P. Domiziani
OneZeroBinary LTD, San Pawl il-Bah̄ar, Malta
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 27

K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_2
28 E. Zanardo et al.

from fiat currency to Bitcoin and transfer this amount to a specific Bitcoin address
that is provided by the criminals. Again, on underground markets, large amounts of
goods and services—like drugs, weapons, and DDoS attacks—are bought and sold
using Bitcoin as method of payment [14].
Mixing services enable the “masking” of initial transactions by assigning new
addresses to the sender and receiver, such that to making the transaction tracing
difficult. Note that even if the address is not associated with a real identity, it
could be associated with an IP, allowing the detection of the respective identity.
The Spring of 2020, the Cryptocurrency Crime, and Anti-Money Laundering report
from blockchain intelligence and forensics company CipherTrace1 revealed the
global amount of Bitcoin crime attributed to fraud and misappropriation as USD 4.5
billion in 2019. A high proportion of these illicit Bitcoin transactions (74%) moved
from exchange to exchange across jurisdictional borders. The report argues that the
nature of these “cross-border” transactions emphasizes the need for cryptocurrency
exchanges to adopt and ensure appropriate compliance. Also, the report underlines
how the global average of direct criminal funds received by exchanges dropped
60% from 2017 to 2019, most of which occurred in the last year with a 47% drop
from 2018 to 2019. This trend marks a three-year low for cryptocurrency exchanges
around the world, with an average of only 0.17% of funds received by exchanges in
2019 coming directly from criminal sources.
Luckily, the very nature of the blockchain implies that each transaction is hashed
in a distributed ledger, without the possibility to be changed. That feature assures
that data exchanged assume an immutable version. First of all, that characteristic
implies that in a blockchain system it is not possible to build adversarial attacks such
as those described in [2], since the architecture of the transactions graph cannot be
modified. Second, it could be possible to investigate the transaction graph in order
to underline illicit behavior associated with a given address [1, 9, 11, 17, 21].
The prevention of fraud transactions becomes of absolute importance for all the
financial related activities, which could be done through blockchain frameworks.
The entire credibility of potential fintech blockchain applications relies on the
robustness and resilience against cybercrimes. Furthermore, the proposed methods
must be precise, ensuring that the number of false positives is as low as possible, as
well as inclusive, allowing for a lower number of false negatives, preventing honest
addresses from being classified as illicit.
Motivated by the above considerations, this work proposes a new approach for
improving the robustness of machine learning algorithms for classifying Bitcoin
transactions as licit vs. illicit. Our approach relies on a well-established dataset,
while the proposed method improves the performance (precision, recall, F1, and
micro-F1). Furthermore, the respective source code is made publicly available.

1 https://tinyurl.com/3xpcsb6w.
Identification of Illicit Blockchain Transactions Using Hyperparameters Auto-tuning 29

2 Related Work

Several computational models have been used in the area of blockchain including
the estimation of blockchain-related business intelligence such as blockchain
readiness [4], utilizing techniques from other disciplines like unsupervised machine
learning on semantic similarity, e.g., [3], and web mining, e.g., [5]. A broad category
of those models deals with the dynamics of the network including the computation
of analytics both at the user and at the transaction level. Regarding the employment
of computational approaches for identity exploration, one of the first attempts was
presented in [13] focusing on the analysis of Bitcoin blockchain to reveal identities.
The heuristics applied in this work form the basis upon which today’s Bitcoin
analysis is performed. These heuristics make it possible to cluster activity around
a certain user and add context to this user for purposes of identification or grouping
similar services on the network. In addition, it introduces the concept of peeling,
where smaller amounts of Bitcoin are “peeled” off a larger amount and transferred
onto another address with the remainder transferred back to the one-off change
address.
In [9], a methodology was suggested for predicting the BTC price fluctuations
utilizing an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and an agent-based modelling
method (ABM). Rather than estimating relationships between price-related factors
and market pricing, the approach consisted of forecasting prices by reproducing
synthetic behavior of agents in simulated markets. The IRL model provided a
method for finding the behavior rules of agents from blockchain data in an orderly
manner by framing trading behavior as a barrier to rectifying the motivations
of known behavior and issuing guidelines that are consistent with the observed
motivations. Once the rules/guidelines are corrected, the agent-based model gen-
erates hypothetical relationships between observed behavior rules, resulting in an
equilibrium price as emergent characteristics by matching Bitcoin demand and
supply dynamics. ABM, on the other hand, demonstrated that manually created
individual rules/guidelines were the result of IRL-channeled ones. The experimental
results showed that the proposed method can forecast market prices in the short term
as well as outline overall market trends.
In [17], the authors investigated the question: “Given an address, is it possible
to classify it as belonging to a particular services or purpose?” In this framework,
seven different services were considered: exchange/wallet, faucet, gambling, HYIP,
marketplace, mining pool, and mixer. The authors adopted a multi-class problem,
that is, the classification of an address to one of those services. This was conducted
by exploring the transaction history, using a supervised machine learning approach.
The history of transactions was built by the following two schemes: (1) Address-
based and (2) Owner-based schemes In the address-based scheme, when a Bitcoin
address is given, any transactions where it is involved either in the inputs or in
the outputs are retrieved and the wanted features are extracted. In the owner-based
scheme, thanks to the help of address clustering, other addresses controlled by its
owner are also extracted. Using a dataset including 1360 owners and 26,313 Bitcoin
30 E. Zanardo et al.

address, this study reached 70 and 72% of accuracy for the owner-based scheme and
the author-based scheme, respectively. In [10], the same multi-class classification
task was studied, using a similar supervised learning scheme and starting by the
same dataset used in [17]. However, in [10], a richer set of features was utilized,
using extra statistics, with the objective of modelling temporal relations between
transactions. The obtained performance was reported to be 87 and 86% for Micro-
F1 and Macro-F2, respectively, using the LightGBM classifier.
In [21], the authors proposed a supervised learning model for classifying a given
transaction as licit or illicit, in order to have a level of risk of a given transaction
to/from cryptocurrency wallets. The dataset used maps Bitcoin transactions to real-
world entities that fall into the licit and illicit categories, for example, {exchanges,
wallet providers, miners, etc.} vs. {ransomware, Ponzi schemes, etc.}). A graph
is constructed from the raw data, with nodes representing Bitcoin transactions and
edges representing the flow of Bitcoin currency (BTC) from one transaction (node)
to the next. If the user initiating the transaction (i.e., the entity owner of the private
keys associated with the transaction’s input addresses) falls into the licit (illicit)
category, the transaction is labeled as “licit” (otherwise, “illicit”). In total, there is
a total of 203,769 node transactions. The top performing model, Random Forest,
was reported to achieve 0.796 F1 score. Further information about the dataset
constructed a part of the study presented in [21] is provided in the section that
follows.

3 Experimental Dataset

In the present work, we have used the dataset developed in [21], Elliptic dataset.
Also, we have extended the respective machine learning approach that exploits this
dataset. The Elliptic constitutes one of the largest publicly available labeled dataset,
in any cryptocurrency, dealing with the licit/illicit characterization of transactions.
In the next paragraphs, a summary of the dataset is provided.
The dataset consists of three documents:
– Class document: each transaction ID has one of the three possible classes (labels),
namely, licit, illicit, and unknown.
– Edges document: this document defines the edges of the graph. An edge exists
between transaction IDs.
– Features document: it defines a set of features for each transaction.
The distribution of the aforementioned classes in the dataset is as follows: 21% licit,
2% illicit, and 77% unknown.
Another observation is that the authors of the dataset do not determine how the
features were engineered. Also, a series of heuristics were followed. For instance, a
higher number of inputs with the reuse of same address were mapped to the same
entity in the Bitcoin blockchain. Also, users following a low number of addresses
were more likely to be characterized as illicit.
Identification of Illicit Blockchain Transactions Using Hyperparameters Auto-tuning 31

Fig. 1 Licit and illicit labels as a function of time step

As depicted in Fig. 1, each transaction has a time step associated with it, which
indicates when the transaction was confirmed. A time step is made up of a single
linked component of transactions that were settled within 3 hours of each other
or less. In the Elliptic dataset, there are 49 time steps in total, evenly distributed
over about 2 weeks. Every transaction has 166 attributes that are divided into
two categories: local and aggregated features. Features such as transaction fee, the
number of outputs/inputs, and time step are among the first 94 attributes (local
features). The other 72 attributes include aggregated information extracted for local
features (e.g., transaction fee and inputs/outputs) from one hop backward/forward
from the central vertex, such as the standard deviation and correlation coefficients
of neighboring transactions [21].

4 Experimental Setup and Evaluation

This section presents the experimental setup followed by the evaluation of the
scenarios we have adopted, namely, offline and online learning. Four classifiers have
been employed: Linear Regression (LR), XGBoost(XGB), Random Forest(RF), and
LightGBM (LGB) [6].
The first scenario (offline learning) consists of a train/validation phase that
employs cross-validation with a varying number of folds and a final evaluation
phase in which the used model classifies a batch of previously unseen samples.
As illustrated in Table 1, the CV parameter defines the number of folds to be used
in the train. Class weight is a Boolean flag indicating the balancing of the
32 E. Zanardo et al.

Table 1 Parameters NAME VALUE

CLASS_WEIGHTS [False, True]
CLFs [lgbm, rf, lr, xgboost]
CVs [5, 10, 15]
LAST_TIMESTEP 49
LAST_TRAIN_TIMESTEP 34
SEED 456

labels. CLFs is the list of classifiers, where LAST_TRAIN_TIMESTEP is the range

defining the train window (from the 0 time step to LAST_TRAIN_TIMESTEP),
LAST_TIMESTEP, LAST_TRAIN_TIMESTEP are representing the test window.
Finally, SEED is fixed for re-producibility. As a result, the initial dataset is divided
into train and test datasets, with the train being further divided into a second
train/validation dataset and the test being used for the evaluation phase.
In the second scenario (online learning), the classifier is given a fixed sample size
for training and is asked to predict a smaller sample size in real time, after which the
training dataset is expanded with the last prediction plus the starting samples. This
method enables the lookup of all the available samples in a uniform manner, based
on the prediction made for each time step.
Each offline experiment is composed of two distinct parts/phases. The first one,
where the parameters reported in Table 1, are executed in a loop cycle, and at each
iteration, the selected classifier, clf, is instantiated with the scikit-learn [15] default
parameters. Then, the best two classifiers, in terms of F1 score, are selected
and an auto-tuning phase is performed, by making use of the open-source library
FLAML [20].
The online experiment is executed using the two selected best classifiers, where
the optimal parameters, as obtained by the optimal search algorithm, are used.
For each experiment, given the unbalanced dataset, in addition to the F1 score,
the Micro F1 average score is also reported, along with the associated
precision and recall scores.

4.1 Offline Learning

In the offline experiment, the parameters reported in Table 1 are tuned, in a loop,
where for each iteration an instance of the selected classifier is created.
In Table 2, the best result of the first phase, with the above selected parameters,
is reported. In terms of F1 score and the Micro F1, the two best performing
classifiers are LightGBM and RF, with the default configurations as reported in the
scikit-learn package [15].
The evaluation results for all classifiers are depicted in Fig. 2 for a specific
number of time steps. It is observed that LR reaches the worst results, while
Identification of Illicit Blockchain Transactions Using Hyperparameters Auto-tuning 33

Table 2 Offline results LR XGB RF LGB

Precision 0.327 0.813 0.917 0.854
Recall 0.707 0.723 0.717 0.729
Micro-F1 0.886 0.913 0.977 0.974
F1 0.447 0.765 0.805 0.786

Fig. 2 Evaluation results for all classifiers

XGBOOST is not able to provide any valid results from the 43 to the final time step.
LGBM and RF follow more or less the same shape. Consequently, the XGBoost was
excluded from successive explorations.

4.2 Online Learning

Auto-tuning Phase From the offline experiment, the two best classifiers are RF
and LGB, reaching a F1 score of 0.805 and 0.786, respectively. The auto-tuning
34 E. Zanardo et al.

Table 3 Final values for parameters

LightGBM Random forest
n estimators: 100 n estimators: 13
Num leaves: 17 Max features: 0.8730950943488909
Min child samples: 33 Criterion: entropy
Learning rate: 0.09438604883209972
Subsample: 0.9336368694068224
Colsample bytree: 0.49899338695396656
Reg alpha: 0.037525442727811574
Reg lambda: 1.2037412273658785

was performed, for these two types of models. The FLAML open-source library has
been tested. It is an open-source project,2 in which it is possible to perform an auto-
tuning based on some defined parameters (settings). In particular, FLAML makes
use of two recent optimal hyperparameter search algorithms BlendSearch and CFO
(Frugal Optimization for Cost-related Hyperparameters) [19, 22], both are based on
the same randomized direct search methods algorithm F LOW 2 , which, unlike the
Bayesian Optimization, it try to construct a conditional probability distribution of
the cost function. Given the configuration of the chosen hyperparameters (Bayes’s
rule)—we start with an initial configuration of the hyperparameters which returns
a low cost of the objective function x0 s.t. g(x0 ) is small (the cost), and we define
a step (differential) δ, and at each iteration k ∈ K, we choose a vector of random
hyperparameters xk , and we compare f (xk−1 + xk · δ) with f (xk−1 ), selecting as
hyperparameters vector that which results in a smaller (or maximum depending on
the min/max problem) value of the objective function. The two best configurations
are reported in Table 3.
The online configuration experiment has been done, using the optimal parameters
obtained in the auto-ML tuning phase. The experiment consists in using 70:30 ratio
size for training and test/evaluation. The training/validation phase is performed
with time series split cross-validation, using a number of fivefolds, with a fixed
size of validation data of 10% of the initial 70% of training data. Using that method
allows to validate the model over all the time steps, except for the first 15 time steps,
used in the first fold. The evaluation is performed, as before, for the time steps in
the range [35, 49].
In Table 4, the average F1 and Micro F1 scores are reported, for the validation
phase, where the LightGBM model reaches 0.907 of average F1 scores over the
fivefolds.
In Table 6, the evaluation results are reported: the LightGBM, best model,
reaches an F1 score of 0.819, with an improvement of 2.1% with respect of the
default parameters, as well as with respect to the best results obtained in [21],

2 https://github.com/microsoft/FLAML.
Identification of Illicit Blockchain Transactions Using Hyperparameters Auto-tuning 35

Table 4 Validation of RF LGB

average results over the
fivefolds AVG Micro-F1 0.972 0.978
AVG F1 0.885 0.907

Table 5 Confusion matrix 0 1.00 0.00

for the LightGBM
1 0.29 0.71
0 1

Feature Importance TOP 30 - # features: 30 - % explained: 80.6

Feature_53 15.8%
Feature_100 6.1%
Feature_2 5.5%
Feature_55 4.0%
Feature_103 3.5%
Feature_46 3.4%
Feature_22 3.1%
Feature_52 2.7%
Feature_18 2.7%
Feature_101 2.6%
Feature_3 2.5%
Feature_142 2.4%
Feature_89 2.1%
Feature_58 2.1%
Feature_85 1.9%
Feature_16 1.9%
Feature_47 1.9%
Feature_94 1.7%
Feature_29 1.6%
Feature_138 1.6%
Feature_159 1.5%
Feature_5 1.4%
Feature_6 1.2%
Feature_59 1.2%
Feature_143 1.2%
Feature_43 1.0%
Feature_54 1.0%
Feature_61 1.0%
Feature_49 1.0%
Feature_41 1.0%
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

Fig. 3 Feature importance averaged over fivefolds

Table 6 Evaluation results RF LGB

Precision 0.841 0.969
Recall 0.717 0.710
Micro-F1 0.974 0.980
F1 0.782 0.819

which is our main comparison target. The RF model does not reach an improvement
with respect to the default parameters.
Continuing with the comparison, the LGB model reaches a close to zero
number of False Negative, as shown in Table 5, therefore avoiding to classify
licit transactions as illicit ones, assuring an inclusive predictive behavior. Figure 3
displays the 30 most significant aspects of the LGB model.
The obtained results are shown in Table 6.
36 E. Zanardo et al.

Fig. 4 Percentage of
explained variance as a
function of number of
features

Table 7 PCA: evaluation RF LGB

results when using reduced
number of features Precision 0.869 0.947
Recall 0.128 0.426
Micro-F1 0.942 0.961
F1 0.224 0.587

4.3 PCA Analysis

Furthermore, a Principal Component Analysis [16] was performed, aiming to

identify the minimum number of features needed for explaining at least 95% of
the data. In Fig. 4 shows the percentage of variance explained as a function of the
number of features. It is observed that 75 components can explain more than the
96% of data. Two experiments were performed, using a pipeline starting with the
application of a PCA with a number of 75 and 85 features, using two best selected
classifiers: RF and LGB. The results are presented in Table 7. The main observation
is that this approach does not reach comparable results when compared to the full
feature set, specifically, F1 score of 0.587 for LGB and 0.224 for RF.

5 Conclusions

In this work, we have investigated Elliptic Dataset [21], an anonymous

Bitcoin transactions dataset, composing of more than 170 features. The main
aim was about trying to improve the performance of the machine learning model
proposed by the creators of the dataset. This was conducted by employing an auto-
tuning library.
The main achievement deals with the improvement of the F1 score for the
LightGBM of 2%, making the model more robust against predicting false positive
and false negative. Furthermore, PCA was performed, reporting a number of 75
features as optimal number of features, and however, the obtained results were not
Identification of Illicit Blockchain Transactions Using Hyperparameters Auto-tuning 37

sufficient, in comparison with the results obtained using all features. This finding
can be associated with the unbalanced character of the dataset. Indeed, less than the
2% of the transactions are labeled as illicit, meaning that the explained 96% of the
data, as reported by the PCA Analysis, do not imply to be able to explain the illicit
transactions.
As part of future work, it is needed to explore a statistical method for tackling the
unbalanced character of the dataset. A first approach could be the use of a classical
statistical method for that problem [8], as baseline, and then compare it with modern
approaches such as [2, 12].
Last but not least, our contribution also includes the release of the source code3
of this work, which has been made publicly available.

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Multidimensional Blockchain:
Construction and Security Analysis

Ilya Shilov and Danil Zakoldaev

1 Introduction

Cryptocurrencies and related technologies have appeared not a long time ago but
have already gained a significant role in the sphere of information technologies.
Among the most important features of blockchain technology, which emerged in
2008 with the invention of Bitcoin, was a consensus mechanism with resistance
against 50% of adversarial users. This technology predefined the success of Bitcoin
and its sustainable position [1].
On its basis a large number of related technologies had emerged. They applied
various changes to the technology and its inner protocols. At the top of this devel-
opment was the Ethereum project, which significantly transformed the principles
of building decentralized systems. As mentioned by its authors, blockchain could
be used not only for the construction of cryptocurrencies but for a wider range of
spheres. The main advantage of Ethereum was a Turing-complete language, which
had enriched blockchain with the possibility of programming.
In general, the following advantages of blockchain technology can be named:
1. Decentralization [6].
2. Reaching consensus in the presence of faults and adversarial actions.
3. The possibility of building decentralized applications.
These advantages attract business, technology companies, and financial corpo-
rations to blockchain and related systems. However, it is necessary to admit that
blockchain is not deprived of disadvantages. Of those following have a special
meaning:

I. Shilov () · D. Zakoldaev

ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 39

K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_3
40 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

1. Unconstrained growth of blockchain size, which complicated its storage and

leads to partial centralization due to high requirements for maintaining nodes.
2. Significant expenses for maintaining some consensus mechanisms.
3. Uncontrolled economical processes (applying to cryptocurrencies).
4. Presence of intermediaries in intersystem exchange.
A large part of research has been taken recently to overcome these problems.
In particular, the IOHK company has proven the security (in probabilistic sense)
of a system based on proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which is by far less
expensive than proof of work [2, 11, 17]. Other approaches to building less power-
consuming consensus mechanisms have also been presented [5]. Uncontrolled
economical processes are partially handled by the KYC and AML policies, which
allow to partially deanonymize operations with cryptocurrencies and increase the
trust to cryptocurrencies from business.
However, until the present day, the size of blockchain remains a complicated
problem. Blockchain implies replication of the complete database of blocks on all
nodes in the network. Moreover, it is necessary to have access to complete block
history to verify the chain correctness. Although the attempts to solve this problem
have been undertaken, the provided solutions either have not been presented or solve
the problem partially. The problem of blockchain size is shown in Fig. 1.
The problem of intersystem exchange is of great importance. Now such opera-
tions require using intermediate parties or sidechains. In practice these approaches
do not solve the problem but move it to another level of abstraction.
This chapter summarizes the main advances in the direction of solving these
problems, which have been achieved by the author in recent years. The concept
of multidimensional blockchain is shown, and its protocols and components are

Fig. 1 Volume size growth for some famous systems based on the blockchain technology
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 41

described. Next, a brief overview of security analysis is given. On the basis of exist-
ing solutions, a novel search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions is
presented, and its security is briefly examined. Finally, the experimental results and
theoretical comparison for multidimensional blockchain and alternative systems are
given.

2 Robust Distributed Ledgers

Before proceeding to the description and analysis of multidimensional blockchain,

it is necessary to present several important terms used throughout the research. One
of the most important applications of distributed systems is the ledger. In literature
dedicated to research on consensus mechanisms, this term was created not a long
time ago, and it is relatively rarely used in the sphere of cryptocurrencies.
In cryptocurrencies and database management systems, ledger is an ordered
set of transactions. In practice ledgers are implicitly used in almost all database
management systems. Moreover, a critical component of any automated banking
system (ABS) is an ordered sequence of transactions, which also implies using
a ledger. Finally, versioning systems, domain name systems, and many other
distributed applications in some way use ordered sequence of transactions, which
provides perspectives of using distributed ledgers. Distributed ledger is an evolution
of ledger concept. It is a ledger maintained by two and more machines.
Robust distributed ledgers must comply with a set of requirements, of which the
most important are persistence and liveness. These terms are based on the term of
honest node – a node that acts in compliance with the protocol.
Persistence means that when an honest node declares some transaction as stable,
all the other honest nodes also declare it as stable when queried. Persistence is
presented as a predicate with parameter k. At first, persistence was created for
distributed ledger based on blockchain. It meant that reaching depth of k blocks by
transaction in a local copy of blockchain for honest node means that it occupies the
same position in the same block in a local copy of blockchain for any other honest
node. As robust distributed ledgers could be built on systems without the concept of
block, later on this term has been generalized [13].
Liveness is a second feature of a robust distributed ledger, which preserves its
robustness. It means guaranteed inclusion of honest user’s transaction into ledger in
an acceptable period (predefined number of time slots). In other words, liveness
implies security against denial of including correct transactions into system by
adversary’s will. In application to blockchain, liveness implies guaranteed reaching
of depth more than k blocks in a certain number of rounds by honest transaction.
For ledger controlled by one node, persistence and liveness are fulfilled by
default. It is way more difficult to achieve these qualities for distributed ledgers
functioning in an unreliable environment in the presence of adversaries operating
against the protocol. Blockchain solves this exact problem.
42 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

3 Multidimensional Blockchain

Multidimensional blockchain is a system based on the concept of sidechains.

Sidechain solutions have been created a while ago and are used mainly to transfer
funds between independent cryptocurrencies. At first such operations were per-
formed by observing the complete chain history in foreign blockchain. One of
the first approaches to speed up this procedure was the use of nested hash chains
(interlink) [15]. Instead of checking the complete chain history, only a chain of
blocks with hash-sums less than T/2i is checked (T is a target hash-sum value for
consensus mechanism). Thus, the complexity of verification is significantly reduced.
In [16] the approach has been improved. The main advantage of the proposed
solution was the possibility to verify a transaction with only one request to the
target ledger. Moreover, several additional predicates that generalize the concept
of verification have been proposed.
An approach to building proof-of-stake-based sidechains has been developed in
[14]. That approach was compatible with the GHOST approach [22]. A formal
definition of sidechain notion independent of consensus mechanism has also been
presented.
The review of major modern pegged sidechain solutions has been undertaken
in [3]. The solutions described have been based on cryptocurrencies and allowed
temporary exchange of tokens. It implied freezing the tokens in one system and
creating a corresponding number of tokens in a different chain. Also, almost all
solutions under review represented applications and lacked security analysis.
In general, pegged sidechains imply following sequence of operations:
1. A user willing to use funds in sidechain sends them to a special address in his
blockchain and proves the fact of sending to sidechain.
2. Exchange of tokens happens in sidechain – the account of the user is credited
with a certain number of tokens.
3. If reverse exchange is necessary, it is performed analogously: the user sends
tokens to a pre-defined address, where these tokens are frozen, and in an original
blockchain, a transaction is created to return funds.
Multidimensional blockchain generalizes the concept of sidechains. It is a system
consisting of a set of blockchains, where each blockchain, but the first one, follows
the procedure of registration in one of the existing blockchains. Registration means
storing information on genesis-block and, in some cases, information about some
features of the new blockchain in some other blockchains.
The result system is in fact a tree of blocks. At the same time, many consensus
algorithms permit temporary forks that lead to the existence of several syntactically
correct chains in one blockchain – when correct and approved chain is only one
of them. Taking this fact into account to avoid vagueness of term, the name
“multidimensional blockchain” has been selected.
Two ways of building a multidimensional blockchain are possible: block mode
and state mode. Figure 2 shows a general view of multidimensional blockchain,
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 43

Fig. 2 Multidimensional blockchain

which unites several blockchains into one system. It is supposed that every
blockchain implements robust distributed ledger – this assumption allows to
disengage from a concrete operation mode. Therefore, it is not explicitly mentioned
how exactly blockchain registration is performed: in block of special type or in
internal data structure.
Block mode requires the creation of blocks of special type – for registration. State
mode is based on the concept of state-transition machine developed in Ethereum
white paper by G. Wood. It has been extended to represent a multidimensional
blockchain. Consider the multidimensional blockchain mathematical model. As
blockchains create new states at different rates, the following ratios assume that
transactions were created within a fixed length of time, a slot. For the most correct
statement of the mathematical model, the following relation can be taken:
   
   (k)
Time σt →σt+1
(k)
T (k)= j =
T (k,1) , · · · , T (k,j )
 sl
(1)
 
(k,j ) (k,j )
sl ≡ GCD (Time (σt → σt+1 )) , T (k,j ) = T0 , · · · , Tn

where T(k, j) is a transaction tuple in ledger k during slot j, sl is a time slot, GCD
is a greater common divider function, Time is a function returning state transition
duration, and σ is a state.
In other words, a slot is the largest period of time into which the time intervals
necessary for the transition between states in all blockchains are completely divided.
As a result, each transition between states in each blockchain occurs once in a fixed
(integer) number of slots:

 
  σ if T  = ∅
(k) (k,j )
Π  σ (k) , T (k,j ) =    
(k,j ) (k,j )
Ω Y . . . Y Y σ , T0
(k) , . . . Tn otherwise
(2)
44 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev


where  is a modified block-level state transition function, Y is a state transition
function, and  is a finalizing function responsible for consensus mechanism. In
general, a multidimensional blockchain can be represented as follows:

Σi+1 ≡ Φ (Σi , T ) | Σi ≡ σ(1) , . . . , σ(N ) ∧ Φ (Σi , T ) ≡ Ψ (P (Σi , T ) , T )

(3)

  (k)  
P (Σi , T ) = E (E (. . . E (Σi , T , 1) , . . . ) T , N ) | E (Σi , T , k) = E Π  σ ,T ,
(4)

where creates new blockchains, P is a state transition function, E is a state


transition function for the k-th blockchain in its composition, and E is an aux-
iliary function that returns a multidimensional blockchain for a one-dimensional
blockchain and is used to avoid using the universal quantifier in mathematical
notation. Finally, let us define the relationship between the state transition functions
of ledgers:
       
Π σ(k) , T (k) = Π  Π  . . . Π  σ(k) , T (k,1) , . . . , T (k,j ) (5)

A key feature of a multidimensional blockchain is addressing, which directly

affects the order in which applications are built. Within the framework of a
multidimensional blockchain, user accounts, transactions, blocks, blockchains, and
nodes supporting the system are subject to addressing. Addressing is performed
in hierarchical mode, and a special notation has been developed to distinguish the
addressed entities. A deep representation of the addressing has been shown in [18].
It is necessary to outline the fact that every blockchain is still a one-dimensional
list that can operate separately from the system and differs from general implemen-
tations only, thanks to typing or existence of registration storage – depending on the
operation model. At least two ways of addressing exist:
• Absolute – in multidimensional blockchain.
• Relative – in the current blockchain.
Besides, if in any subsystem interaction with a large number of other subsystems
is not intended, using full address for every block can become excessive – especially
at late functioning stages and in blockchains that are situated deep in the nested
structure. In this case, it is possible to use aliases that are known to all participants
of current subnet.
In block mode, addressing of child blockchain is possible using a number or a
hash sum of block that performs registration of child blockchain. Number means
height of block in parent blockchain where the current blockchain is registered.
Both approaches are identical, but using hash sum allows to avoid reading all the
blockchain and works faster in general. Also, if several blockchains are registered
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 45

in one block, it is necessary to specify the blockchain registration number inside the
block. Special designation is to be used in this case.
In state model, every blockchain is registered by placing genesis-block or its
hash sum into another blockchain. Child blockchain can be referenced by its
genesis-block hash sum. The uniqueness of hash sums is provided by the hashing
algorithm in use – and it is chosen while designing a concrete implementation.
Cryptographic hash algorithms guarantee the existence of collisions with negligible
probability, which leads to practically guaranteed uniqueness of genesis-block hash
sum throughout the multidimensional blockchain provided that the genesis-blocks
are unique. Theoretical addressing can be built using non-unique hash sums, but this
might lead to double-spent vulnerability. In case double-spent attacks are not actual,
using non-unique hash sums is permitted.
The main feature of a multidimensional blockchain is the presence of external
transactions. An external transaction is an ordered sequence of logically related
write-and-read operations in two or more ledgers. The ledger in which the external
transaction starts is called the initiator, and the ledgers that accept the transaction are
called recipients or acceptors. An external transaction, respectively, consists of two
phases – initiation and acceptance (reception). It is worth noting that any external
transaction always has one initiator, but there can be several recipients.
Consider the algorithm for conducting an external transaction in a multidimen-
sional blockchain (Fig. 3). For the correct acceptance of a transaction in the acceptor
ledger, it must be present in the initiating ledger, and the transaction must not have
been accepted before.

Fig. 3 Algorithm of accepting phase for external transaction

46 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

To sum up, multidimensional blockchain is a system based on the concept of

one-dimensional blockchain and is meant to perform secure intersystem exchange
and scaling of the systems based on distributed ledgers. The security is provided by
the underlying data structure and a set of protocols for search and verification of
external transactions.

4 Multidimensional Blockchain Security Analysis

The security analysis of multidimensional blockchain has been divided into several
directions. First, it is necessary to show how the security of separate robust
distributed ledgers is affected in case of scaling with multidimensional blockchain.
This analysis is important as some security parameters might change, thanks to the
change in relation between honest and adversarial nodes. Second, it is required
to examine security of intersystem exchange organized with multidimensional
blockchain. Finally, an analysis of scaling security must be performed to show that
multidimensional blockchain implements robust distributed ledger.

4.1 Security Analysis of Underlying Robust Distributed

Ledgers

The first security assessment of blockchain technology (e.g., internal consensus

mechanism – proof of work) was presented in the first work on the first widespread
cryptocurrency by Satoshi Nakamoto. When scaling using a multidimensional
blockchain, the nodes that support the system are split into groups. As a result,
the relation between the number of honest and adversarial nodes changes. Con-
sequently, the parameters of the system change, which leads to a change in
the probability of an attack. For a multidimensional blockchain, this probability
takes the following form (modified version of probability calculated by Satoshi
Nakamoto):
⎛  (z−k) ⎞
z
λk e−λ ⎝ q ⎠,
Pa = 1 − 1− p (6)
k! N
k=0

where p and q are the probabilities of an adversarial and honest creating a block,
respectively; N is the number of blockchains in a multidimensional blockchain;
and z is the block depth for which the probability is calculated. An example of
the probability of an attack on the last six blocks from the end of the chain is shown
in Fig. 4.
The GHOST (Greedy Heaviest-Observed Subtree) approach has been developed
by Zohar and Sompolinsky during their security assessment of Bitcoin and its
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 47

Fig. 4 Probability of a successful attack when the number of nodes is insufficient

underlying protocols [22]. It has been shown that standard chain selection rule is
vulnerable to a potential attack of 25% of adversarial power. The novel approach
implies placing in each block not only a hash-sum of a previous block but hash-
sums of last blocks in recent forks. As a result, the discovered attack on Bitcoin and
similar systems becomes impossible. The general safety condition is as follows:
  q q
β λrep ≥ λrep = λrep , (7)
1−q p

where β is the block inclusion rate, λrep is the observed block creation rate, q
and p are the probabilities that the next block is created by the attacker or honest
node, respectively. Dividing miners into groups when creating a multidimensional
blockchain (and when creating blockchains within a multidimensional blockchain)
entails a change in the ratio of p and q, i.e., the probabilities of creating the next
block by honest and attacking nodes. This leads to strengthening of the security
requirement.
A more complete analysis of the proof of work has been presented by the IOHK
company. The main requirement for the model is to comply with the requirements
of honest majority:

t ≤ (1 − δ) (n − t) , δ ≥ 2f + 2, (8)

where t is the number of compromised nodes, n is the total number of nodes, f is the
expected number of new blocks created in each round, and  is a negligible number.
When the blockchain is split into independent blockchains inside multidimensional
blockchain, the number of honest nodes decreases, which leads to a decrease in the
48 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

parameter f. Consequently, the lower bound of the parameter δ decreases, which

entails the strengthening of the requirement for an honest majority.
The security of a proof-of-stake system does not depend on the number of nodes
maintaining it and is determined by the number of accounts in the system and the
ratio between the shares of honest and attacker accounts. Therefore, the theorems
introduced in the articles about Ouroboros remain correct for a multidimensional
blockchain under the only condition – the creation of a genesis block with a fair
majority when registering a new blockchain.
A more deep and thorough analysis has been presented in [19].

4.2 Intersystem Exchange Security Analysis

To prove the security of a multidimensional blockchain, it is required to show that

it does not break the security of internal robust distributed ledgers with the novel
functionality of external transactions. In other words, it is necessary to show that
the intersystem exchange is secure. To achieve this goal, a generalized universal
composition framework (GUC-framework) is used. It involves representing the
system in the form of a set of interacting interactive Turing machines and proving
either of the following:
1. For any adversarial node attacking the target system (ideal functionality), there
exists a simulator attaching the constructed protocol such that it is impossible for
an environment (external observer) to distinguish the executions (in probabilistic
sense).
2. There exists a sequence of equivalent hybrid models from the target system
model to the constructed protocol model. A hybrid model incorporates parts of
both target and constructed systems.
3. The probability of bad events that might break some security requirements is
negligible in probabilistic sense (in this case, the GUC model is used to perform
formalization).
A deep description of the GUC framework has been presented in [7, 8] and some
other papers in which the security analysis has been performed with the help of it [9,
10]. It is worth mentioning that the models of robust distributed ledgers have been
presented in the literature before [2, 4, 12]. However, these functionalities have not
implemented external transactions. Thus, a novel robust distributed ledger model
has been built to prove the security of multidimensional blockchain. It supports
external transaction functionality and is constructed as close to the pre-invented
models as possible. Also, a model for a protocol implementing robust distributed
ledger has been created. In addition, an auxiliary ideal functionality for searching
and verifying external transactions was proposed.
Both models – of ideal functionality implementing robust distributed ledger
and corresponding protocol – are presented in Fig. 5. These models include the
following parties: GCLOCK is a timing ideal functionality, GVERIFY is an ideal func-
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 49

Fig. 5 GUC-model of protocol implementing robust distributed ledger (a) and GUC-model of
robust distributed ledger (b)

tionality used for search and verification, FCON is consensus mechanism, FN − MC is

multicast medium, GLEDGER is robust distributed ledger (which implements external
transactions), A is adversary, Z is environment, and Pi are the parties running the
model.
With these models, the following propositions have been proven:
1. The robust distributed ledger model is compatible with previously proposed
models.
2. The properties of persistence and liveness are not violated when using the
ideal search and verification functionality for blocks and transactions with a
probability proportional to the probability of a fork at depth k.
The first proposition has been proven by comparison of the execution models. It
is sufficient to show that these have no differences but external transactions [21]. The
proof leads to the proof of the second proposition. The second proof is based on the
examination of possible “bad” events that might break the properties of persistence
and liveness (the proof is shown as it has not been presented before):
• BAD1 – breaking liveness of the initiating ledger. This event is impossible, thanks
to the way the external transactions are performed (the initiating phase is equal to
ordinary transaction).
• BAD2 – breaking liveness of accepting ledger. This event is impossible because
ideal functionality provides guaranteed verification in case the verification period
exceeds the provided time window. For this to happen, the following relation must
hold:

window × tsl − 1 ≥ max {d} × 2 × max {tv } , (9)

50 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

where window is a window size in slots, tsl is a slot duration, d is the maximum
ledger depth, and tv is the time of interaction with ledger during search or
verification.
• BAD3 – breaking persistence of the initiating ledger. This event is impossible,
thanks to the way the external transactions are performed (the initiating phase is
equal to ordinary transaction).
• BAD4 – breaking persistence of the accepting ledger. As the response on
verification of external transactions is delayed, the only way to break persistence
is to apply transaction to the ledger and to revert it in the initiating ledger. All
the ledgers in multidimensional blockchain are robust by assumption. Thus this
situation is possible only when the transaction is reverted before going deep
enough in the chain of blocks. Let p(k) be the probability of fork at depth k. Then
the probability of acknowledgement is as follows:

  A
θH
i +γ θi
p=p (k)
× (10)
|H | + | A |

In the worst case, the nodes are split into two equally sized groups such that
in one of them, there are all the adversarial nodes and sufficient number of honest
nodes. Then the adversary has a maximum chance of reverting transaction:
 A
θi =| A |
 H ⇒ p = p(k) × 0, 5
θi = 0, 5 × (|H +| |A|) − |A| |
= 0, 5 (|H − |A|)
(11)

Finally, for a protocol that is executed by nodes supporting a multidimensional

blockchain, the GUC-model has also been proposed:
A proposition has been proven that this protocol GUC-implements the ideal func-
tionality of a multidimensional blockchain. To prove this, it is enough to show that
the execution of this protocol is equivalent to the execution of the multidimensional
blockchain GUC-model, because in this case, the universal composition theorem
will be applicable. The proof is based on hybrid models, when each next model
differs from the previous one but remains equivalent to it (the proof is shown as it
has not been presented before):
• HYB0 is a multidimensional blockchain model. All nodes use queries to the
multidimensional blockchain to work. In fact they act like “dummy” parties that
only pass queries in an appropriate format to an ideal functionality.
• HYB1 is a model in which nodes independently handle addressing actions, i.e.,
determine source and destination ledgers for each external transaction. Instead
of one external transaction, they redirect two internal transactions (outgoing and
incoming) to the multidimensional blockchain. HYB1 is equivalent to HYB0,
because the way the model uses multidimensional blockchain does not change:
external transactions are simply divided in advance.
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 51

• HYB2 is a model in which nodes perform notifications on all external transactions:

when a new transaction is created, a notification is sent to the nodes that maintain
the target ledger. Then they independently send a request to the multidimensional
blockchain. The difference from HYB1 is only in the origin of the second (incom-
ing) transaction, because the transmission of the notification takes negligible time
in the scale of the slot time.
• HYB3 is a model in which nodes independently verify an external transaction
and send a request to add an incoming transaction only if it is correct. For
this, the ideal search and verification functionality is used, which is guaranteed
to carry out the verification correctly. The same functionality is used inside
multidimensional blockchain ideal functionality. Because no changes have been
made to the functionality of the multidimensional blockchain, this model is
equivalent to HYB2.
• HYB4 is a model in which nodes independently carry out verification of incoming
external transactions using a search and verification protocol, which must GUC-
implement an ideal search and verification protocol. According to the universal
composition theorem, this model is equivalent to HYB3 with a probability
determined by the probability of successful verification.
• HYB5 is a model in which the multidimensional blockchain is replaced by many
one-dimensional blockchains. Because verification is guaranteed (subject to the
constraints of the GUC-implementation), this model is equivalent to HYB4.
It can be seen that HYB5 is the same model as that given in Fig. 6. In other
words, this model is actually a simulated protocol that implements a multidimen-
sional blockchain (MBC-Protocol). Thus the MBC-Protocol GUC-implements ideal
multidimensional blockchain functionality and can be used in models instead of this
functionality and vice versa.

4.3 Scaling Security Analysis

Yet multidimensional blockchain has been invented to perform intersystem

exchange; it also solves the problem of scaling robust distributed ledgers. To prove
the security of scaling, it is sufficient to show that multidimensional blockchain
GUC-implements robust distributed ledger. In this case a one-dimensional
blockchain GUC-implementing robust distributed ledger can be replaced by
multidimensional blockchain.
To build such a proof, a simulating approach was used: it has been proven that
for any node attacking a multidimensional blockchain, there exists a simulator
attacking the ideal functionality of a robust distributed ledger that, from the side
of the environment, the two executions are identical. A schematic representation of
the simulation model is shown in Fig. 7.
52 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

A P1

Pi GClock

GLedger1

GLedgerK

GVerify

Fig. 6 GUC-model of a protocol implementing multidimensional blockchain (MBC-Protocol)

5 Search and Verification Protocol

In [20] several approaches to building search and verification protocol for blocks
and transactions have been presented. The following conclusions were obtained:
1. A centralized search and verification protocol is equivalent to ideal functionality,
provided that the node supporting the protocol is honest.
2. The search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions built on the
basis of a fully connected network interaction graph GUC-implements an ideal
search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions with the probability
specified in Relation (12).
3. The search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions, built on the basis
of a fully connected graph of network interaction with the parent blockchain,
GUC-implements an ideal search and verification protocol for blocks and
transactions with the probability indicated in Relation (12).
4. The 1-to-1 connection approach is not secure and should not be used when
building a search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions.
5. The approach with connecting subsets of neighboring ledgers is not secure and
should not be used when building a search and verification protocol for blocks
and transactions.
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 53

Fig. 7 GUC-model of a
system with a simulator

⎧  
⎪
⎨  2 −1
k
 
Cki × q i × pk−i , if z = k2 − 1 ≤ NA
P = i=0 , (12)
⎪
⎩  
1, if k2 − 1 > NA

where k is the number of polled nodes, p is the proportion of honest nodes, q is

the proportion of attacking nodes, C is the number of combinations, and NA is the
number of attackers.
A robust search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions has been
invented. This protocol makes it possible to guarantee the search for nodes of the
target registry and, under certain conditions, to carry out verification faster than
using a sidechain-based solution. The following version of the protocol is proposed:

1. Each blockchain node keeps track of the last l + 2k blocks from each neighboring
blockchain. k blocks are used to provide the common prefix property. l blocks
correspond to the chain quality.
2. They are asked for the headers of l + 2k blocks in the next blockchain and the
addresses of the nodes that created them (identifiers and a network entry point for
54 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

Fig. 8 Robust search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions

searching are allowed). The last k blocks are used to comply with the common
prefix property, the next l blocks are used to enforce the purity property of the
chain, and the last k blocks are needed for verification. Because there is at least
one honest node among the nodes (by the CQP, because the length is greater than
l), such a chain is guaranteed to exist. For the obtained blocks, the correctness of
their construction is checked.
3. If the ledger is targeted, then go to the next step. Otherwise, select l nodes in the
middle of the resulting chain, and go to step 1.
4. If the combined search and verification time exceeds the maximum allowable
time in terms of liveness, perform verification using the backup functionality.
5. To verify the l found nodes (which created l blocks deeper than the last k) in the
block chain, a chain of l + 2k blocks is requested.
6. If the l + k first blocks are the same among all the received results, perform
verification by requesting the block containing the outgoing transaction and
the chain of headers from this block to the first among l + k received earlier.
Otherwise, skip l slots and go to step 1.
The algorithm is shown in Fig. 8.
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 55

Using the universal composition framework, the following propositions have

been proven:
1. The robust search and verification protocol makes it possible to correctly verify
an external transaction with a probability close to 1, with the right choice of the
set of polled nodes.
2. The robust search and verification protocol based on the chain quality property
implements the ideal search and verification functionality with the probability
of maintaining the chain quality by the blockchains included in the multidimen-
sional blockchain.
By the definition of a multidimensional blockchain, all ledgers within it are
stable. A ledger is stable if it meets the Chain Growth (CGP), Common Prefix (CPP),
and Chain Purity (CQP) requirements. Consider possible attacks on the protocol by
an attacker.
Event 1: The attacker forms a completely fabricated chain of length l + 2k. This
event can only occur if the purity property of the chain is violated. Therefore, the
probability of this event in the worst case is as follows:
1. p1 = 1 − (1 − e−(κ) ) = e−(κ) for proof of work (this upper bound is less than
other from analogous
 works,
√ 
e.g., [12]). √ 
−Ω l+k +ln R
2. p1 = 1 − 1 − e = e−Ω l+k +ln R for proof-of-stake (by
Theorem 4.13 of [17]).
Event 2: All polled nodes are attackers. This event can only occur if the chain
quality property of the chain is violated. Therefore, the probability of this event in
the worst case is as follows:
1. p2 = 1 − (1 − e−(κ) ) = e−(κ) for proof of work (this upper bound is less than
other from
 analogous
√
works,

e.g.,
 [12]).√ 
−Ω l+k +ln R
2. p2 = 1− 1 − e = e−Ω l+k +ln R or proof of stake (by Theorem
4.13 of [17]).
Event 3: The attacker generates an alternative chain of blocks when requesting
information from block N to block N-l-2k. This event is determined by the
probability of finding the first preimage for the hash sum used in the blockchain.
 l+2k
In the worst case, this probability is equal to p3 = 21κ .
Event 4: Two honest nodes provide different responses to the query. This
situation can only occur if the common prefix property is violated. Because nodes
that created blocks at depth k are used for interaction, the probability of this event is
as follows:
 κ
1. p4 = 1 − 1 − e−Ω = e−Ω(κ) for proof of work (this upper bound is less than
other from analogous works, e.g., [12]).
2. p4 = 1 − (1 − e−(κ) + ln R ) = e−(κ) + ln R for proof of stake.
56 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

Event 5: The attacker does not provide information when requested. This event
causes the fallback protocol to be used and therefore does not compromise system
security. In this case, in the worst case, the probability of an event depends on the
probability of the presence of at least one attacker (in the worst case, 0.5l) and is
therefore not negligible.
Therefore, the probability of violating the information security and robustness
properties of a distributed ledger for proof of work and proof of stake, respectively,
is as follows:
 l+2k
−Ω(κ) 1
PPOW = p1 + p2 + p3 + p4 = 3 × e + ≈ε (13)
2κ

√   l+2k
1
PPOS = p1 + p2 + p3 + p4 = 2 × e−Ω l+k +ln R
+ + e−Ω(κ)+ln R ≈ ε
2κ
(14)

The second proposition is proven with the help of hybrid models:

• HYB0 is the original model; external interactions are carried out using the ideal
functionality to validate external transactions.
• HYB1 is a model in which the nodes themselves provide work with the search
for ledgers for interaction. However, all ledgers still notify the ideal functionality
about external transactions. As a result, each node using the search protocol
can be guaranteed to discover a subset of the initiating ledger nodes, i.e., the
search is performed independently, while verification is still performed using ideal
functionality. Since the search is carried out correctly with a probability close to
1, for an external observer, this model is equivalent to HYB0.
• HYB2 – separation of transaction validation logic. Instead of ideal functionality,
a wrapper is used that executes a set of ideal functionalities within itself, each
of which is passed requests related to only one ledger. External interfaces do not
change, so the model is equivalent to HYB1.
• HYB3 – wrapper elimination. Ledgers interact independently with ideal func-
tionalities. Information about which ideal functionality to request verification
from is requested from the nodes found through the search protocol. The search
and verification protocol searches with the probability of respecting the chain
quality and common prefix properties. According to the previous proposition, this
probability is close to 1.
• HYB4 – requesting information directly from nodes. Similarly to HYB3, informa-
tion is requested from the nodes; however, it is information about the correctness
of the transaction that is requested. The probability of correct verification remains
the same, because honest nodes follow the protocol and correctly verify the
transaction. This model is equivalent to a search and verification protocol for
blocks and transactions.
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 57

6 Theoretical and Experimental Analysis

Multidimensional blockchain has several advantages over conventional systems.

This section covers them. Consider saving memory by a separate node of a computer
network when replacing a one-dimensional blockchain with a multidimensional
analogue. Let the source ledger be divided into NL ledgers. If the transaction
generation period (frequency) or the block size decreases, then the average value
of the amount of information stored by the nodes at any given time is as follows:
 
LV(i) LV × i pi LV
LV = i
= = (15)
NL NL NL 

where NL is the number of registries, and pi is the number of accounts transferred to

the new blockchain. Figure 9 shows comparison of the volume size growth for the
different numbers of ledgers inside the multidimensional blockchain.
Another important feature of any ledger is the number of transactions per second
(TPS). Figure 10 shows an estimate of the TPS. In each unit of time, the number
of blockchains increases by 1. Graphs 1 and 2 reflect the increase in the number of
transactions per unit of time in the system as a whole with a constant increase in the
number of transactions and without growth, respectively. Graphs 3 and 4 reflect the
reduction in the load on each blockchain separately under the same conditions. A
more comprehensive analysis has been presented in [18].
In order to verify the applicability of multidimensional blockchain, an exper-
imental analysis has been conducted. For this, a prototype that implements a
multidimensional blockchain was applied. It implemented a simple token-based
system with accounts associated with key pairs and balances.

Fig. 9 Volume of one node for the different numbers of blockchains

58 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

Fig. 10 TPS in multidimensional blockchain

A series of experiments were conducted to test the properties of a multidi-

mensional blockchain. As part of the first experiment, five independent robust
ledgers were used, each of which was executed by five nodes in different parts
of the world. It is necessary to admit that the system was based on simple
centralized consensus mechanism (beacon service) in order to decrease the influence
of consensus scheme peculiarities on the analysis. Also search and verification
errors have been modeled by a probabilistic approach: a probability of unsuccessful
search and verification has been introduced. The sequence of transactions has been
generated programmatically, and for each ledger, a period of intensive transaction
generation has been introduced.
The purpose of the first experiment was to identify the numerical characteristics
of the system operation. All external transactions have been accepted. The average
results for all ledgers are presented below (Table 1).
Multidimensional Blockchain: Construction and Security Analysis 59

Table 1 Experimental results for external transaction delay (intersystem exchange)

Delay of external Delay of external
Delay of internal transactions transactions
Experiment Delay transactions, sec verification, sec applying, sec
No adversarial Maximum 20.171 140.608 276.836
actions Minimum 0.001 6.325 6.997
Average 6.923 59.904 71.632
Adversarial Maximum 20.009 260.179 339.509
actions Minimum 0.001 6.303 6.82
Average 5.042 65.716 80.989

Table 2 Experimental results for external transaction delay given the transaction rate growth
(scaling)
Average Maximum Average storage
Number of transaction transaction load (number of
ledgers delay, sec delay, sec TX stored) TPS
1 4.97 10.15 313 0.21667
2 36.08 86.94 425.5 0.42083
3 15.57 80.32 350 0.52847
5 11.97 80.25 331 0.92847

Table 3 Experimental results for external transaction delay given the constant transaction rate
(scaling)
Average storage
Average Maximum load (number of
Number of transaction transaction transactions
ledgers delay, sec delay, sec stored) TPS
1 4.31 10.09 310 0.21806
2 36.14 80.38 229 0.21111
3 16.57 79.22 116.67 0.18194
5 12.02 80.09 67.4 0.1875

The second experiment was aimed at analyzing similar parameters under con-
ditions of a targeted attack on the protocol by 10% of attackers (without using a
backup protocol). All the other characteristics were left untouched. The results are
presented in Table 2.
For scaling, an experimental test was also carried out using four models
consisting of one, two, three, and five blockchains, respectively (the total number
of nodes is unchanged). At the same time, a situation was considered in which the
load on each independent blockchain is higher (the flow of transactions increases
in proportion to the increase in the number of ledgers) or remains unchanged
(Table 3).
60 I. Shilov and D. Zakoldaev

Based on the experimental results, the following conclusions can be made:

1. Multidimensional blockchain allows to perform secure intersystem exchange
with acceptable (under certain circumstances) average transaction delay.
2. Multidimensional blockchain allows to increase the system throughput.
3. Multidimensional blockchain allows to decrease requirements for nodes.
4. The split into multidimensional blockchain containing two ledgers leads to the
opposite effect: the size of blockchain volume increases for all nodes thanks to
the two-phase structure of external transactions.

7 Conclusion

This chapter covers the recent advances in the sphere of constructing multidimen-
sional blockchain. The technology is briefly described, and its peculiarities are
highlighted. Several statements on multidimensional blockchain security have been
proven. Some proofs have been presented for the first time. Finally, experimental
analysis of multidimensional blockchain functioning has been presented for the first
time.
In general, multidimensional blockchain allows solving the problem of scaling
robust distributed ledgers and the problem of secure exchange between independent
robust distributed ledgers. The research and its results described in this chapter are of
interest to developers of decentralized and distributed technologies and applications,
as well as researchers involved in the problem of secure intersystem interaction and
questions of building distributed technologies.
As prospects for further development, we can point out the improvement of
the proposed search and verification protocol for blocks and transactions in order
to increase the likelihood of its successful operation in the face of attacks from
malicious network nodes. In addition, it is of interest to introduce zero-knowledge
cryptographic methods into the process of conducting external transactions to ensure
the confidentiality of transactional information. Finally, it is possible to search
for new areas for applying the proposed methods and algorithms and adapt them
accordingly.

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Blockchain Project Workflow Execution
for Trustless Operation

Samuel Ashaolu and Lei Chen

1 Introduction

Blockchain was first introduced by a cryptographer in 1992, which was basically

utilized as the starting foundation for Bitcoin. Since its inception, the advantages
of this technology were not fully maximized and realized until the emergence of
Bitcoin [1]. About this time, Bitcoin was regarded and became the largely used form
of cryptocurrency relative to blockchain, providing enormous advantages alongside
various socioeconomic benefits globally. The blockchain system predominantly
provides an incorruptible distributed digital ledger of transactions to automatically
store a secured record of financial transactions or virtually everything of value
and importance [2]. Traditional contracts have been known over the years to be
executed within a centralized system of operation, thus requiring the involvement
of a trusted third party. The need of a third party in executing such transactions
thereby leads to security, integrity, and reliability issues in traditional contracts. The
blockchain technology was created with the notion of resolving and tackling these
issues regarding traditional system of contract agreement and eventual execution.
Blockchain-based smart contract technology therefore allows untrusted parties to
transact together based on predefined conditions without the involvement of third
party embedded within the smart contract coding sequence [3]. Blockchain is a
distributed ledger that automatically stores all ongoing and previous transactions
on the network and thus makes these transactions available to each individual or
participants on the peer-to-peer network (P2P). Technological advancement brought
about the use of blockchain-based smart contracts for a wide range of applications
and usability. Blockchain possesses a range of applications that provides a workable

S. Ashaolu () · L. Chen

Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 63

K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_4
64 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

platform to build and develop other decentralized applications hosted on the block.
Smart contract is an emerging and yet newer technological concept introduced
by cryptographers and engineers to be hosted on the blockchain. Smart contract
is a computerized transaction protocol that executes a set of predefined terms
and agreements of a contract between untrusted parties on a network [4]. It is
a digital signature mechanism capable of executing the release of digital assets,
financial agreements, and the automated release of crowd fund which is dependent
on the programmed piece of code to all participants involved in this transaction
on the network. Comparing traditional contract and smart contract, it is evident
that smart contract is independent of a third-party system in contract execution,
which would therefore lead to a greater deal of minimal transaction costs [5]. In
a workflow management system, each node on the blockchain network has a local
Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), which is capable of executing smart contract.
Inter-organizational business mechanism could also bring about engagement of
two or more organizational participants in an adversarial relationship that requires
a need to collaboratively execute a given business project [6]. In this case trust
in the required process or project execution could be lacking on the part of the
stakeholders [7]. Blockchain technology is able to provide a trust-based platform
that is distributed for workflow execution and project monitoring in such situations
[8]. A workflow can be described as an organized, systematic, and cyclic process
that consists of a series of sequential steps, for example, interactions, algorithms,
tasks, and operations among two or more organizations or client with the sole aim
and purpose of adding and creating value to the organizations’ overall business
process [9]. The alignment and integration of organizational business workflow
process helps strengthen collaborations. This would improve trust and enable the
usability of newer trends of applications across organizations and provide a more
secure trading mechanism as well as insurance and notary services [5]. These
cogent advantages have, over the years, motivated researchers to dive deeper in
developing a blockchain-based business workflow management system model. A
couple of challenges still need to be addressed in order to fully maximize the
full potential of this technological solution [10]. Blockchain-based smart contract
technology is one of the most critical and crucial forms of technology currently
driving the acceptance and adoption of blockchain across various private and public
sectors globally [4]. The main idea of smart contract was to digitally facilitate an
automated system whereby the terms and conditions of a contract between two
untrusted entities can be executed in a more secured manner and faster execution
time and with contract integrity maintained without dependence of a third-party
institution [11]. The working operation of smart contract being an automatic
verification machine would grossly reduce intermediaries on the network in contract
execution. The matter of trust is based on the code written on the smart contract,
which is immutable and unchangeable unless the agreement is met. In addition,
the solutions and challenges tackled by smart contract make it undisputable and
poised to change, modify, and greatly improve the way business is being executed,
controlled, and managed in the twenty-first century and beyond [4]. A blockchain is
capable of authenticating a series of blocks that contain various business processes
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 65

in a cryptographic manner [8]. This makes it difficult to alter the data in the
previous block on the chain code without being detected [11]. Within the confines
of a distributed blockchain network, participants act independently in order to
validate transactions across the chain network and add new block to the chain
via data mining, thus replicating the chain across each node [12]. Participants on
this chain must agree for validation to transactions on the block, which is referred
to as consensus [7]. In workflow management system for project monitoring and
execution, it is also imperative that participants across the organizations need to
agree on the “state of work,” which largely determines the next set of valid activities
in the workflow process [6]. Therefore, it is expedient to use blockchain transactions
to execute the state of work [11]. This paper thus introduces Blockchain Studio,
which is regarded as a novel role-based workflow management system [6]. In this
paper, we introduce the blockchain-based smart contract structure mechanism in
executing project workflow management system among two or more untrusted
parties toward building trust and harnessing the property of the blockchain in data
security and smart contract in enforcing the project workflow as agreed by both
parties on the network. This paper carefully outlines the applications of smart
contracts in solving and mitigating real-life challenges across board [13]. The
novelty of this paper was to determine and track the speed and time constraint
involved in the usage of smart contract and blockchain as a trustworthy means
in project execution management and optimal data-sharing accuracy via Solidity
programming computation [14]. It also outlines the deployment of the smart contract
on the second-generation and second-target cryptocurrency in the world, namely,
Ethereum, which is most suited in the development of decentralized applications
(Dapps). On the other hand, traditional contracts would always require the need
of a third party for transactional authentication, such as banks, credit loan system,
collaterals, insurance company, etc., which would consistently require the need
of tons and massive paper works involved as well as a lengthy time process in
achieving the desired result and prolonged transaction execution timeline [4]. The
Ethereum platform, which greatly provides the best platform in the creation of
decentralized applications (dApps), has been understudied to support the overall
usage and deployment of smart contract. The remainder of this chapter is structured
as follows. Section 2 expounds and provides in-depth illustration of the concept
of blockchain technology, the working mechanism of smart contract relative to the
facilitation of project workflow execution in a realistic concept [15]. This section
also outlines the applications of blockchain-based smart contract in resolving
organizational trust issues and proffering workflow layered solutions. Section 3
describes the proposed methodology and architecture of our system and other
key concepts. Section 4 describes research results, related work, and a survey
research on a broader range of blockchain and smart contract applications. Section 5
discusses blockchain platforms and blockchain as a service (BaaS) and categorizes
the blockchain programming languages. Section 6 further describes the conclusion,
limitations of our architecture, and future work.
66 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

2 Literature Review

2.1 Blockchain and Workflow Operations

The applications of blockchain technology across various sectors have grown at

an astronomical rate in the last two decades. Most especially in the technological
and financial spaces, blockchain has gained a massive foothold across varying insti-
tutions in executing specialized functions [16]. Large corporations and industries
are at a faster rate embracing the blockchain technology [5]. Blockchain enables the
automation of business workflow process using smart contract, which thus facilitates
the intelligent collaboration between trustless entities without the reliance of a
centralized authority [9]. Ethereum has been the most prominent blockchain tech-
nology to have proposed the design of a decentralized system and a programming
language referred to as Solidity, which facilitates the development of smart contracts
[16]. Each organizational node participating on the blockchain network has a local
EVM with the ability of executing contracts. The blockchain design thus provides
a consensus algorithm that provides a trustworthy infrastructure, which allows
various partners involved in the organization to collaborate, monitor, perform, and
actively audit project workflow transitions [7]. A major challenge of these workflow
systems is that they require the continuous exchange of a large proportion of data,
which has to be managed off-chain when data is being exchanged between the data
producer and consumer alike. This off-chain sharing also requires a high level of
security and optimal control in order to follow the workflow execution mechanism.
As earlier emphasized, blockchain operates as a data storage capable of storing
transactional data, files, etc., whose content is hashed cryptographically represented
in hexadecimal values to avoid data breach or a compromise of its data content,
which carefully explains its immutability property. Blockchain is a distributed
decentralized ledger system [10]. In the blockchain system, the dependency on
intermediary institutions is greatly reduced to its barest minimum. Organizations
such as banks or any financial institution are completely eliminated, and this due
to the fact that transactions are being approved by participants on the network, and
this is referred to as a consensus agreement. In the blockchain, the first block is
called the “genesis block.” Figure 1 shows the blockchain structure and its internal
configuration across each block in the chain [17]. Blockchain generally consists
of four main elements, asset, ledger, business control network, and cryptographic
mechanism, in automatically enforcing the consensus algorithm via participants on
the network doing a range of business together [6]. A business network actually
consists of individuals and personnel within a company whose core responsibility is
to maintain ownership and optimal state of a range of assets [5]. On the other hand,
the distributed ledger system in a business network is completely synchronized by
the participants in the consensus algorithm [16]. Consensus largely creates a form
of compliance among participants in the business process such that each participant
agrees on the pattern of information that is being accepted about a given business
asset. Provenance is very important as it enables parties on the network to effectively
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 67

Fig. 1 Demonstration of a chain in blockchain [6]

account for records in a ledger [17]. The immutability property of the blockchain
ensures that all records of an asset on the workflow cannot be falsified or tempered.
One core advantage in a blockchain application process is the concept of “Shared
Ledger”; this is almost similar to data being shared across Google Document
whereby authors, viewers, and editors have different levels of privileges across
the document in making modifications. In a similar manner, a Shared Blockchain
Ledger is similarly updated each time a transaction occurs on the block through a
P2P application mechanism. In this case, the ledger is thus updated, distributed, and
shared such that there is no centralized control or mechanism controlling the system
[8]. Each participant on the network has a duplicate; it is thus permissioned to allow
different participants to have complete access to the various segments of the ledger
on a timely basis [18]. It is pertinent to note that this is not a duplicated copy of the
ledger but a shared copy of all records on the ledger across the network node [7].
Relevant information are only released across the node to participants on a need-to-
know basis; this also ensures that transactions are effectively authenticated, secure,
and verifiable.

2.2 Salient Features of Blockchain

Some of the most important features that improve the vast reliability and usability
of the blockchain technology stem from its applications in various sectors, such as
in administrative duties, banking, medical field, etc.
1. Decentralized: Blockchain is a decentralized database ledger, and data in this
system is stored in a decentralized manner, which helps solve the challenge of
data security and accessibility [10].
2. Open-Source: Overall, blockchain is generally accessible and therefore partici-
pants on the P2P network can access the distributed public records on the ledger,
and create distinctive applications using blockchain [7].
68 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

3. Immutable: Permanently every record is saved in a blocks, and its unchangeable

records cannot be modified not until a participant on the network takes over 50%
control of the entire system [19].
4. Autonomy: In the blockchain setup and during data and information exchange
on each respective block, the identities of the participants are limited only to the
blockchain address. Thus the information and identities of the participants on the
network globally are kept confidential [12].
5. Auditability: At some point on the network the ledger is evenly distributed to all
participants on the network and each participant thereby has full access to the
transactional data available on the system. The identity of each participants stays
anonymous to the public. And finally, data on each blocked is converted into a
hashing algorithm for security purposes.
6. Anonymity: In the blockchain setup and during data and information exchange on
each respective block. Identity of participants are limited only to the blockchain
address. Thus information and identity of participants on the network globally
are kept secret [12].
7. Security: The security feature of the blockchain is second to none with a better
security. It is almost impossible to shut down the system [3]. Blockchain is
heavily immune to hacking due to its complex hashing algorithm to protect data
content, and it is secured by a group of computers referred to as nodes, which
authenticates the flow of transactions.

2.3 Blockchain Structure

Blockchain, an emerging technology, is regarded as the buildup of blocks in the

connecting structures where each of these blocks serves as a form of data storage
with the ability to store transactional data [10]. The block basically consists of
three things, namely, data, hash, and hash of the previous block as shown in Fig. 2.
Metadata can be arranged in three varieties, which include the previous block, in a
blockchain system. The value of each block is connected to the hash of the previous
block, and this is because the previous block hash is being utilized to frame the
content of the new block. It is expedient to note that for each block N, the output
is fed into the hash value of the next block assigned N-1. Another block on the
chain must be allocated a valid hash, making it part of the network, which is being
executed by miners [8].

2.4 Project Workflow Trustless Operation

There are a number of core advantages of blockchain in project workflow manage-

ment within organizations in providing what is called “Trustless Operation” [9].
In advents of database system failure in managing a project which could result in
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 69

Fig. 2 Structure of a block [7]

system downtime and efficiency of business processes blockchain-based solution

can eliminate that downtime by providing a personal copy of project document data
to participants in the organization via consensus mechanism thus reducing time
delay in the overall project execution. Furthermore, the aforementioned reference
made emphasis on the use of Ethereum-based blockchain in the execution of this
workflow model, which is suitable for the generation and automation of business
workflows. Ethereum blockchains are most suitable in building applications on the
blockchain whereby smart contracts can be deployed on these blocks in creating
pre-defined codes and agreement to guide the given project [10]. Finally, another
new aspect is Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) in business contract operations where
each part of the project is updated on the blockchain ledger using smart contract
providing truthful visibility to the entirety of a project operation [6].

2.5 Smart Contract and Workflow Project Dynamics

Smart contracts are the predefined rules that automate the execution of a transaction.
In workflow project management, the contract for the business process transfer can
be embedded in the transaction database [5]. It is this particular code that propels
the blockchain to either modify, delete, create, or reorganize the state of a workflow
process. A software engineer would think that a transaction quite synonymous to
a stored sequential process call on a database [8]. The smart contract is basically
a piece of code that runs a series of input parameters that are then being stored as
transactions on the blockchain ledger. Smart contracts are mostly programmed in
Solidity but can also be programmed in Go or Java script languages. The world is
in dire need of trust, and this automated blockchain-based smart contract is able
to provide trust in this untrusted digital world [12]. A vast majority of blockchain-
based workflow execution systems deploy the use of smart contracts, which has
earlier been described as a piece of code stored and deployed on the blockchain
and simultaneously executed as part of the blockchain transaction process [20].
70 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

A number of blockchain provides a workable platform for the execution of smart

contracts such as the Solidity language [21], which was originally developed for the
Ethereum blockchain [5]. A project that is executed within the financial ecosystem
requires a specified domain workflow implementation, which is based on Ethereum
and smart contracts that largely support the digital document workflow relative to
the import/export exchange domain [17]. Another important example of domain-
specific blockchain workflow management system is in the real-estate ecosystem,
which also deploys the use of Ethereum and smart contracts [22]. Another domain is
the use of smart contract as choreography monitors in validating workflow messages
in controlling the process of sending and receiving messages as well as sending
messages according to the process model [23].

2.6 Structure of the Smart Contract in Workflow

Smart contracts can be deployed on three main platforms on a blockchain. One of

the most viable and initial platforms is the Bitcoin platform, which is configured to
perform cryptocurrency transactions with little or no computing process involved.
Another platform is called NXT that is also suitable in developing smart contract.
NXT possesses a simplified architecture and is built into the smart contract template.
To this end, NXT will only allow the construction and deployment of smart contracts
together with those default built-in templates into its system; it however permits
various users to customize smart contracts suited to their respective applications
and purposes largely due to the absence of coding in its scripting. In addition,
the Ethereum platform is the utmost focus of this research. Ethereum supports
and makes provision for the development of newer and customized models of the
smart contracts as well as the ease in the development of decentralized applications,
which is made possible by Solidity language. Ethereum is capable of supporting a
wider range of programming functionality [33]. An executable machine or piece of
code that guarantees the execution of a contract between two unknown parties is
smart contract, which is presented in Fig. 3. The Ethereum platform is used in the
development of smart contract. There are still a wide range of technical gaps being
associated with the construction and implementation of the smart contract [11].

2.7 Smart Contracts and Traditional Contracts

Contracts were first developed in ancient Rome. Over the years these approaches or
styles of contract execution have heavily evolved and developed in complexity and
size. Now, they all form the framework and superstructure of modern businesses and
trading all across the globe [9]. From time immemorial, traditional contracts have
been highly utilized in the execution of terms, agreements, or business contracts
of which there has neither been a different approach or perhaps the availability
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 71

Fig. 3 Comparison of smart and traditional contracts [17]

Table 1 Trade-offs between smart and traditional contracts [12]

Traditional contract Smart contract
Intermediaries Loan agencies None
Execution timeline 1–2 days Minutes
Remittance Manual Automatic process
Transparency Unavailable Available
Archiving Difficult Easy
Security Limited Cryptographically secure
Cost Expensive Cheap
Signature Manual Digital signature

of a more reliable, secure, and efficient system in the handling or execution of

such contracts [4]. An emerging technology such has the Ethereum-based smart
contract being deployed on top of a blockchain has been able to remedy most of the
challenges associated with traditional contracts, which is largely in use as shown in
Table 1 [17].

2.8 Smart Contract Applications

Valentina Gatteshu explained in her article and journal the various applications of
Smart Contract, where it can be used and deployed. It is important to note that
smart contracts have several real-life applications ranging from the voting system,
72 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

real estate, law firms, to business outfits. And some of these applications have
even already been deployed in Internet of Things (IoT) and real estate property,
patents, and online businesses across the globe [4]. The application of IoT alongside
blockchain-based smart contracts provides the permission for several nodes on
the network to gain full access to various kinds of properties available online
and digitally. Another useful application of smart contracts is in the protection
of music rights or in the management of music rights [24]. This could become a
possibility by storing the legal ownership rights of a patent or copyright work into
the blockchain. Here, the immutability property of the blockchain does come handy,
such that ownership stored on the blockchain cannot be altered. Smart contract
as an automated system plays a huge role in copyright management, making sure
the legal owner of such original work gets the required reward for the job done
[25]. E-commerce also facilitates online trade between various untrusted parties
whereby the smart contract ensures that the agreement between the buyer and seller
is enforced without an intermediary third-party involvement [4].

2.9 Advantages of Smart Contracts

1. Automated: An automated machine which is self-executing without the need of

any manual input [4]
2. High-Speed: Smart contracts run on a programmable code thus execution speed
is higher than that of traditional contracts [13]
3. Accuracy: Based on predefined conditions, the terms and conditions of a smart
contract are recorded accurately and cannot be modified [5]
4. No Intermediaries: The process is executed without the need of a third party [9]
5. Secure: Transactional data is stored in a blockchain decentralized system where
data is immutable and unchangeable [6]

2.10 Information and Sharing in Inter-organizational

Workflows

From the aforementioned reference topics, the main idea derived from the con-
ceptual framework of each author basically shows how Company A can execute
a project with Company B within a project workflow structure and ensure that the
project is monitored from initiation until completion using blockchain and smart
contract technology [4]. However, different authors used different tools or software
in developing this workflow management system such that organizations can
collaborate in executing various projects and would be enforced by smart contract
[6]. This research relative to IT project management suggests that workflows are
required in guiding organizations in managing transactions and confidential data
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 73

which is a workflow blockchain-based solution via smart contract [3]. Trust has been
a major collaboration in business processes that can take the advantages derived
from introducing smart contract technology into various business processes [2].

2.11 Blockchain-Smart Contract Workflow Solutions

The solution provided by a blockchain-based smart contract is based on permis-

sioned blockchain, which provides data transparency for all records listed on the
ledger for all participants on the node [5]. This mechanism addresses the following
project execution challenges in three major steps:
1. Automates and improves business performance: Business processes are always
executed by workflows. A more efficient workflow, be it physical or digital,
usually results in a higher degree of business performance and thus mitigates
business capital and running costs [26]. This process is actualized by accurately
recording each work project and their corresponding work item as well as their
current state on the blockchain [27].
2. Mitigates company disputes: The application of blockchain comes in handy
here as the issue can be managed by replacing document-based contracts and
transforming them into data based contracts [28]. This is actualized by recording
each contracts on the ledger, as well each noticeable change request, which
includes any form of validation on the blockchain [29].
3. Improves organizational trust: Poor information sharing majorly leads to a lack
of trust amongst organizations or participants on the network. This further
explains the major problems a Blockchain-based Smart Contract aims to tackle
and address towards the execution of project workflow amongst participating
organizations. Blockchain, via a consensus algorithm, allows the sharing of
information to node participants on a need-to-know basis with inbuilt privacy
mechanism. The sharing is thus validated, and information can be shared while
trust is maintained [30]. These aforementioned steps thus benefit the business
partners on the long run across various business functionalities. It hugely
enhances better information flow and exchange through contract control and vis-
ibility of actionable project steps. It also allows the tokenization of the valuables
and improves privacy on the network. Finally, it greatly enhances project process
planning, project forecasting, and project performance monitoring and rating to
enhance collaboration across untrusted entities [22].

2.12 Project Workflow Execution Layers

To effectively ensure the optimal functionality of workflow execution, there is a

cogent need of two main layers: the coordination layer, which properly regulates
74 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

the execution of workflow project and task, and the authorization layer, which
effectively deploys, maintains, and controls the sequence of data sharing.
1. Coordination layer: The execution layer initiates the execution of a task by
passing the project details to the executor, which is the needed information.
From the coordination layer, once a task is initiated, the coordination layer
processes and awaits the result outcome, and based on the results, it continually
processes the workflow execution until it reaches the final state in the block.
Due to lack of trust among participating organizations, it is equally pertinent
to ensure accurate workflow execution [28]. This can be achieved by totally
outsourcing the control and management of the coordination layer to a third
party in totally controlling the workflow execution process. This nonetheless
will come with privacy and security issues [31]. A third-party representative
could compromise the data and take full advantage of the confidential data to
favor another participating organization, which can expose the whole system to
a unique point of failure. A more secure and advanced way of mitigating these
trust issues is the implementation of blockchain technology to manage such a
collaborative process [23]. Because of the consensus algorithm property of the
blockchain, it ensures accurate execution of the smart contract. In light of this,
the workflow is thus encoded by a smart contract and therefore executed and
validated by the blockchain.

2. Authorization layer: The main purpose of the authorization layer is to initiate and
deploy a set of authorization to enable the required access to resources on the
project. For the authorization layer to be effective, the corresponding conditions
have to be satisfied, such as the following: “Temporal authorization, Dynamic
resource allocation and least privilege, and Access control enforcement” [12].
The system enables various users to manage and selectively interact with the
business rules and predefined agreement as established on the smart contract as
the workflows on the ledger. The workflows are usually used as direct inputs to
the chain codes or what is termed smart contract, which is a fundamental working
functionality of the workflow engine, which is thus implemented on Hyperledger
Fabric.

3 Proposed Methodology

An inter-organization business can be modeled in accordance to a workflow, which

is composed of a number of activities dependent on the services provided across
each organization. The model adopted in this paper is the Blockchain Studio Hyper-
ledger Framework, a novel role-based business workflow management system. The
model is then parsed from the Ethereum database platform or back-end, which
is then converted into what is called Solidity-based smart contracts before being
compiled via the remix and truffle IDE platforms. Solidity code is thus generated
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 75

from a smart contract algorithm framework. Each project workflow is being

assigned a unique code identifier which is then deployed across the Hyperledger
blockchain having its terms and agreement enforced by the smart contract [16].
As aforementioned, smart contracts are a set of protocols that are self-executing
and embedded with transactional agreements and terms of a contract between
the participants on the network [32]. The terms of the contract are programmed
on a piece of code, which is then executed on a blockchain-based decentralized
platform, and updates the ledger [10]. These agreements facilitate and ensure the
eventual negotiations and delivery of digital asset, monetary value, valuable goods
and documents as well as items needing a transaction or requiring somewhat
exchanged. A blockchain-distributed system platform provides a consensus system
in which majority of the participants on the network authorize the transaction, and
the identities of the parties are also kept confidential. Figures 4 and 5 thus outline
the step-by-step mechanism in the facilitation of this process [5]. This string of
code is heavily dependent on the principle of IFTTT (If This Then That). This sort
of protocol is the major philosophy embedded in the creation of a smart contract,
especially from the coding perspective. Code and conditions are compiled on the
Ethereum platform via the EVM. It takes the computer ample time to resolve
a cryptographic puzzle, in which this puzzle is being solved using a series of
decryption and hashing algorithm. In this process, a newly created block is then
merged to the blockchain system, which would be a follow-up to the previous block.
Then, a newly created block is thus created and merged to the chain linked to the
hash of the previous block. Finally, a new set of data is stored and further encrypted
via a process called hashing [17].
Regarding Figs. 4 and 5, the Electronic Official Documents Management System
[2] (EODM) embedded on the blockchain network comprises an internal and exter-
nal communication, which consists of three (3) workflows that aid the processing

Fig. 4 Dispatching official document workflow for outgoing documents [17]

76 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

Fig. 5 Dispatching official document workflow for incoming documents [17]

of official projects and documents across the network, which are dispatching,
incoming, and disposition workflows [5]. The processes of these documental
transfer mechanism are recorded on the node as transactions for document audit
trial and tracking [7]. This system is designed with a centralized system to initiate
data processing activities stored in the centralized database on the blockchain. The
protocols guiding the transfer of such documents for validation are approved and
enforced by the smart contract. In the advent of system failure at a particular
time period, the activity cycle would be expanded [17]. Dispatching documents is
regarded as the process of making, verifying, and digitally validating documents
to produce official project and documents for an internal organization [9]. The
overall process of dispatching outgoing and incoming documents is presented in
Figs. 5 and 6. The documents received are the receipts of official documents
from other organizations or partner companies of which validations are checked,
scheduled, and forwarded to the relevant officials or participants for disposition
to the intended user or client [3]. Outgoing and incoming documents or projects
across the blockchain network must first be verified for their validity via a consensus
algorithm by the participating organizations. The document details, such as changes,
auditing, and cancellation, are recorded, and thus the ledger is updated. On the
transactional log, we can ascertain whether the process has followed the regulations
enforced by the smart contract [2]. The blockchain ledger consists of the Conceptor,
Auditor, Verificator and Signator ledger which performs a profiling function, or an
accounting of transactions executed on each block with a timestamp at the execution
of a workflow project across organisations who are participants on the network is
shown in Fig. 5.

4 Results and Discussions

Based on the results obtained from the execution of a blockchain-based project

workflow system for inter-organizational operations, we could deduce that there
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 77

Fig. 6 Workflow of outgoing and incoming documents [17]

exists a comparison between the graphs that shows the distributed blockchain-based
EODM proposed project flow management system which increases the activity time
efficiency in official business processes in advent of system failures as well as
provides the much-needed confidentiality and trust within organizations in project
execution. Thus participants can make transactions on the P2P ledger system and
increase work efficiency by up to 1.5 times faster in transactional speed, as shown
in Fig. 8 [8]. The immutability property of the blockchain provides the platform
for workflow and confidential data to be stored on the block, and the workflow
is executed by the code agreement set among the participating organization on
the network based on a consensus algorithm, as shown in Fig. 7. The blockchain
ledger, which consists of the Conceptor, Auditor, Verificator, and Signator ledger
that performs a profiling or an accounting of transactions executed on each block
with a timestamp at the execution of a workflow project across organizations who
are participants on the network. Ethereum has been regarded as the frequently
used platform for the development and creation of smart contract [10]. This study
is crucial in reducing criminal and theft-based transactions. Figure 8 shows data
transfer per second among organizations for incoming and outgoing data transfer
with a time difference of about 5 h and approximately 6 h per scenario, respectively,
which was better enhanced by the use of smart contract on the blockchain.

4.1 Smart Contracts: Ethereum Platform

In Fig. 9, Nounce is regarded as the counter block that indicates the precise
number of transactions being sent from a given account [6]. This is to ensure that
transactions are processed no more than once for a single account on the network.
78 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

Fig. 7 Solidity code implementation [9]

Fig. 8 Transaction speed time in the project workflow execution

The number of wei owned by an account is referred to as the balance block. Wei is
defined as a denomination of ETH, and there are 1 × 1018 per ETH. CodeHash
is defined as the code of a particular account on the EVM. The EVM code is
automatically executed by the system when the account gets a message call. It is
immutable as compared with other account fields [5]. The code fragments of each
respective accounts on the platform are contained in the state database encrypted
into hashes for easy data collection. This hash value is known as code hash. The
storage root block is also referred to as the storage hash, a 256-bit hash of the main
node. The storage hash thus encodes or encrypts the storage content of the account,
thus making it secure and preventing its data content from being compromised [8].
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 79

Fig. 9 Ethereum-based smart contract [5]

4.2 Concept of Cryptocurrency

In general and across the globe, cryptocurrencies have greatly provided a tech-
nological breakthrough when they emerged from the blockchain technology [17].
Cryptocurrencies are generally referred to as a group of digital currencies. One of
the most common examples of cryptocurrency is the Bitcoin. Many other examples
of cryptocurrencies, such as the Ethereum, have successively emerged as the second-
largest cryptocurrency being used globally [6]. Like smart contracts, Bitcoin also
allows a system of digital payments across unknown participants on a network.
These parties can be involved in the exchange of digital currency on a secured
network without third-party authentication [7]. Ethereum is the second in the
world and best blockchain platform that permits the development of decentralized
distributed applications (dApps) [8]. Ethereum contributed to the development of
smart contracts, which permit the execution of a given contract. Ethereum is a crypto
platform built using the Solidity or viper programming language, which enables the
swift creation of smart contracts and dApps [5].

4.3 Decentralized Applications (DApps)

DApps are apps that have a decentralized nature or behavior. They are usually
free and open-source applications. All their operations and database are crypto-
graphically stored on public blockchains for public accessibility and interaction.
Tokens are usually generated for this application, which is being executed by a
set of algorithms [5]. These tokens are essential in the optimal usage of these
applications, and any contribution to this app receives a token as a contributor to
80 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

its development. Changes on dApps are made by majority votes. These apps portray
a greater tendency to be widely successful in its usage or user-friendliness than even
the most successful apps currently trending today due to their flexibility, durability,
and transparency [8].

5 Survey Research on Blockchain Applications

5.1 Smart Contract and Blockchain in Food Tracing

The overall goal of the blockchain-based smart contract, which runs on top of
the blockchain, is to facilitate, execute, and enforce autonomous verification in
an agreement between untrusted parties under predefined conditions without third-
party involvement [16]. This paper further outlines the working operation of
an Ethereum-based smart contract being deployed on top of a blockchain. The
limitations and technical gaps faced in the development of the smart contract
technology are also examined in this research. The major key issues identified
were security, applications, and performance issues. Metadata can be arranged in
three varieties, which include the previous block. In a blockchain, each block is
acquired from the previous block; this is because the previous block hash is being
utilized to frame the content of the new block. It is expedient to note that for each
block N, the output is fed into the hash of the new block N-1. A valid block on
the chain must be allocated to a valid hash, making it part of the network that is
being executed by miners. One of the main goals of the aforementioned process
is to facilitate a successful transaction between two untrusted parties aimed at
establishing a contract with predefined terms and conditions. The terms of these
contracts developed by a programmer also involves the scripting of this language
using the solidity programming language. This string of code is heavily dependent
on the principle of IFTTT (If This Then That). This sort of protocol is the major
philosophy embedded in the creation of a smart contract, especially from the coding
perspective. Code and conditions are compiled on the Ethereum platform via the
EVM [19].

5.2 Blockchain in Food Traceability: A Systematic Literature

Review

Blockchain technology serves as a major application in improving food quality,

inventory tracking, demand response, traceability, transparency, and product recalls
for subsidization [33]. There has been a growing interest in blockchain food
traceability technology in tracking the quality of food produced for supplier to
the final consumer. Several attempts have been made to secure the data being
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 81

collected across all stages in the distributor chain. The advantages of using the
blockchain in food supply chains were also examined in this study. This study
investigated about 14 primary recent studies that utilized blockchain in tracking
food quality across various points. The 14 blockchain systems studied in this SLR
used four different blockchain platforms, and out of these 14 platforms, 8 made
use of Ethereum blockchain-based traceability systems, which provided numerous
traceability features across each transactional log. The results obtained from the
food information traceability tracking report shows that the investigation of this
study shows 14 primary studies which were published between 2017 and 2020 from
various web sources and digital libraries; 21% of the papers were published in
2017 and 43% in 2020, indicating that the use of blockchain technology in food
traceability is gaining the much-needed attention over time [33].

5.3 Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain

Blockchain technology can considerably improve food quality in the food sector
via food tracking mechanisms, improve transparency in data sharing, mitigate cost,
improve inventory tracking procedures etc. This paper aimed to provide a systematic
literature review in tracking food products from all stages of production, from
processing, supply, and consumption across the supply chain [34]. The goal of this
systematic literature review was to carefully identify and analyze the advantages
of using blockchain across the supply chain. This review executed an investigative
study on 14 primary recent studies published between 2017 and 2020 involving a
pull of web sources and digital libraries. The 14 blockchain system studies in this
SLR used about four different blockchain platforms: 8 out of 14 used the Ethereum
platform for food-tracing mechanism [5]. According to findings, 21% of the papers
were published in 2017 and 43% in 2020, which thus indicates that the use of
blockchain technology in food traceability is gaining the much-needed attention
[22].

5.4 Towards Automated Migration for Blockchain-Based

Decentralized Application

This research aimed to present the underlying structure of the blockchain and smart
contract technologies. It also illustrates the various contemporary and emerging
applications of the different methodologies used in the smart contracts across
various platforms [35]. Smart contracts are a piece of code or machine protocols
dependently stored on top of the blockchain network. This piece of code is
hosted on a database P2P network. As aforementioned, smart contracts are set
of protocols, self-executing, and embedded with the terms and conditions of an
82 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

agreement between the peers on the network. These terms and conditions are written
on a piece of code, which is then executed on a blockchain-based decentralized
platform and updates the ledger. This agreement facilitates the exchange of digital
asset, money, shares, or property needing a transaction [8]. A blockchain-based
decentralized platform provides a democratic system where most of the participants
on the network authorize the transaction and the identity of the parties are also
kept anonymous. This paper highlights the application of the blockchain in various
business sectors like real estate, voting system, E-commerce, and IoT. Results from
this research shows that the response time in transactions per second being made
by the smart contracts against the processing time was seen to be 1.5 times that of
traditional contracts in real-world application [7].

5.5 Ensure Traceability in European Food Supply Chain

by Using a Blockchain System

In order to construct a generic agri-food supply chain traceability system which is

based on blockchain technology, we adopted a model that aims to implement the
farm-to-fork model which is majorly being utilized in the European Union such
that various traceability rules and processes can be integrated and executed as a
holistic system [34]. This system basically allows food- or health-aware consumers
to verify and view product history across the supply chain network from production
to destination via the QR code scan. The blockchain implemented in this study
is the Hyperledger Sawtooth, which provides permission to legitimate participants
on the network. This system employed the Hyperledger Sawtooth platform [16].
This platform was able to generate a traceability application within a generic SC4 .
This application had previously been adapted for the management of defined logic
through UML. Client communication on the network was created by Sawtooth
Validator, REST API, and VN Setting TP in the management of granting permission
to participants released by the Hyperledger. The TP application called Agrichain
TP aided the validation of the business logic across the entire supply chain. QR
code was utilized in viewing product history, and the AES encryption method
was deployed for data security [28]. The results obtained from a food information
traceability tracking report from the UML diagram in this work was able to obtain a
higher software quality in food tracing. All participants and operators on the network
were identified across the supply chain, which therefore increases the degree of
trust among organizations and health-aware consumers with the involvement of
autonomous management of various sequences of activities [27].
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 83

5.6 A Proof-of-Concept of Farmer-to-Consumer Food

Traceability on Blockchain for Local Communities

The outbreak of the global pandemic presses more importance on the quality of
food being produced across the supply-distribution chain from the local farmers to
consumers. Considering these, farmers found the need to rely more on middlemen
in the sale of produce, which has resulted in price manipulation and lack of
communication in providing consumers with reliable food information [36]. This
paper incorporates the use of blockchain-based food traceability system eliminating
the intermediary, thus allowing farmers to sell their produce to health-aware
consumers and able to trace the farming activity of each produce they purchase.
This system is based on a private blockchain platform referred to as Hyperledger
Fabric, which has an embedded feature of a world state database and a transactional
log feature that supports farmers, carriers, and consumers [6]. The farming activities
would be recorded by the farmers, whereby the consumers can view the product
purchase prior to purchase and track the transportation carriers of that product up
until delivery. This is proof-of-concept mechanism on the application of blockchain-
based system in agriculture eliminating the need for intermediaries [28]. Three
participants are present on this network, namely, farmer, carrier, and consumer,
each performing a set of transaction via a web application. The overall results show
a system for the farmers to perform farm and shop management processes, and
consumers can by products, and carriers are basically responsible for transporting
the products embedded in the Hyperledger Fabric framework using the Node.js
application API, which interacts with the system and submits transactional log to
the network [33].

5.7 Blockchain and IoT-Based Food Traceability for Smart

Agriculture

In the last decade, food safety has become a crucial topic worldwide, and tackling
these issues has been a daunting task. This paper proposes to examine and design a
trusted system that is self-organized as well as open and ecological food traceability
system that is based on blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies [37].
This model involves all parties of a smart agricultural ecosystem not trusting each
other. IoT devices were used as a replacement for manual recoding and verifica-
tion of data. Smart contract was deployed in helping law enforcement agencies
process problems quickly. This system employed IoT applications and blockchain
technologies, which provides a large amount of benefit to smart agriculture and
food traceability [19]. An ad hoc approach solution was used, which involved the
use of a traditional ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) legacy system as well
an IoT system allowing the use of smart mobile phones as blockchain node to
access data stored on the block. A virtual Trusted Trade Blockchain Network
84 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

Cloud Platform (TTBNCP) was relatively utilized to establish a trusted and smart
agricultural application system. The results obtained from this system was able to
propose a system that made use of blockchain and IoT technologies in building
a trusted and smart agricultural system. This was the first attempt to make use of
these technologies in food tracing. Results show that the IoT device being used as
a replacement for manual recoding and verification of data across the supply chain
reduced human intervention to the system much effectively [7].

5.8 A Trustworthy Food Resume Traceability System Based

on Blockchain Technology

Ethereum is the most common blockchain platform for developing smart contract.
This study is crucial in reducing criminal and theft-based transactions. Technical
gaps in smart contract implementation vary from codifying, privacy, and security
and performance issues yet to be explored [34]. Ethical gaps in smart contract
implementation vary from codifying, privacy, and security and performance issues
yet to be explored. Transaction per second was seen to be approx. 1.5 times better
while using smart contract than using traditional contracts. The first platform is
the Bitcoin: Bitcoin is a public blockchain platform that is used in crypto-currency
transactions with a limited computing capability [12]. The second platform is NXT:
NXT is another public blockchain platform that includes built-in smart contracts
as a template and allows the creation of smart contracts using those pre-installed
templates. The third platform is the Ethereum: Ethereum (ETH), which is the
focus of this research work, is also a public blockchain platform that can support
upgraded smart contracts using the Solidity programming language. The hashing
algorithm used on a Bitcoin platform is SHA256, and that on an Ethereum platform
is ETHASH. The process of adding a new block to the chain is carried out by miners,
in which a certain amount of cryptocurrency is being added to these miners when
this cryptographic puzzle is being resolved. Thus, the identity of participants on the
network is kept anonymous on the P2P network [31].

5.9 Smart Contract and Blockchain in Food Tracing

There has been a variation of technological trends associated with blockchain

technology and the creation of decentralized applications (Dapps) like smart
contract implemented on top of a blockchain via Ethereum platform which has
facilitated food tracing techniques. The development cycle, security mechanism, and
development support were the core foundational models utilized in the development
of smart contracts. It also addresses the technical pitfalls, elemental components,
and future implementation of this model in smart contract build-up. Ethereum and
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 85

the EVM with the Solidity programming language are the core platforms used
in the development of the smart contract and other Dapps [12]. A systematic
mapping method was used for data extraction and the mapping process in this
research aimed at identifying and gathering previous or past research papers on
the development of smart contract via the blockchain technology on the Ethereum
platform. Systematic mapping involves search process and searching of paper in
building a strong research outcome. An essential pitfall in the development of smart
contract on Ethereum was seen to be security vulnerability threat and exposure.
A step to combat this issue proffered the need for code development designed to
address the vulnerability of contract exposure [33].

5.10 Blockchain Technologies and Their Applications in Data

Science and Cyber Security

Highlighted in this paper are the core essential applications of blockchain technol-
ogy. It provides a basis for which these applications are expedient in the field of
data science and cyber security. It explores and examines the various data science
methods and techniques involved in the transactional process of blockchain [34].
Technical concepts such as blocks, smart contract, Bitcoin cryptographic checksum,
and blocks were extensively discussed relative to the operation of blockchain for
data science and cyber security purposes. Data analytics and data sharing process
are key in blockchain technologies providing security for data life cycle, IoT, and
DDoS attacks [37]. The Hyperledger Fabric blockchain process was utilized in
analyzing the systemic approach of how the blockchain can be used to process Big
Data analytics in analyzing private data. Data security and data privacy were key
elements that transcend all aspects of data science, and this blockchain technique
was used to provide solutions due to the decentralized infrastructure property of the
blockchain. Computed graphs from the blockchain were used to predict Bitcoin
price dynamics through data science and data analytics. It was proven that the
blockchain technology was able to provide maximum security in the entire data
lifecycle process involving data collection and analysis [16].

5.11 Towards Automated Migration for Blockchain-Based

Decentralized Application

This paper utilized a systematic literature mapping (SLM) approach aimed at inves-
tigating the technological advancement and current practices regarding blockchain-
based applications in supply chain management (SCM). These applications were
critically analyzed based on the business industrial sector, utilized blockchain
framework, and prevailing challenges. This research provides a careful outline of the
86 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

various blockchain use case as it relates to supply chain management [12]. A five-
step systematic mapping process was designed based on pre-existing research work
related to a blockchain-based applications of supply chain management. Scopus
electronic database was used to gather quality research papers using the search
query “Blockchain” and “Smart Contract” and “Supply Chain Management.” To
ensure high-quality survey papers, the inclusion and exclusion criteria were utilized
using a series of hypothetical questions. Analysis results show that a vast number
of the blockchain solutions and industrial applications were being developed for
the agricultural and food industry followed by the pharmaceutical and other health
related sectors which are equally important [13]. The solution seemed satisfactory
and reliable when these applications were built on Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric
frameworks [22].

5.12 Rebuilding Food Supply Chain with the Introduction

of Decentralized Credit Mechanism

This paper introduces the concept of credit management system in a bid to further
improve the security architecture of the information traceability tracking software
built on the blockchain [9]. The design of the RFID traceability system is developed

Table 2 Blockchain platforms and BaaS platform – Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) [34]
BaaS platform Use cases BaaS platform Use cases
Azure Supply chain Corda Financial markets, digital
assets, digital identity,
energy, government, etc.
AWS Supply chain, letter of credit, Crypto APIs Gas fee management,
system-of-record, trading and tokenization solutions, crypto
asset transfer, retail wallet, and lending
IBM Banking and financial Nexledger Financial markets, trade
markets, government, financing, audit, and
healthcare, insurance, regulatory compliance,
services, supply chain insurances
Oracle Supply chain, voting, Blockchain Supply chain, notarization for
banking, financial markets, Service BCS crowdfunding, digital assets
and payments
Alibaba Supply chain, digital content BLOCKO Financial security insurance,
ownership, government, supply chain
anti-counterfeiting Service
SAP Supply chain, identity SAP Financial markets,
management manufacturing, healthcare
Kaleido Financial markets, supply Baidu IoT, hazardous chemical
chain, letter of credit, logistics, financial collection
healthcare
Rubix Supply chain
Blockchain Project Workflow Execution for Trustless Operation 87

Table 3 BaaS platforms and programming languages – Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) [34]
BaaS platform Programming language BaaS platform Programming languages
Azure Solidity, Serpent, Go, Java, Baidu Solidity, Serpent, Go, Java
Kotlin, JavaScript
AWS Solidity, Serpent, Go, Java, Google Solidity, Serpent, Go, Java
Kotlin
IBM Go, Java, Node.js, Chainstack Go, Java
JavaScript, TypeScript
Oracle Go, Java, TypeScript Corda Kotlin, Java
Mission Solidity, Serpent, Kotlin Kaleido Solidity, Serpent, Kotlin
Critical
SAP Go, Java Rubix Solidity, Serpent

to solve problems related to data tampering and data security, especially in the
agricultural sector for food tracking mechanisms. Based on blockchain, a new
decentralized credit system would be implemented for enhanced security and
reduction in time and cost, thereby providing a means of authentication during
the tracking of food across various middlemen [13]. The Credit Management
System Model on a blockchain is broadly divided into four layers for complete
implementation; “traceability entity layer, Internet of Things (IoT) layer, blockchain
and the credit entity layers”. The traceability entity layer serves as the main
core layer for the food supply chain structure while the IoT layer collects data
on the supply chain feeding this data to the blockchain layer. The blockchain
layer records transactions and credit data on the ledger via consensus algorithm
to execute the credit management system [34]. From a theoretical and practical
perspective, the results obtained from a food information traceability tracking report
with the introduction of the credit management system show that the members of
the blockchain (Tables 2 and 3).

6 Conclusion

Blockchain differs in its architecture from other traditional centralized databases in

that blockchain possesses salient properties and unique characteristics, making it the
most recent and upgraded version of traditional centralized databases. Blockchain is
a decentralized distributed database in that it is able store data, that is, transactional
data on its database [9]. These data are non-tamperable, immutable, and traceable,
which is jointly managed and maintained by multiple parties or members via a
consensus algorithm on the network [19]. Each participant on the network must
agree upon a consensus on an updated data ledger based on pre-defined rules
enforced by the smart contract being deployed on the blockchain network. Based
on the results that described the implementation of a blockchain based-project
workflow for trustless operation, this paper has been able to illustrate a mechanism
of project execution and workflow agreement among participating organizations
88 S. Ashaolu and L. Chen

in executing “Trustless Operation” on the blockchain, which avoids data falsi-

fication or tampering and preserves the integrity of workflow project execution
among untrusted party [9]. The final results show that the proposed blockchain-
based system is more profitable than the previous system. Overall, the system
shows an increasing activity time efficiency for various business processes [17].
Technical gaps were found in the design and technical buildup of the smart contract
requiring attention for future studies. Technical gaps range from codifying, security,
privacy, and performance [7]. Ethereum-based smart contracts was discovered to
have technical issues ranging with scalability, runtime, power consumption from
mining exercise. In addition, future work should examine the transition of an
Ethereum-based smart contract from [7] “Proof-of-Work to Proof-of Stake,” thus
enhancing processing time in the addition of blocks to the chain and reducing power
consumption in its overall computing [8].

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 Part II
Blockchains in Internet of Things and
Mobile Phones
Protecting Location Privacy
in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet
of Things

Abdur R. Shahid, Niki Pissinou, and Sajedul Talukder

1 Introduction

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is a network of interconnected computing devices

that use unique identifiers (UIDs) to facilitate communication between devices and
the cloud, as well as among themselves. Thanks to low-cost computers, the cloud,
big data, analytics, and mobile technologies, IoT has emerged as one of the most
important technologies of the twenty-first century in recent years. A variation of IoT
is the mobility-centric IoT, which unifies the sensing ability with the mobility of the
devices. The core component of such mobility-centric IoT systems is the location
information of the IoT devices: users share their location information through
their devices with a system to get a variety of location-based services (LBSs).
Formally, location-based services are “services accessible with mobile devices
through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the location
of the terminals.” The location information of the users, for example, has made
location-based recommendation systems a standard part of our daily life. Real-time
navigation systems, intelligent vehicle systems, crowdsensing, indoor navigation for
blind people, and health monitoring are just a very few examples of location-based
services which are benefited from the mobility aspect of IoT. From an economic
perspective, mobility-centric IoT has a tremendous impact on the overall GDP. As

A. R. Shahid ()
Robert Morris University, Moon Twp, PA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
N. Pissinou
Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Talukder
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 93

K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_5
94 A. R. Shahid et al.

IoT devices create, analyze, and share massive volumes of security-critical and
privacy-sensitive data, they are potential targets for a variety of attacks, including
location privacy attacks. Moving objects, geographical coordinates, present time,
and distinctive properties distinguish location data from other data, which is discrete
and valuable. Location privacy is an essential aspect of the Internet of Things privacy
protection. It mainly relates to the location privacy of each node in the Internet of
Things, as well as the location privacy of the Internet of Things in providing various
location services, such as RFID reader location privacy, RFID user location privacy,
sensor Node location privacy, and location-based privacy issues based on location
services [1].
As of this writing, the mobility-centric Internet of Things (IoT) systems utilize
a centralized model to handle the vast amount of data generated by IoT devices
(e.g., smart vehicles in the Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) [2], smartphones
in ad hoc networking-based mobile crowdsensing [3]). Such models are weak in
ensuring security and trust and are not capable of handling the fast-paced growth
of IoT. Thus, distributed systems are considered to address the problems of IoT
systems. Recently, blockchain, a unique distributed technique, has gained tremen-
dous attention from the IoT community [4–8]. A blockchain is a distributed ledger
that uses cryptographic protocols to allow peer-to-peer data transfer and storage
[9, 10]. It provides built-in integrity of information and security of immutability
by design, making it very useful for ensuring trust, security, and transparency in
P2P trustless networks. There are two basic types of blockchain architectures based
on the permissions of the users to read/write on the ledger: permissionless and
permissioned. Permissionless blockchains are generally public blockchains where
anyone may read, write, and participate in consensus. Permissionless blockchains
have a high level of decentralization since they can accommodate more users and
span a much broader network. Permissionless blockchains are often open source,
meaning that they are developed by a community and may be modified and used by
anybody. Because the users must maintain some kind of anonymity, permissionless
blockchains are far more transparent. Transactions are encrypted using different
cryptographic methods, and wallet addresses cannot typically be linked back to
blockchain users. A permissionless blockchain eliminates the necessity for two
nodes or participants to verify each other’s validity. As a result, permissionless
blockchains are more secure in general, as the risk of bad actors in the network
colluding is decreased. Permissionless blockchains, on the other hand, suffer from
several problems, including privacy concerns, lower TPS, scalability issues, and
high energy consumption, owing to transaction verification and proof of work.
Similar to many other fields, permissioned blockchain is also being studied
in the IoT of mobile devices. For better understanding, we draw the motivation
of a permissioned blockchain from CreditCoin, a privacy-preserving blockchain
framework for the Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) [11]. In this framework, the
vehicles are required to be registered with the authority. This authority is responsible
for generating and providing the vehicles with cryptographic keys and keeping
track of the relationship between the vehicles and the provided keys. A set of
trace managers at different locations also aids the authority in tracking malicious
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 95

vehicles/users. In this framework, only road-side units (RSUs), and authorized

vehicles are responsible for managing the blockchain. This framework is built
around the short-range communication technology-based P2P network of vehicles.
Here, the vehicles make transactions with their peers such that each transaction is
signed by each of the peer vehicles by their public keys. As these transactions are
made through a short-range communication technology (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth),
they can be treated as a proof of location (PoL) for the vehicles’ whereabouts in
the spatiotemporal domain. In some frameworks, such as the one proposed in [12],
the proof of location is explicitly defined in the design. Based on the transaction
information, the vehicles generate a rating about each other and forward them to the
nearest RSU. The RSUs then compute the overall rating of each vehicle and append
the new rating into the blockchain. Similar motivation can also be drawn from the
work presented in [13]. Obviously, these frameworks can be integrated into many
other mobility-centric IoT scenarios, such as mobile crowdsensing.
Mobile IoT devices create, analyze, and share massive volumes of location-
centric privacy-sensitive data, they are potential targets for a variety of attacks,
including location privacy attacks. Geographical coordinates, present time, and
distinctive properties distinguish location data from other data, which is discrete
and valuable. Location privacy is an essential aspect of the IoT privacy protection
[1, 14–16]. In a centralized architecture of IoT, all the location-based data are stored
on the cloud. In a blockchain system, the transactions carry the location informa-
tion. In both permissionless and permissioned blockchains, these location-based
transactions can be analyzed to infer location-centric privacy-sensitive information.
However, in a permissionless blockchain, a mobile IoT node can change its key pairs
frequently and hence protect its location privacy. On the contrary, on a permissioned
blockchain, IoT devices do not enjoy such privilege, as the key distribution is
handled by a blockchain authority. The objectives of our work are as follows:

– Provide a formal definition of the location privacy-invading problem in the

context of permissioned blockchain.
– Present a solution to protect location privacy in permissioned blockchain.

Against this backdrop, in this chapter, we study the location privacy issue in the
context of permissioned blockchain, where:
– The authority of the blockchain holds the public and privacy key distribution task
in the system.
– A transaction can be considered as a proof of location (PoL) for a user’s temporal
whereabouts.
– There is a spatiotemporal correlation between the locations.
We make the following key contributions:
1. We first discuss the limitations of existing location privacy-preserving mecha-
nisms under a PoL in the context of permissioned blockchain.
2. We present an effective solution, called BlockPriv. As discussed above, in
BlockPriv, the worst form of privacy leakage is considered. That is, whenever
96 A. R. Shahid et al.

Table 1 Notations and their Notation Description

description
MU Mobile user or mobile node
Nx Privacy parameter for a location lx
P (lh ) Privacy level achieved for location lh
t (l)
P rMU MU ’s probability of being at location l at time t
ls A sensitive location
S Set of all sensitive locations of a MU
U (l) Loss of utility for location l
Tr A trajectory
n Total number of sensitive locations in a Tr
δt Time difference
La Set of all locations reachable to/from location la
Φ(a, b) Required time to reach from location la to lb
|X| Size/number of elements in a set X
α % of location types selected as sensitive
r Privacy region radius

an IoT node makes a transaction with its peers, its location information is known
to the malicious blockchain authority, and the authority is completely capable
of mapping the real identity of a node with its public key pairs. Taking a node’s
privacy preference for different locations and spatiotemporal correlation between
the transactions, BlockPriv decides whether or not a node should make a
transaction, such that its undisclosed sensitive location’s privacy is also preserved
with a set of locations.
3. We quantify the trade-off between privacy and utility theoretically and empiri-
cally using two factual datasets.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. Related works are discussed in
Sect. 2. The overview of the system and its design goals are presented in Sect. 3.
Then, the proposed BlockPriv approach is detailed in Sect. 4. Important security,
privacy, and utility aspects of BlockPriv are analyzed in Sect. 5. A discussion of
the experimental analysis is covered by Sect. 6. Finally, the chapter is concluded in
Sect. 7. Important notations used in the chapter are presented in Table 1.

2 Related Work

Location privacy preservation is a comparatively well-studied problem in central-

ized architecture-centric IoT systems. Several classes of mechanisms have been
proposed to mitigate the privacy leakage, such as:
1. Pseudonym
2. Location perturbations
3. Spatial obfuscation
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 97

The goal of these mechanisms is to apply them to a node’s actual location before
releasing it to the central authority. For instance, in the case of a pseudonym,
before revealing the location, the mechanism changes the ID of a node to make
it untraceable [17]. These approaches depend on a trusted third party (TTP) to
carry out the steps of changing pseudonyms. This is similar to the mixing approach
[18] used in blockchain to improve privacy by exchanging the public key of a
mobile node with a random public key such that the probability of linking multiple
transactions is reduced. However, in a permissioned version of the blockchain, such
an approach will not work.
Perturbation mechanisms, such as differential privacy-based geo-
indistinguishability [19], add statistical noise to a node’s real location before it
is shared with the system. Obviously, under a PoL, such mechanisms have limited
impact [20]. On the other hand, spatial obfuscation reduces the precision of the
actual location information before releasing it to the authority of the system. This
is done by either infusing more locations [21] or replacing the actual location with
a realistic larger region [22]. Similar to location perturbation, location obfuscation
works only at a limited scale under the PoL. In a nutshell, the existing privacy-
preserving mechanisms, designed for centralized IoT systems, cannot be applied in
a plug-and-play way to the problem that we are trying to solve here.
In the scope of blockchain, the frequent change of public keys is the most
explored solution to preserve privacy [9, 23–25]. It was first proposed by Nakamoto
[9], the creator of Bitcoin. Motivated by Bitcoin’s solution, Dorri et al. [24] also
suggested using a fresh unique public key to prevent linkage attacks while commu-
nicating with other nodes in their proposed Lightweight Scalable Blockchain (LSB)
architecture for smart vehicle ecosystems. In blockchain-based centralized proof-of-
location (PoL) generation, Brambilla et al. [26] also proposed changing the public
keys frequently to preserve a node’s sensitive location privacy while generating
proof of locations. Michelin et al. [20] proposed a privacy-preserving blockchain-
based SpeedyChain framework for a vehicular network scenario. Similar to most of
the other works in this context, SpeedyChain considers the fixed positioned road-
side infrastructure units (RSUs) as the key to maintaining the blockchain. Unlike
Bitcoin or Ethereum-like blockchains, here, for each vehicle, there exists exactly
one block in the blockchain. In order to maintain privacy, this framework proposes
the timely change of the public key of each vehicle. However, these frameworks do
not fit completely into the scenario considered in this chapter, where the authority of
the blockchain controls the private and public key distributions to the mobile nodes
in the system.
The idea of a permissioned blockchain primarily stemmed from the evidence
of misuse of freedom in public blockchains for illegal activities. For instance,
almost half of the bitcoin transactions are estimated to be related to illegal drug
sales, ransomware, and other malicious activities [27]. Hence, the deanonymization
of blockchain users has gained significant attention from both law enforcement
and the security and privacy communities. In fact, it is found that changing the
public keys in order to nullify a linking attack in a public blockchain is not
quite as bulletproof as it was expected [28, 29]. Research efforts show that it is
98 A. R. Shahid et al.

possible to map the public keys of Bitcoin users to their unique identities (e.g., IP
addresses) [28, 29]. For instance, Koshy et al. [28] were able to deanonymize 1162
addresses by analyzing transaction relaying patterns. Biryukov et al. [29] proposed
a deanonymizing algorithm by exploiting only the input and output transactions of
mixing services and identified a relationship between the input and output addresses
at very high accuracy. Recently, Roulin et al. [30] applied decision tree algorithms
on smart home devices’ data (e.g., smart things, nest smoke alarm) by utilizing off-
chain information to classify IoT devices for understanding a user’s activity pattern.
While the work is done in the context of a smart home, it can be adapted for the
mobility of IoT devices. All these deanonymization works highlight that simply
changing the public keys frequently is not the ultimate solution to providing privacy
in the blockchain, even in a public version.
Moving forward, our work is focused on an authority-based permissioned
blockchain where privacy is tougher to achieve by default. It is closely related to
the work proposed by Li et al. [11] in the context of a vehicular network. Using
their proposed framework, it is possible to achieve only conditional privacy, as the
trace manager can track anyone at any time, if necessary. Similarly, Yang et al.
[13] presented a blockchain-based decentralized trust management framework for
vehicles where each vehicle is registered with the system using its VIN number.
Thus, only conditional privacy can be attained with this framework. Likewise,
Sharma et al. [31] proposed a permissioned blockchain by incorporating traceability
features while maintaining privacy on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). However,
they used a server for vehicle registration, which would store all vehicle IDs in
an encrypted scheme; the central authority can track any vehicle when needed.
To achieve complete location privacy, Yang et al. [32] proposed an obfuscation
approach to protect location privacy in a private blockchain for crowdsensing
applications. In this work, a worker submits an obfuscated region to the system to
protect their exact location’s privacy. However, in the case of P2P communication
of the nodes, this type of approach cannot be applied without the collaboration
of the nodes. Jia et al. [33] designed a blockchain-based incentive mechanism for
crowdsensing applications with a focus on preserving the location privacy of the
users. In their framework, a confusion layer was proposed, in which a user’s location
is encoded in such a way that it can be confused with other k − 1 users’ locations.
While this could be a solution to protect location privacy, it requires the honest
collaboration of other users.
In contrast to all these works, we intend to design a location privacy-preserving
obfuscation mechanism that does not require collaboration from other users and can
provide complete privacy in permissioned blockchain under the presence of PoL.
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 99

3 System Overview and Design Goals

In this section, we present the details of the system model and the behavior and
attack strategies of the malicious entities in the system. We then formulate the
central problem of this chapter and state the goals we set out to achieve in the design
of its solution.

3.1 Blockchain System Model

We consider a permissioned blockchain, where its authority also acts as the

certificate authority to provide the public and private key pairs to the mobile nodes.
The mobile nodes are registered with the system and communicate with each
other using the preassigned key pairs. Communication between the nodes takes
place using a short-rage communication technology. The nodes can request the
authority for new key pairs at any point of time. The blockchain is managed by
preassigned mobile edge computing devices (e.g., RSU, Wi-Fi access points, and
so on), distributed over a large region. These devices constitute the blockchain
nodes and are connected with each other in a P2P network over the Internet. The
transactions among the IoT nodes are broadcasted to the blockchain nodes in the
blockchain network. The blockchain nodes aggregate and insert the new transactions
into the blockchain through a consensus mechanism (e.g., practical byzantine fault
tolerance, proof of stake) in a timely fashion (e.g., every 30 minutes). We consider
a blockchain architecture similar to the one presented in CreditCoin [11] without
considering the rewarding phase. We assume that the mobile nodes have Internet
capability to compute the time to reach one location from another with the help
of a traffic information provider in real time, e.g., Google Maps. We also assume
that the information between the traffic information service provider and a node is
anonymous and the provider is independent from the blockchain authority.

3.2 Malicious Entities

In the system, we consider the authority of the blockchain as the malicious entity.
It follows the honest-but-curious adversary model in the system. That is, it tries to
predict a target node’s sensitive spatiotemporal information without violating any
protocol of the system or dismantling the way blockchain works. Furthermore, it
is not going to hack into the device of a target node. We also consider that, in
order to compute the time reachability information, the authority also uses a traffic
information service provider. From this point on, we refer to the authority as an
attacker. It is important to note that some of the mobile nodes can be malicious.
However, as we mentioned earlier in the system model, the mobile nodes can change
their public keys at any point of time; the malicious mobile nodes cannot track a
100 A. R. Shahid et al.

target node from their transactions without colluding with the authority. This is a
fundamental privacy feature of blockchains. Thus, we focus on the attack strategies
of the blockchain authority.

3.3 Attacker’s Goal and Strategies

The goal of an attacker is to understand a mobile node’s presence at different

locations in the temporal domain. In order to do so, it utilizes the time reachability-
based spatiotemporal correlation between a node’s disclosed locations in the
blockchain as its fundamental strategy. Let the random variable OMU t represent the
actual location of a mobile node MU at time t. Given a node’s locations li , lj at
time ta , tb , respectively, the node’s probability of being at a location lh at a discrete
time tq (ta < tq < tb ) is

q q
P rMU (lh ) = Pr(OMU = lh |OMU
a
= li , OMU
b
= lj ) (1)
q
The attacker computes P rMU (lh ) using the time reachability correlation as follows:
⎧
⎪
⎪
⎨1 If lh is reachable to and from li
q
P rMU (lh ) = and lj in (tb − ta ) time (2)
⎪
⎪
⎩0 Otherwise

q
Obviously, it is possible to have multiple locations with P rMU (lh ) = 1. Thus, the
ultimate goal of the attacker is to minimize the number of such locations, that is,
 
q
minimize P rMU (lh ) (3)

We also analyze the impact of transaction dropping attacks on location privacy.

Note that the scope of this chapter encompasses the analysis of location privacy-
invading attacks from a user’s point of view, and thus different blockchain-related
attacks, such as DDoS, Sybil, 51% attack, and eclipse attack, are not covered here
(Fig. 1).
This forms the core of an attacker’s strategy. Based on this, we consider mainly
the following attacks that can be exploited by the attacker to infer a target node’s
location information:
– Collusion with Malicious Mobile Nodes: Malicious nodes collude with the
attacker and provide it with the location information of a target node for profit.
– Map Matching Attack: The attacker employs the map information to understand
spatially reachable and unreachable location information. A spatially unreachable
location refers to a location that cannot be reached at any time using a map service
∞ (l) = 0.
(e.g., the middle of a lake). Thus, P rMU
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 101

Fig. 1 System model of permissioned blockchain where BC and BA refer to blockchain and
blockchain authority, respectively. The BA also acts as certificate authority and trace manager.
The mobile IoT nodes are connected with each other in a P2P network using a short-range
communication technology. They make transactions with each other and send information on the
transactions (e.g., rating about other mobile nodes at a specific location and time) to the nearest
blockchain node. Here, each grid refers to a specific location

– Time Reachability based Path Reconstruction Attack: In order to reconstruct

the actual path between two revealed locations, the attacker can use the time
reachability information to construct the valid paths that can be traveled between
the two locations within a time limit.

3.4 Problem Formulation and Design Goals

It is clear that there is an important trade-off between location privacy and utilization
of the system. The problem lies with the short-range communication technology-
based transactions between the mobile nodes that form proof of locations (PoLs)
for the nodes. Thus, in order to protect a sensitive location’s privacy, a mobile node
must remain silent in the network; that is, it must not make any transaction in the
102 A. R. Shahid et al.

network. This leads to the question of how long in both spatial and temporal domains
a node must remain silent to protect a sensitive location’s privacy. Remaining silent
infinitely results in location privacy of 100%, but a system utilization of 0%. In other
words, an indefinite silence will incur a 100% loss of utility. Hence, the goal of this
work is to formulate, design, implement, and evaluate a location privacy-preserving
mechanism, called BlockPriv, for mobile nodes in the context of permissioned
blockchain by solving the following problem:

minimize {P −1 (l s ), U (l s )} (4)

Here, P(l s ) and U (l s ) refer to the achieved privacy for sensitive location l s and the
loss of utility due to privacy preservation for l s , respectively.
To summarize, in the design of the BlockPriv mechanism, we intend to achieve
the following goals:
• Achieve privacy without collaborating with any other entity in the system.
• Achieve a quantifiable balance between privacy and utility.

4 The BlockPriv Approach

For the sake of clarity and to maintain coherence with the blockchain concept, we
first discuss the public key changing technique adapted in BlockPriv. In our scheme,
we adapt the temporal public key changing concept proposed by Michelin et al. [20].
Here, at a fixed time interval t key , a mobile node will change its public key in order to
nullify the possibility of a spatiotemporal linkage attack from malicious nodes. Note
that, in our problem, public key changing can only provide privacy to a mobile node
against its peers, not against the authority that distributes the keys. Also, this scheme
is vulnerable to colluding attacks between the authority and malicious mobile nodes,
which is one of the focuses of our work.
At this point, we present the formal definition of location privacy and utility from
the perspective of a mobile node. The definition of privacy can be derived from the
formulation of the attacker’s objective, defined by Eq. 3, as follows:
 
q
P(l s ) = maximize P rMU (lh ) (5)

Let us consider a node’s last revealed location in the blockchain is li at time ta , and
it was at a sensitive location lhs at time tq . It should reveal its location, also known
as making a transaction, at an insensitive location lj at time tb (ta < tq < tb ) if and
only if
 
q
P(lhs ) = P rMU (lhs ) ≥ Nh (6)
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 103

To explain, a node should reveal its location lj at time tb in the network to the
authority when there exist at least Nq number of locations, including lhs , which are
both reachable from and to li and lj in (δt = tb − ta ) time. Here, Nh is a user-
defined privacy parameter for location lhs . This formulation is applicable only for a
single sensitive location. It is also possible that, after lhs , the node was also at another
sensitive location lps at time tr (ta < tq < tr < tb ) such that, after δt = tb − ta time,

P(lhs ) ≥ Nh , but P(lps ) < Np . In such a case, the node should not make any
transaction at location lj at time tb . Formally, if there are m number of sensitive
locations visited by a node between time ta and tb , then it will make a transaction
with its peers at an insensitive location at time tb in the network if and only if
 
qi
P(lis ) = P rMU (lis ) ≥ Ni ; ∀i = 1, . . . , m (7)

Note that, from ta to tb , the node was continuously silent in the network. We call it
single or 1 round silence to maintain privacy of the m number of sensitive locations.
If a trajectory Tr contains n number of sensitive locations, then the average privacy
of each sensitive location in that trajectory is defined as

1
P(Tr ) = P(lis ), i = 1, . . . , n (8)
n
i

From the formulation of privacy, we can also define the loss of utility due to the
application of privacy preservation. Let us consider, at ith round silence, the node
opted not to make any transaction at P(lhs ) number of locations. In our definitions,
this number is the loss of utility of BlockPriv. If a node maintained k rounds of
silence to preserve privacy of a trajectory Tr with n number of sensitive locations,
then the average loss of utility for each sensitive location is

i=k
1
U (Tr ) = Ui (9)
n
i=1

This allows us to reconstruct the multi-objective optimization problem, presented in

Eq. 4, as a single-objective optimization problem as follows:

minimize U (Tr )
s.t. P(lis ) ≥ Ni ; ∀lis ∈ Tr (10)

Now, we present in detail the mechanism of BlockPriv to solve this problem

(Fig. 2).
In this mechanism, the mobile nodes are responsible for labeling their sensitive
locations and assigning level of privacy to each of them. The nodes utilize radius r
to specify the level of privacy for a sensitive location as N = π r 2 . Let us consider a
node MU made a transaction in the network at time ta at location li . Then, it moved
104 A. R. Shahid et al.

Fig. 2 Illustrated BlockPriv: The curve refer to a mobile node (MU )’s actual path between l0 , l1 ,
and l2 locations at times t0 , t1 , and t2 , respectively. The location l1 is privacy-sensitive for the
MU . Thus, it remained silent at location l1 . It will make a blockchain transaction at l2 at time t2
only when the number of locations reachable from both l0 and l2 in t2 − t0 time meets the privacy
requirement for l1

to a privacy-sensitive location lhs at time tq and did not make any transactions. Then,
after every Δt time at location lj , different from both li and lhs , it checks the number
of locations that are reachable to and from li and lj . Let current time and location be
tb and lj , respectively. The node first computes the set of all the locations Li that are
reachable from li in δt = tb − ta time. Next, it computes the set of all the locations
Lj from which location lj is reachable. Then, L = Li ∩ Lj forms the set of all
locations from which both li and lj are reachable in δt time. In other words, each of
the location in L creates a valid 1-hop route from li to lj in δt time. That is, based on
the time reachability information, the node can move from li to any location ll ∈ L
and then move to lj in δt time. Thus,

L = {∀l|(Φ(li , l) + Φ(l, lj )) ≤ δt} (11)

Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 105

Here, Φ(a, b) refers to the time to get from location a to b. The size of L defines the
privacy level achieved for sensitive location lhs in δt time. That is, P(lhs ) = |L|. The
node will make a transaction at time tj at location tb only when |L| ≥ Nh . If there
is a total m number of sensitive locations visited by the node in δt time, according
to Eq. 7, it will make a transaction at time tj and location lb if and only if

|L| ≥ Ni ; ∀i = 1, . . . , m (12)

It is understandable that in the case when all the sensitive locations have the same
level of privacy, comparing L with the level of privacy of the latest sensitive location
is enough to check whether the condition in Eq. 7 is valid. However, for sensitive
locations with different levels of privacy, the MU is required to check whether
all the previous sensitive locations’ levels of privacy are met before making any
transaction.
For a single sensitive location l s , the maximum loss of utility Umax (l s ) is bounded
by the value of its privacy parameter N . The higher the value of N , the higher the
Umax (l s ). More specifically, Umax (l s ) ≤ L. Certainly, from Eq. 10, we do not want
any “extra” loss in utility of the blockchain. Let ta be the last time a node’s location
was revealed in the blockchain. After that, at every Δt (Δt ∈ Z≥0 ) time, it computes
L and checks whether it meets the privacy requirement of a set of sensitive locations.
That is, after checking L at time (ta + x × Δt), it will check L at time (ta + (x +
1) × Δt). Here, x ∈ Z≥0 . Let t  , where (ta + x × Δt) < t  < (ta + (x + 1) × Δt), be
the time when L  N . Then, computing L at (ta + (x + 1) × Δt) time will certainly
impose some extra loss of utilities. Thus, Umax (l s ) ≤ N + U  . Here, U  refers to
the set of insensitive locations at which the MU opted not to make any transaction
between time t  and (ta + (x + 1) × Δt). With the higher value of Δt, the value of U 
will be higher. Thus, Δt should remain as small as possible. However, for resource-
constrained mobile nodes, a small Δt means the very frequent computation of the
time reachability, which affects the energy of the device. Thus, the compromise
between the capability of the device and loss of utility is an issue that needs to be
examined: we leave it for our future work. The detail of BlockPriv is presented in
Algorithm 1.

5 Scheme Analysis

In this section, we present an analysis of the important privacy, utility, and security
aspects of BlockPriv.
106 A. R. Shahid et al.

Algorithm 1: BlockPriv
Input: Current location lcur , current time tcur , last revealed location in the blockchain lprev
and time tprev , list of sensitive locations S, list of level of privacy for the sensitive
key
locations N , previous time of key change tprev , key expiration time t key
Output: Decision on making transactions.
key
1 if (tcur − tprev ) ≥ t key then
2 Request new key pair from the authority.
key
3 tprev = tcur
4 if lcur is a sensitive location then
5 Append lcur to S and do not make any transaction.
6 else
7 δt ← tcur − tprev
8 Lprev ← select all the locations that are reachable from lprev in δt time
9 Lcur ← select all the locations from which lcur is reachable in δt time
10 L ← Lprev ∩ Lcur
11 for (i = 1; i ≤ |S|; i + +) do
12 if |L| ≥ N (lis ∈ S) then
13 Delete lis from S

14 if S = ∅ then
15 Do not make any transactions in the network.
16 else
17 Free to make transactions.

5.1 Privacy Analysis

5.1.1 Privacy Bound

Lemma 1 If there are multiple numbers of sensitive locations between two revealed
insensitive locations, then each of the sensitive locations achieves a privacy level of
(max N ).
Proof Let us suppose that a mobile node MU has visited m number of sensitive
locations between lprev and lcur in δt = (tcur − tprev ) time. According to Eq. 12, it
will make a transaction at location lcur and time tcur only when all of the sensitive
locations’ privacy requirements are met. That is, a new transaction will take place
only when the length of the set L ≥ (max N = max{N1 , . . . , Nm }). Thus, even if a
sensitive location’s privacy requirement is much lower than (max N ), the achieved
privacy for ith sensitive location lis in the set is P(lis ) = |L| ≥ (max N ).

5.1.2 Obfuscating Paths

Lemma 2 If there are any sensitive locations between two revealed insensitive
locations li and lj , then, at a minimum, there are (max N ) number of 1-hop
obfuscating paths between the two revealed locations.
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 107

Proof Equation 11 implies that each location in the set L is reachable to and from
lpriv and lcur in δt time. Thus, from the point of reachability, each ith location in L
forms a 1-hop path between lpriv and lcur in δt time. As a result, each path formed
by each sensitive location lis ∈ L is obfuscated with (|L| − 1) number of different
other paths in δt time.

5.2 Utility Analysis

5.2.1 Loss of Utility Bound

Lemma 3 If there are multiple numbers of sensitive locations between two revealed
insensitive locations, then the maximum loss of utility Umax (l s ) in BlockPriv to
preserve privacy of a sensitive location l s is proportional to (max N ).
Proof Lemma 1 states that whatever the expected level of privacy assigned to a
specific sensitive location, the achieved privacy is bounded by the location with the
highest level of privacy max N . Thus, the maximum loss of utility for every sensitive
location l s between the two revealed insensitive locations is

Umax (l s ) ≤ (max N ) + U 

5.3 Security Analysis

We analyze the efficacy of BlockPriv against different location privacy-invading

strategies by a malicious authority of the blockchain system. We also briefly discuss
the interesting impact of the transaction dropping attack on location privacy.

5.3.1 Collusion Attack

Definition 1 A collusion with malicious mobile nodes is successful if the authority

of the blockchain can find a new set of locations L∗ about an MU ’s sensitive
location lis such that

|L ∩ L ∗ | < Ni . (13)

Lemma 4 A combination of time reachability information and collusion with other

malicious nodes will not leak the privacy of a target mobile node.
108 A. R. Shahid et al.

Proof In BlockPriv, a mobile node remains silent in the spatial and tempo-
ral domains in order to preserve privacy against an untrusted authority of the
blockchain. Thus, even if the authority colludes with some mobile nodes, it will not
be able to construct a new set L∗ beyond L that would satisfy Eq. 13. In other words,
its understanding of a targeted node’s whereabouts will not be made any finer than L
by colluding with other nodes. In fact, collusion with mobile nodes to track a target
node is a costly approach. The target node changes its public keys frequently, and to
keep tracking it, the authority needs to update the colluding nodes at the same rate.
The only way a colluding attack will be successful is if a malicious node physically
tracks a target node. However, our work concentrates on providing security against
software-based privacy-invading techniques, not on physical observations.

5.3.2 Map Matching Attack

Definition 2 For a sensitive location l s , a map matching attack is considered to be

successful if an attacker can find a set of locations L∗ from L such that
∞
(L∗ ⊂ L∗)(|L ∗ | > 0), and P rMU (li ) = 0; ∀li ∈ L∗ (14)

Lemma 5 BlockPriv is resilient against map matching attack.

Proof The mobile node calculates the time reachability information using a real-
time map service provider, and thus each location l, selected to form L, is spatially
∞ (l) = 1}. Thus, L∗ = ∅.
reachable. That is, L = {∀l ∈ L|P rMU

5.3.3 Time Reachability-Based Path Reconstruction Attack

Definition 3 A time reachability-based path reconstruction attack on BlockPriv is

said to be successful if, for a sensitive location l s , the authority can find fewer than
N number of paths between two revealed locations for a mobile node.

Lemma 6 BlockPriv is resilient against time reachability-based path reconstruc-

tion attack.
Proof According to Eq. 11, every location li ∈ L, including every sensitive
location, is reachable from previously revealed location lprev to lcur in δt time. Thus,
according to Lemma 2, there are at least max N number of 1-hop obfuscating paths
from lprev to lcur for li .
We can now generalize the analysis for multi-hop paths. Let the actual path be
lprev → l1s → l2s → lcur and the temporal sequence of this path be tprev → t1 →
t2 → tcur . Hence, δt = Φ(lprev , l1s ) + Φ(l1s , l2s ) + Φ(l2s , lcur ). Assume that, using
BlockPriv, we got L, where {l1s , l2s } ∈ L. For the sake of argument, let us consider,
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 109

for every location l ∈ L (L = L \ {l1s , l2s }), there exists no multi-hop path. In
such a case, if somehow it is known that the node visited multiple locations between
lprev and lcur , then the attacker can exclude all the single-hop paths and is able to
reconstruct the actual path: lprev → l1s → l2s → lcur . However, in BlockPriv, the
node remains silent in the network, such that every location in L exhibits similar
probability of being the node’s whereabouts under the time reachability condition.
Also, such a special case can occur only when P rMU ∞ (l) = 0; ∀l ∈ L . This
case falls into the category of a map matching attack, and Lemma 5 proves that
BlockPriv is resilient against such an attack. Hence, time reachability information
cannot help a malicious authority to reconstruct the actual path.

5.3.4 Transaction Dropping Attack

In this attack, a mobile node MUi attempts to drop the transactions between itself
and another node MUj for a specific intention (e.g., preventing the other node from
gaining reward out of ill intention or to protect its instance location privacy). There
are two cases to consider here. First, MUj passes the transaction information to the
nearest blockchain node, and thus MUi ’s location information is revealed. In such a
case, MUi ’s attempt to protect location privacy will fail. Second, if MUj ’s also drop
the transaction, then both the nodes’ location information will remain undisclosed
in the blockchain.

5.3.5 Security Limitations

We are also interested in exploring the following security limitations of BlockPriv

in the future extension of the work:
(1) Off-Chain Information-Based Attack. The attacker can combine off-chain
information (e.g., information about the hours of operation of a business) with the
map matching attack to devise a better inference model.
(2) Probabilistic Inference Attack from On-Chain Information. The attacker can
personalize the mobility of the node from the information available on the chain
using machine learning algorithms (e.g., Markov chains [34]). Such a model can be
exploited to improve the path reconstruction attack.

6 Experimental Evaluation

In this section, we describe the details regarding the experimental evaluation of

BlockPriv. To properly understand the efficiency and efficacy of our approach,
we implemented two cases: locations with (1) similar privacy parameter and
(2) different privacy parameters. These two versions will be referred to as sim-
BlockPriv and diff-BlockPriv, respectively.
110 A. R. Shahid et al.

6.1 Experimental Settings

6.1.1 Dataset Description

In this chapter, we consider the case of making frequent transactions in the network.
Hence, we selected Foursquare’s New York City (NYC) and Tokyo (TKY) datasets
[35] to test the approach with factual data. These datasets contain the check-in
information of nodes, in terms of location and time. The number of transactions,
locations, location types, and nodes of the datasets are presented in Table 2, and a
visualization of the locations in the datasets is depicted in Fig. 3.

6.1.2 Simulation Setup

The datasets do not contain any mark on the privacy-sensitive locations of the
mobile nodes. Thus, we mark α% of the location types as sensitive locations for
all the nodes. The different values of the parameters, including the privacy level
for a sensitive location r, used in the experiment, are shown in Table 3. For each
combination of the parameters, we ran the simulation on both datasets for n number
of nodes. As there is a correlation between the number of transactions and the
impact of privacy on utility, we selected 100 nodes with the highest number of
transactions. We justify this claim by comparing the result with 100 nodes with
the least number of transactions. Next, since the datasets do not contain continuous

Table 2 Dataset statistics Dataset #Transactionsa #Locations #Types #Nodesa

NYC 227428 38333 400 1083
TKY 573703 61858 385 2293
a
Originally called “Check-ins” and “Users.” In this context, we
renamed the variables “Transactions” and “Nodes,” respec-
tively

Fig. 3 Locations in (a) New York City (NYC) and (b) Tokyo (TKY) datasets. Green markers
symbolize the locations. The red colors represent the high-density regions
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 111

Table 3 Simulation setup Parameter Value(s)

parameters
r {500, 1000, 1500, 2000} m
γ {5,10,15,20}
v 30 miles per hour
α {2, 4, 6, 8, 10}
n 100

location information, we set a speed (v) for each node to simulate its reachability-
based mobility. By nature of mobility, there are cases when a node cannot reach a
new location, lnew , from a previous location, lprev in a certain time, in the dataset
with speed v. In these cases, we continue adding a small value to v (e.g., v/5)
until it can reach lnew . In diff-BlockPriv, the difference in the privacy level for
different sensitive locations is set by drawing a random number from the range
{r − (r × γ %), r + (r × γ %)}.

6.2 Experiment Results

In the experiment, we examine the loss of utility of sim-BlockPriv and diff-

BlockPriv. In particular, we examine the following two relationships, fundamental
to the design of a privacy-preserving mechanism: (1) loss of utility versus privacy
level and (2) loss of utility versus the number of sensitive locations.

6.2.1 Utility Versus Privacy Level

We first examine the relationship between the loss of utility and privacy (in terms
of radius r in meters). For example, Fig. 4a–d visually shows this relationship for
both sim-BlockPriv and diff-BlockPriv when there are a few number of sensitive
locations (α = 2%) and a significant number of sensitive locations (α = 10%).
Each data point in a figure refers to the average of the 100 users of a specific city.
From these figures, we can make several important occlusions. First, we can draw a
clear comparison between sim-BlockPriv and diff-BlockPriv, regarding the impact
of privacy level r on the loss of utilities. From the city-level view, for the same value
of r, sim-BlockPriv imposes less utility loss than diff-BlockPriv due to the privacy-
level randomness associated with diff-BlockPriv. Second, there is an almost linear
correlation between the loss of utility and privacy level, regardless of the number
of sensitive location types (α) in the dataset. We observe a similar upward trend of
loss of utility against the increase in the privacy level for α = 2% and α = 10%
in both of the datasets. The distribution of loss of utility in Fig. 5 further improves
the resolution of this linearity. If we look into the exact numeral values, presented in
Table 4, the average Pearson’s correlation values [36] are 0.94 and 0.95 for the NYC
and TKY datasets, respectively. Such linear correlation and lower loss of utility give
112 A. R. Shahid et al.

Fig. 4 Average loss of utilities versus privacy level in sim-BlockPriv and diff-BlockPriv. (a) NYC
(α = 2%). (b) NYC (α = 10%). (c) TKY (α = 2%). (d) TKY (α = 10%)

sim-BlockPriv an upper hand in designing a user-centric privacy scale, which we

intend to explore in our extension of this work.

6.2.2 Utility Versus Number of Sensitive Location Types

We then analyze the correlation between loss of utility and the number of sensitive
location types (α). While the analysis of the relationship between utility and privacy
level shows that the sim-BlockPriv charges less utility loss than diff-BlockPriv,
the correlation between utility and the number of sensitive location types further
signifies the superiority of sim-BlockPriv. Figure 7a–d presents the average loss
of utility for different values of α. We found that, regardless of the value of privacy
level r, there is a linear correlation between utility and α. For the same value of r, the
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 113

Fig. 5 Distribution of loss of utilities in sim-BlockPriv, regarding different privacy levels

Table 4 Pearson’s correlation values

Dataset Statistics Loss of utility vs. privacy level Loss of utility vs. sensitive location types
NYC Minimum 0.75 0.44
Average 0.94 0.92
Maximum 1.00 0.99
TKY Minimum 0.75 0.74
Average 0.95 0.95
Maximum 1.00 0.99

Fig. 6 sim-BlockPriv: comparison of the distribution of loss of utility for different numbers of
sensitive location types (α) for r = (a) 500 m, and (b) 2000 m

higher the value of the α, the higher the loss of utility. However, the increase of loss
of utility is slightly sharper in diff-BlockPriv than in sim-BlockPriv. This sharpness
is due to the effect of both the increase in the number of sensitive location types
and the randomness in the privacy level. As we already know that sim-BlockPriv
is better than diff-BlockPriv, we only present the distribution of loss of utility
in sim-BlockPriv in Fig. 6. For the same reason, we skipped the depiction of the
114 A. R. Shahid et al.

Fig. 7 Average loss of utility versus number of sensitive location types (α) in sim-BlockPriv and
diff-BlockPriv. (a) NYC (r = 500 m). (b) NYC (r = 2000 m). (c) TKY (r = 500 m). (d) TKY
(r = 2000 m)

impact of different γ in diff-BlockPriv. Similar to the average values in Fig. 7, the

distributions of the loss of utility exhibit a linear correlation. More accurately, the
average correlation is 0.92 and 0.95 in the NYC and TKY datasets, respectively. As
we mentioned earlier, such a linear correlation can play an important role to make
BlockPriv usable for privacy-preserving applications.

6.2.3 User-Level Correlation Analysis

Figure 8 depicts the correlation values for loss of utility versus privacy level (U-P)
and loss of utility versus the number of sensitive location types (U-S) for 100 users;
Table 4 presents different statistics (min, average, and max) on these values. It is
Protecting Location Privacy in Blockchain-Based Mobile Internet of Things 115

Fig. 8 sim-BlockPriv: correlation values (Corr. value) of loss of utility versus privacy level (U-P)
and loss of utility versus the number of sensitive location types (U-S) for 100 users in NYC and
TKY datasets

observed that in the NYC dataset, 75% of the nodes have 0.9 correlation for both
U-P and U-S. In the case of the TKY dataset, these numbers are 82% and 84%,
respectively. Note that these statistics are generated by considering the 100 nodes
with the greatest number of transactions in the datasets. We found that, when the
number of transactions is fewer, the loss of utility is significantly less. For instance,
in both datasets, the 100 nodes with the fewest number of transactions achieved a
minimum of 30% less loss of utility than the 100 nodes with the highest number of
transactions.

7 Conclusion and Future Direction

In this chapter, we introduce a user-centric obfuscation technique called BlockPriv,

to preserve location privacy in permissioned blockchain-based IoT systems. As part
of this work, we consider that a user cannot falsify its location, and an untrusted
authority can correlate locations by considering spatiotemporal constraints to pre-
dict unrevealed sensitive locations of a user. We quantify the relationship between
the notion of privacy and the utility of the system in BlockPriv. We analyze
two variations of BlockPriv, sim-BlockPriv and diff-BlockPriv, where the first
116 A. R. Shahid et al.

has the same privacy level for all the sensitive locations and the second has a
different privacy level for different sensitive locations. We show that there is a
linear correlation between loss of utility and privacy level in sim-BlockPriv. Such
linearity can be exploited to define a usable privacy scale. In the extended version
of this work, we intend to employ a more rigorous model to simulate the mobility
of the nodes. Our future work also includes improving the technique by considering
different probabilistic attack models based on a combination of off-chain and on-
chain information, adapting the approach for the case of continuous transactions in
the network, and defining a soft privacy margin to further reduce the loss of utility.

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A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning
Intrusion Detection System for Internet
of Things

Jaspreet Kaur and Gagandeep Singh

1 Introduction

In today’s era, IoT is the major evolution of Internet also known as Internet of
Everything. It creates low-power lossy networks using heterogeneous sensor devices
for communicating the information. Some of these sensor devices have resource-
constrained features such as limited memory, limited storage, and others have
enough memory and resources. Like in the traditional network, these devices and
their data also need security such as confidentiality, authenticity, authorization,
and availability. But due to the resource constrained nature of some devices,
traditional security features are difficult to implement. There are various lightweight
security solutions available today such as DTLS, IPSec protocols, Elliptic Curve
Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), various types of lightweight intrusion
detection/prevention systems (IDSs/IPSs), and many more that are specifically
designed for data or payload security. But intruder performs various types of attacks
such as DDoS [1] (distributed denial of service), sinkhole attack [1], blackhole
attack [1], ransomware attack [2], and many more by just seeing or observing
and manipulating the header information. This header information includes both
encrypted protocols such as TLS and IPsec and non-encrypted protocols such as
HTTP, TCP, IP, UDP (not encrypted in the network due to not to increase latency
and less complex operations). Attackers can easily observe this information and
manipulate it for their own profit.
There are various approaches in the literature those are focused on these types of
attacks, mainly machine and deep learning approaches are considered for predicting
or alerting these attacks. Due to resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and for

J. Kaur () · G. Singh

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur,
Jodhpur, India
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 119
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_6
120 J. Kaur and G. Singh

real-time processing results, some part of these algorithms are implemented at edge
of the network and rest processing are done at the cloud.
Recently, blockchain methodology or technique has been taken by industry as
well as research community as an innovative or novel technology that create various
roles such as managing, controlling, and most valuable securing IoT devices. A
blockchain is fundamentally a decentralized, distributed, shared, and immutable
database ledger that stores any type of data and transactions across a peer-to-peer
(P2P) network [1]. Due to various advantages of this technology, it has various
use cases such as cryptocurrency, decentralized apps, securing machine learning
algorithms, Internet of Things as smart city, smart health care, and many more. But
in this chapter, we mainly focus on how combinations of blockchain, machine or
deep learning algorithms, and edge computing are to be used for security of IoT
devices through seeing the header part of the packets.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: Sect. 2 discusses various IoT
security attacks and their existing solutions. Potential combination of blockchain
features with respect to IoT has been discussed in Sect. 3. In the next section,
we have been surveyed some recent related work in the direction of ML and DL
methods for the IoT security. In Sect. 5, we mention some possibilities of combining
these three technologies (blockchain, IoT, and ML/DL methods) as well as our
proposed work in this direction for the security of IoT data. Experimentation and
result analysis have been given in Sect. 6. Finally, we conclude our work with some
future directions.

2 IoT Security Attacks and Their Solutions

Intruders perform various attacks to disturb the functionality of IoT networks. These
attacks are occurred due to the weaknesses or absence of security features such as
authentication, authorization, and many more. Some of these security issues and
their implications along with their existing solutions in the literature are presented
in Table 1. These attacks and their security measures are to be taken either at data
part or at header part features of the network packets. There are various technologies
such as cloud computing, edge or fog computing, blockchain, SDN (software-
defined networking), lightweight cryptographic algorithms, machine/deep learning
techniques, etc. that are to be used in the literature for providing security to IoT
devices/network. But in this chapter, our main focus is on how we can combine
blockchain, ML and DL algorithms, and edge computing for IoT data security.

3 Blockchain of Things (Blockchain with IoT)

Nowadays, blockchain technology is used almost everywhere due to their fun-

damental features such as a decentralization of nodes, distributed, shared, and
A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning Intrusion Detection System for Internet. . . 121

Table 1 Summary of IoT security threats, implications, and their existing solutions
Security issues Implications Proposed solutions
Sybil and Spoofing Attacks Network disruption, Signal Strength Measurements, Chan-
[1, 3–8] Denial of Service (DoS) nel Estimation, Random Traversing of
Social Graphs and IDS
RPL Routing Attacks [1, 5, Eavesdropping, Man- Hashing and Signature based Authen-
9–12] in-the-Middle Attacks, tication and Observing Node Behavior
Rank and Version
number attacks
Sinkhole, Blackhole Attack Denial of Service, Dis- Rank Verification Through Hash
and Wormhole Attacks [1, 3– rupt the network topol- Chain Function, Trust Level
5, 8, 13–15] ogy Management, IDS (Intrusion
Detection System)
Authentication and Secure Privacy and Integrity Compressed AH and ESP, Header
Communication related Violation Compression and Software Mode
Attacks [1, 3–5, 16, 17] AES,IACAC using the Elliptic Curve
Cryptography, Hybrid Authentication,
Distributed Logs and Homomorphic
Encryption
Transport Level End-to-End Privacy Violation DTLS-PSK with Nonces, 6LBR with
Security Attacks [1, 3–5, 18, ECC, Compressed IPSEC, DTLS
19] Header Compression,IKEv2 using
Compressed UDP and AES/CCM
based Security to Identification and
Authorization
Insecure Software/Firmware Privacy Violation, Denial Regular Secure Updates of Firmware,
Attacks [1, 3–5, 20] of Service, Network Dis- Use of File Signatures, and Encryp-
ruption tion with Validation
Middleware Security Attacks Privacy Violation, Denial Secure Communication using
[1, 3–5, 21] of Service, Network Dis- Authentication, Security Policies,
ruption Key Management between Devices,
M2M Security
CoAP Security Attacks [1, 3– Network Bottleneck, Mirror Proxy, TLS/DTLS &
5, 22–24] Denial of Service HTTP/CoAP Mapping, TLS-DTLS
Tunnel, Message Filtration by 6LBR

immutable database ledger that stores any type of data and transactions across
a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. It maintains as a link list blocks of data that
have been time-stamped and verified by miners. The blockchain provides data
authentication and integrity using strong cryptographic algorithms such as elliptic
curve cryptography (ECC) and SHA-256 hash method. Basically, the block data
contains a list of all transactions or assets along with a hash to the previous block
for maintaining a linked list. So that it can track a history events of the assets and
gives an interoperable overall distributed trust. In blockchain, each transaction is
validated by a majority agreement of miner nodes those are actively involved in
validating and verifying transactions [1, 25, 26]. Due to these advantages of this
technology, it can be used for IoT devices as well.
122 J. Kaur and G. Singh

3.1 Advantages of Blockchain of Things

Below we have mentioned some of the advantages of blockchain of things:

1. Address Space and Identity: IPv6 protocol is unable to cooperate to these
resource-constrained network (IoT network). But using blockchain, it eliminates
IANA (centralized authority). In addition, blockchain provides 160-bit unique
address space for the identification of IoT devices, which is more than IPv6 128-
bit address space, and this makes blockchain a more scalable solution for IoT
than IPv6. It also provides a set of various features and relationships that are to
be stored on the blockchain.
2. Decentralized and Trust: Blockchain eliminates centralized server and main-
tains a peer-to-peer network that builds trust between parties and IoT devices.
Due to its decentralized behavior, it reduces transactional cost and accelerates
transaction speed.
3. Integrity and Pseudo-anonymity: All transactions made to or by an IoT device
are cryptographically proofed, signed by the true sender, and verified by majority
nodes. All these messages are stored on the blockchain ledger and can be
tracked securely, which provide integrity and authentication of transmitted data.
Blockchain uses public key as user address which provide pseudo-anonymity.
4. Authentication, Privacy, and Authorization: Blockchain smart contract pro-
vides a decentralized single and multiparty authentication rules, authorization
access rules, and data privacy access rules of less complexity when compared
with traditional Internet Protocols. These smart contracts can create the various
logics of code for protecting the IoT devices.
5. Security in Transmission: Basic IoT connection protocols such as HTTP,
MQTT, CoAP, RPL, and 6LoWPAN are not secure by design. There are several
security protocols such as DTLS, TLS, and IPSec that are used to provide secure
communication in IoT. But these security protocols require high computation and
memory requirements and used centralized PKI protocol for key management
and distributions. With blockchain, centralized PKI protocol is totally mitigated,
as each IoT device would have its own unique id and asymmetric key pair. This
provides us lightweight or simplify solution that would satisfy the requirements
of resource-constrained IoT devices.

3.2 Disadvantages of Blockchain of Things

Despite various advantages of blockchain platform, it also has some limitations

when this technology is applied on the IoT devices such as:
1. Resource-constrained nature of some IoT nodes incapable of storing large
blockchain database, which leads to the scalability issues.
A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning Intrusion Detection System for Internet. . . 123

2. Computationally intensive task as mining not to be done at all IoT devices due
to memory and CPU power restrictions.
3. In some use cases, transparency of the confidential data is harmful to the users.
4. Blockchain itself is a naive protocol (has inbuilt limitations).

3.3 Some Related Work of Blockchain of Things

Researchers and industrialist used various approaches for combining these two
technologies for taking the advantage of both and reducing the above limitations as
much as possible. Today, blockchain can be applied at almost all of the applications
of IoT such as smart city, smart healthcare, smart vehicle, smart grid, crowd-sensing
applications, and many more. The general architecture of blockchain of things has
been shown in Fig. 1. Various blockchain platforms and some of the recent related
work that support blockchain with IoT are given as follows:
Bitcoin [27, 28] is the first blockchain cryptocurrency platform for IoT domain
which provides micro-payments to the autonomous IoT devices. It can be a draw-
back since decreasing the value of the coin can negatively affect the performance of
application. So, there is another blockchain platform named as Ethereum [28, 29]
by which decentralized application era has begun. It uses the concept of smart
contract for securing logics, policies, and permissions that react after a specific

Fig. 1 General architecture of blockchain of things

124 J. Kaur and G. Singh

event. As in paper [30, 31], the authors developed a leave application management
system using Blockchain Smart Contract managed by heterogeneous IoT devices at
Ethereum platform. Hyperledger [28, 32] is an open-source platform or framework
for permissioned blockchain applications. It provides various factors for agreement
and membership. Distributed applications can be made by this platform using
general purpose languages. IoT devices can provide data to the blockchain via the
IBM Watson IoT Platform, which use for managing devices and allows data analysis
and filtering. IBM’s Bluemix platform provides this integrated utility as blockchain
as a service. The use of this framework speeds up application prototyping.
The Multichain [33] platform provides a new framework for the development and
deployment of private blockchains. Multichain uses an application that enhances
the core functionality of the original Bitcoin API and allows the management
of permissions, transactions, portfolios, assets, etc. It is also a useful platform
for deploying blockchain of things. In paper [34], the authors use the multichain
platform to IoT devices for evaluating the use of cloud and fog as hosting platforms
of blockchain.
One another platform known as IOTA [35] uses DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)
data structure, blockless framework for more scalable solution to blockchain of
things. But this platform is on their naive state means we do not know how much it
will lead to be scalable and reliable in future.
In paper [36], they use edge cloud method for solving the scalability and security
issues for blockchain of things. They write smart contacts as for analyzing the
behavior of IoT devices and resource allocation at edge devices for resource-
constrained nodes and finally mitigate the malicious users for setting the flag in
the smart contract. In paper [37], the authors introduce blockchain in Internet of
Things using smart home environment at which they use local blockchain for policy
checking purpose whether the devices are authorized or not and also use cloud
structure for storation of data. They also use the concept of overlay networks
for securing the data at cloud and easy management of the different network
environments.
In paper [38], iExec corporation introduces a new method such as blockchain-
based decentralized cloud computing at which they give a web interface using
Ethereum platform to IoT devices for communicating with blockchain. These
blockchain services are managed at the decentralized cloud using off-chain com-
putation and rules managed via scheduler. In paper [39], the authors talk about
Blockchain of Things by establishing an analytical model for considering spatiotem-
poral domain to maximizing transaction throughput, maximizing performance
analysis, and finding the optimal node deployment location. In paper [2, 12], the
authors use blockchain for RPL and ransomware attacks.
In summary, all the works related to blockchain of things are considered one or
multiple of these as usage of:
1. Decentralized Cloud
2. Use of Distributed Edge Computing or Database
3. Use of Off-Chain Data
A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning Intrusion Detection System for Internet. . . 125

4. Deletion of Data Blocks (Depending on Use Case)

5. Use of Multichain
6. Use of Different Structure as IOTA
7. Use of Less Computation Consensus Algorithm
8. Use of Light Weighted Software as Ethereum lite
These above approaches are provided for solving the limitations of both IoT and
blockchain technology or combining these technologies more easy and advanta-
geous way.

4 ML and DL Algorithms in IoT Security

For securing any IoT device from various attacks, there is a probability to proac-
tively predict these attacks using various machine learning and advanced deep
learning techniques.
In the literature survey [3, 4], we have seen that there are various works to be
done into this direction. They use various approaches for detecting and predicting
the IoT attacks such as malware attacks, routing attacks, impersonation attacks, and
many more at every layer of IoT framework such as perception layer, network layer,
and application layer. The general architecture of ML/DL algorithms in IoT data
security has been shown in Fig. 2. In this general architecture, the researchers must
create their dataset with normal as well as attack packets via various IoT devices
such as smart phone, smart watch, smart car, etc. and then apply various ML as well
as DL methods for attack detection. The ML and DL algorithms used in this process
are:
1. DT (Decision Tree), SVM (Support Vector Machine), KNN (K-Nearest Neigh-
bor), Naive Bayesian, CNN(Convolution Neural Network), RNN (Recurrent
Neural Network) in supervised algorithms
2. K-Mean Clustering, PCA (Principal Component Analysis), AE (Auto Encoder),
RBM(Restricted Boltzmann Machine), DBN (Deep Belief Network) in unsuper-
vised algorithms
3. Some hybrid methodologies or semisupervised methods such as GAN (Genera-
tive Adversarial Networks) and many more
4. RL (Reinforcement Learning)
In paper [6], the authors use three DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks
such as TCP SYN flood, a UDP flood, and a HTTP GET flood for performing
attack on IoT devices. They use Mirai-infected devices for performing attack and
use various features such as Packet Size, Inter-packet Interval, Bandwidth, and
many more in various ML algorithms and neural network methods for prediction
analysis of attacks. Similarly in paper [8], the author uses various ML techniques
for detecting various preliminary attacks and compares those results to available IDS
(Intrusion Detection System). In paper [40], the author proposes a semisupervised
methodology for detecting these nodes attack. There are several intrusion detection
126 J. Kaur and G. Singh

Fig. 2 General Architecture of ML and DL algorithms in IoT Security

systems (IDSs) that are to be proposed into this direction such as modified SNORT
[41], SVELTE [5], RPiDS [42], and many more.
There are various technologies such as cloud computing and edge or fog
computing along with training data distribution or model trainer distribution that are
to be used for lightweight implementation of ML and DL algorithms in resource-
constrained IoT devices. Despite that, still we have various open challenges into
these directions as follows:
1. Less availability of security related IoT datasets
2. Learning from low-quality data to securing IoT devices
3. IoT data augmentation and fusion
4. How to apply ML and DL algorithms for IoT security in interdependent and
interactive environments
5. Security and privacy of ML and DL algorithms and their data
6. Possible misuse of ML and DL algorithms by attackers and corrupted ML and
DL algorithms
A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning Intrusion Detection System for Internet. . . 127

7. Integrating DL/ML algorithms with other technologies such as blockchain, cloud

computing, and edge computing for IoT Security

5 Combining Technologies (Blockchain, IoT, and ML/DL)

for IoT Security

There are various suggestions given in the literature [1, 3] or article [43] regarding
the combinations of these technologies for IoT devices and data security. All these
methods have started with heterogeneous IoT device data collection. They have used
different technologies such as blockchain, edge computing, cloud computing, and
various ML and DL techniques for pattern analysis as well as security purposes.
There are already various examples or solutions such as supply management system,
smart infrastructure, and many more that have used combination of these technolo-
gies. The combination of these maintains security of IoT data and devices, security
of ML/DL input data and algorithms, as well as maintaining data analysis/quality.
Figure 3 can also illustrate these technology combinations. Despite these valuable
suggestions, as per our knowledge, we have not found any simulation or real-time
implementation that combined all of these technologies for packet header security.
There is a vast opportunity in this direction to work. So, our work is also a small
contribution in this area, which leads this research a step ahead.

Fig. 3 General Framework of Combination of these Technologies (Blockchain, IoT, ML and DL

methods)
128 J. Kaur and G. Singh

5.1 Brief Summary of Our Problem Statement

Various machine learning and deep learning approaches are valuable for header-
based prediction IoT security attacks and provide more accurate results unless and
until the training data or prediction data is not manipulated by the attacker, until
algorithms of machine learning process are not hacked by intruder and quality
of the heterogeneous devices data are accurate means data fusion has been done
appropriately as well as need appropriate data handling in edge/cloud storage. These
above limitations motivate us to develop a new platform which mitigates some of
the above issues as low as possible. Our new platform combines blockchain, ML/DL
algorithms, and edge storage for handling heterogeneous IoT devices data security.

5.2 Our Proposed Approach

In our approach, we have combined the blockchain, ML/DL methods, and edge stor-
age for providing the header-based security attack detection (IDS) in heterogeneous
IoT environment. Briefly, our methodology works as follows:
In a heterogeneous IoT environment, there exist some low power/memory
devices as well as some high computing devices. In this IoT environment, there
are various attacks possible such as spoofing attacks, ransomware attack, DDoS
attacks, and many more. Here, we deal how to detect these attacks with secure
ML-based IDS by just seeing the header information. Here, we have applied the
blockchain technology for securing the communicating data and code logic of
ML/DL algorithms along with the proper embedding of it at various heterogeneous
IoT devices. It means that there are some low-powered or low-resource IoT devices
that directly interact with the blockchain running at the edge node devices (high-
power IoT devices). These node devices are treated as thin client Ethereum node (not
performing mining process and storation of blockchain at them, but key generation
is performed on these nodes itself) and all the data sent by them to the edge nodes are
authenticated by digital signature (access control in private blockchain) and provide
integrity feature using private blockchain.
A private blockchain is managed by the edge nodes devices. These edge devices
are the high-power IoT devices that perform mining process of blockchain and
storation of blocks. These devices also use a load balancer method for incoming
packets transactions. A smart contract written on private Ethereum separates the
data and header part of packets, and finally header part of the packets are saved in
the blockchain. This discussed procedure maintains integrity of training data.
After that at the edge node devices, we use some machine or deep learning
algorithms at blocks of data (header information) for prediction of attacks vs normal
data. These ML and DL algorithms are also secured by smart contracts. Based on
the use case or availability of resources, we take data from blockchain for predicting
attack based on some time frame. Due to the resource limitation, after particular
A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning Intrusion Detection System for Internet. . . 129

Fig. 4 Overview of our proposed framework

time limit, some older blocks of data are to be vanished or no use at all. Quality
of heterogeneous devices data (data fusion) are also managed by ML or DL and
feature extraction techniques (what header features are to be taken for predicting
the attack).
We need a large amount of data for high accuracy prediction. But ML algorithms
are less complex to implement than DL algorithms. So, we use 2 methods to
handling the complexity of algorithms as follows: for ML algorithms (less complex)
like decision tree, K-means, we take training data distribution method to divide the
data at various edge nodes, and then ML algorithm is applied on these data and
final results are aggregated at the gateway node. But in the DL learning methods
(high complex) such as convolution neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural
network (RNN), we take model trainer distribution method at which DL algorithm’s
independent modules are given to the edge nodes and training data is passed to
one edge node, after that second one, and so on until the last one (pipe lining
of the data). Finally, the result has to be passed to the gateway. The below is our
complete proposed framework, shown in Fig. 4. Our experiment simulation to this
framework has little difference due to the limitation in the simulation environment.
But it can be completely extended to the real-world scenario as discussed above.
Our proposed framework is generalized, which means it is applicable to any domain
(smart home/University/Airport etc.) and can detect all types of intrusions/attacks
(DDoS/ransomware, etc.) in heterogeneous IoT environment by ML-based intrusion
detection system (by packets header portion only). Take an example of a smart
home scenario in this framework; if an attacker performs some attack such as
DDoS attack, ransomware attack at that home, then it can be easily detectable by
gateway node. We can also detect these attacks at a particular locality/community
of smart homes by some extension of our proposed work. Then, our proposed
framework is applied to each smart home, and then each smart home gateways in
that is connected to peer-to-peer network, which means they maintain a separate
blockchain for deciding attack at that locality level. So, that we can detect the
130 J. Kaur and G. Singh

major localities or areas at which these attacks are frequently happened. Once the
attack is detected, then that attack is easily mitigated by removing that attacker node
by sending disassociation or deauthentication packets and set the flag bit in smart
contract so that further intruder packets are not treated via blockchain (for saving
computational and memory resources).

6 Experimentation and Results

There are various attacks occurred as mentioned above due to the header part of
packets in IoT devices, and our proposed approach is generalized, which means it
can detect any kind of attacks. But in this chapter, we simulate only DoS/DDoS
attack protection via our proposed approach taking assumption only for the single
smart home environment. This simulation has been done at single computer system
(8 GB RAM and I7 core processor).
We used Remix IDE [28, 44], a well-known platform for development and testing
of blockchain utilities, for experimentation purposes of the smart contract. A smart
contract is developed for the separation of data and header part of packets along
with maintaining the access control of IoT devices. ML and DL algorithms integrity
will be maintained by us in the extended/future work. In this platform, we used
5 IoT device accounts for simulation and to collect dataset (attack and non-attack
packets). The deployment of the smart contract resulted in a transaction cost of
975040 gas and an execution cost of 707364 gas. Initially, we take 3 types of
headers such as TCP, UDP, and ICMP for performing the DoS/DDoS attack (Low
Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) application [45] for TCP and UDP flood and PING
utility for ICMP flood). For separation of header and data packets for these three
protocols, the transaction cost and execution costs of the smart contract are given in
Table 2. For learning methodology (in Fig. 5), we trained a sequence model [46]
for predicting DoS/DDoS attacks on TCP, UDP, and ICMP packets. The model
architecture consisted of three layers: the first one being LSTM [47] with return
state=True, the second layer was dropout to avoid overfitting during training, and
the last layer was dense layer with sigmoid activation, which returned a number
between 0 and 1, signifying the probability of DDoS attack on the input sequence
of packets. The shape of the input to the LSTM was, f × p, where f denotes the
number of packets being fed to the LSTM as a sequence and p denotes the length
of the feature of vector of the packet. We collected these features of header for
attack detection as time stamp of the packet, source and destination in IP layer of
the packet, source and destination of Ethernet packet, length of the packets in bytes,
source and destination ports, ICMP sequence number, and some others fields. We
trained our model on around 10,000 sequences of packets (50% being DoS/DDoS
and rest non-DoS/DDoS) with a validation split of 0.2 and a batch size of 32,
optimizer was Adadelta, loss function was binary cross entropy, and binary accuracy
was used as metric. The training labels were 0 for non-DDoS packets and 1 for
DDoS packets. When we implement our proposed method using these parameters,
A Blockchain-Based Machine Learning Intrusion Detection System for Internet. . . 131

then the outcome results are quite satisfactory as shown in Table 3. We can also
say that by seeing these results, our proposed approach accuracy and efficiency
remain as high as now when we implement this at real-time dataset or increase
our simulation dataset.

Table 2 Costs of smart contract for header and data separation

Protocol used Transaction cost Execution costs
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) 205759 gas 173607 gas
UDP (User Datagram Protocol) 66529 gas 63225 gas
ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) 264698 gas 228194 gas

Fig. 5 Data learning methodology as sequence model

Table 3 Accuracy and F1-Score Results for DoS/DDoS Attacks

Protocol used f value p value Threshold No. of epochs Binary accuracy F1-Score
TCP 4 24 0.7 10 81.55 0.95
UDP 12 24 0.7 10 85.79 0.88
ICMP 16 24 0.7 10 86.28 0.84

7 Conclusions and Future Directions

Today, increased usage of IoT devices makes them very prone to attacks. There are
various lightweight cryptographic approaches that are to be used in data protection
of these devices. But still these attacks are to be occurred due to manipulating or
observing the header part of the packets (encrypted and non-encrypted both). There
are various methods to be used for protecting these attacks, specifically ML and
DL methods. But these learning methods’ accuracy totally depends on the security
of training data and on the integrity of learning algorithms. So, we develop a new
132 J. Kaur and G. Singh

model that removes above limitations as low as possible using a combination of new
technologies such as IoT devices along with Blockchain, ML or DL methods, and
edge or fog computing. Our proposed framework is very useful due to the ML and
DL calculations occurred at the edge distributed computing that reduce processing
time compared to the cloud computing and also use blockchain smart contract for
both providing security to input data and access control to the IoT devices. For the
implementing scenario, we simulate a single smart home environment with 5 IoT
devices in Ethereum blockchain and detect DoS/DDoS attacks those are occurred
via TCP, UDP, and ICMP packet headers via the LSTM method. From the produced
results, we say that our proposed model is working quite satisfactory.
Some extension or more detailed implementation (observations) will have to be
done in future work for improving the efficiency of our proposed work as follows:
1. We firstly take real-time environment to implement our model on the sin-
gle/multiple smart homes or on another smart infrastructure or environment.
2. We will also implement or detect various IoT device attacks such as ransomware
attack, sinkhole attack, or blackhole attack.
3. We will use various lightweight ML and DL algorithms for improving result
accuracy and quality of data.
4. We will use software-based load balancing techniques for incoming transactions
at edge IoT devices.
5. We will apply blockchain smart contract at ML/DL algorithms (code) itself.

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ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based
Consensus Committee Configuration for
IoT Blockchains

Ronghua Xu, Deeraj Nagothu, and Yu Chen

1 Introduction

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), the rapid advancement
in Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined with Big Data technology brings smart
applications and services to revolutionize human life. By integrating heterogeneous
computing platforms and hierarchical edge–fog–cloud networking paradigm, the
concept of Smart Cities becomes realistic to provide seamless, intelligent, and safe
services for communities and the society [54, 56]. The IoT devices in smart cities are
geographically scattered across near-site network edges and managed by fragmented
service domains with varying security policies. However, most state-of-the-art smart
cities applications heavily rely on a centralized framework which is vulnerable to a
single point of failure and faces heterogeneity and scalability challenges with wide
adoption of the IoT devices [1].
As the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin [33], blockchain
has demonstrated great potential to revolutionize traditional financial applications
and information and communication technology (ICT). In general, the blockchain
system utilizes a peer-to-peer (P2P) networking architecture for transactions and
blocks propagation. All miners or validators cooperatively execute a cryptographic
consensus protocol to maintain a transparent, immutable, and auditable distributed
ledger. Thus, blockchain is promising to provide a decentralized and trust-free
infrastructure for IoT systems without relying on a reliable centralized third-party
authority [46]. Moreover, encapsulating predefines rules into self-executing smart
contract (SC) introduces programmability into a blockchain, which can support a

R. Xu · D. Nagothu · Y. Chen ()

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY,
USA
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 135
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_7
136 R. Xu et al.

variety of customized transaction logic rather than simple P2P cash transactions
[58].
Recently, leveraging blockchain and smart contract to provide decentralized, ver-
ifiable, and traceable IoT-based applications have been among the most intensively
studied topics by both academia and industry. There are many reported efforts like
public safety service [54] and video surveillance [30, 34] for smart cities, social
credit system [50] and time banking application [24, 25, 58], decentralized data
markets [47, 55], space situation awareness [53] and avionics management systems
[5, 57], biometric imaging data processing [52], and identification authentication
and access control [48, 49]. However, directly integrating cryptocurrency-oriented
blockchain technologies into IoT systems is hindered by several challenges in
terms of scalability, performance, security, and privacy preservation. The blockchain
trilemma points out that three important proprieties, decentralization, security,
and scalability, cannot perfectly coexist in a blockchain system [62]. Therefore,
balancing the trade-offs of the three aspects and selecting the most suitable
combination are essential for applying blockchain to complex and large-scale scenes
in IoT systems.
The existing popular scaling blockchain solutions aim to address throughput,
latency, storage, and networking issues. However, according to heterogeneous sys-
tem conditions and complicated requirements of domain-specific applications, split-
ting the whole blockchain network into multiple independent small-scale consensus
networks is promising to overcome performance and scalability problems, like
Microchain [59] and EconLedger [60]. The rationale is using a periodically random-
elected consensus committee to reduce the latency and improve the throughput with
less computation and communication overheads on the edge network. However,
such a partial decentralized approach is inevitable to reduce security owing to fewer
miners or validators participating in consensus protocols. This chapter provides
a comprehensive overview of key techniques in epoch randomness generation,
network traffic model, and consensus committee configuration to design a secure
and efficient committee election mechanism. We introduce ECOM, an epoch
randomness-based consensus committee configuration as a case study, and provide
experimental results that demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the ECOM
scheme.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of
solutions to improve scalability of blockchain systems. The basics of classic epoch
randomness and configuration in distributed systems are explained in Sect. 3. Sec-
tion 4 describes popular network traffic models for data transmission in blockchain.
Section 5 introduces an epoch randomness-based committee configuration as a case
study on designing a unpredictable random committee election protocol. Section 6
concludes this chapter and summarizes the future research opportunities for IoT
blockchain networks.
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 137

2 An Overview of Scaling Blockchain Solutions

Scalability and performance are among the key challenges when integrating
blockchain into IoT systems. Proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains like Bitcoin suffer
high latency and low throughput of processing transactions. Thus, handling a large
volume of user data with time-sensitive requirements in IoT applications like smart
surveillance is difficult. In addition, processing and storing the complete blockchain
data is not suitable for IoT devices with limited storage and computing resources.
Furthermore, traditional blockchains use a broadcast manner for data transmission,
increasing network resource consumption and propagation delay at the edge.
To improve the scalability and performance of blockchain networks, many dif-
ferent solutions have been proposed to handle the challenges in terms of latency and
throughput improvement, storage optimization, and networking efficiency. Figure 1
provides an overview of solutions to scalable blockchain from the perspective of
system-level design, consensus implementation, and networking model. According
to the hierarchical structure of blockchain, scaling blockchain solutions can be
classified as off-chain or on-chain blockchains [62], which are described in the
following subsection. At the same time, details of the network traffic model are
explained in Sect. 4.

2.1 Off-Chain Blockchain Solutions

All off-chain solutions aim at reducing the burden of the main-chain (parent-chain)
by off-loading transaction verification or complex and computation-intensive tasks
to a sub-chain (child-chain) system. Therefore, off-chains are also called “layer-
two” protocols built on “layer-one” blockchains or parent-chains [10].

Fig. 1 A layered overview of solutions to scalable blockchains

138 R. Xu et al.

Payment Channel By establishing a temporary off-chain trading channel to pro-

cess transactions between parties, payment channel achieves to improve transaction
throughput and reduce transaction volume of the main-chain. Lightening network
[36] and Raiden Network [39] are representative solutions adopted by Bitcoin and
Ethereum separately. However, payment channel requires both parties to be online
at the same time to commit transactions or update states of the child-chain.

Side-Chain Similar to payment channel that relies on parent-chain to update

transaction status, Pegged Side-Chain [2] is the first side-chain solution that supports
atomicity of assets transfer between users within different child-chain of Bitcoin.
Plasma [35] is a side-chain platform that uses a smart contract on Ethereum main-
chain to record the rules and state of the child-chain. Compared to payment channel,
side-chain solutions are not limited to cash payment transaction; it also allows
multiple parties to interact with one another without online requirements for all
participants.

Off-Chain Smart Contract in Ethereum requires miners to re-execute contract

code, and every state, as a result, it is not suitable to run complex and high
computational tasks by smart contract. Thus, some off-chain solutions [17, 43] have
been proposed to build scalable and complex smart contract-based applications. The
task execution and verifiable computation are outsourced to off-chain platform, and
only final results and states are submitted back to the main-chain. Thus, side-chain
is a promising option for Decentralized Application (DApp) that requires different
performance and privacy guarantees. In sum, payment channel, side-chain, and off-
chain are deployed as child-chains associated with a monolithic blockchain, like
Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Cross-Chain Unlike the mentioned solutions that achieve scalability within a

mono-blockchain, cross-chain solutions [6, 45] aim to solve scalability by inter-
connecting independent blockchains as a multi-blockchain platform. In a cross-
chain system, individual blockchain (zone) may execute different consensus algo-
rithms like PoW or Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) to maintain its own distributed
ledger, and a hub-chain or relay-chain inter-links heterogeneous zones. An inter-
blockchain communication (IBC) protocol allows zones to communicate with one
another to exchange values or states.

2.2 On-Chain Blockchain

All on-chain solutions focus on performance improvements from perspective of

consensus protocol efficiency and chain data optimization.
Block Optimization Bitcoin Cash [4] increases its block size up to 8M, which is
8× than Bitcoin while still maintaining block interval time as 10 min. Increasing
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 139

block size allows a block to record more transaction such that throughput can be
improved with the stable block interval time. However, larger blocks inevitably incur
extra overhead on blockchain bandwidth and may lead to mining centralization.
Various solutions based on block and transaction compression are proposed to
improve the throughput of blockchains, like Txilm [9] and Lumino [22]. Using
a hash string with fixed length to represent a raw transaction can reduce some
redundant data of a block given majority transactions have been already buffered
in the Mempool of miners. Apart from increasing or compressing block data, CUB
[51] proposes a scheme that requires each node only store part of the block data
to reduce the storage overhead of each node. However, all the abovementioned
block data solutions demand more optimization and incentive mechanism to scale
the blockchain system.

Consensus Efficiency Various efficient consensus protocols are proposed to

improve scalability of blockchains. Bitcoin-NG [11] divides mining time into
epochs and a leader responsible for committing transactions into microblocks in
current epochs. At the end of an epoch, miners use PoW mechanism to generate
a key block, which is only used to select a leader for next epoch. The microblock
interval time is much shorter than original PoW block interval time, therefore, it
significantly reduces transaction confirmation delay and improves throughput. As
an alternative consensus mechanism that reduces energy consumption by PoW,
Proof of Stake (PoS) [18] allows miners to use their investment in a blockchain to
simulate a verifiable random function to propose new blocks. Owing to computation
efficiency and lower block confirmation time, PoS is promising to improve
performance and scalability of blockchain. Algorand [15] adopts a hybrid BFT-
PoS consensus protocol to achieve high throughput in a 500.000 nodes network.

Sharding Blockchain The sharding blockchains are inspired by the concept of

“sharding” [7] in infrastructure of distributed database and cloud. Through securely
establishing randomly selected sub-committees (shards), processing of transactions
is divided into shards. Thus, shards can perform consensus protocol in parallel to
maximize the performance and improve the throughput [44]. SCP [26] firstly incor-
porates sharding into permissioned BFT blockchain, while Elastico [27] extends
SCP to enable a secure sharding protocol for open blockchains. Elastico exhibits
almost linear scalability throughput with computation capacity with roughly O(n)
message complexity. However, the participants have to download full blockchain
data to perform the consensus task, which brings latency in bootstrapping process
and storage overload on client nodes.
To enable the parallelization of both network consensus and data storage, a “full
sharding” protocol called “OmniLedger” [19] is designed to provide “statistically
representative” shards for permissionless transaction processing. OmniLedger uses
a bias-resistant protocol called RandHound [42] to generate epoch global random-
ness strings for sharding committees formation. To optimize trade-off between the
number of shards, throughput, and latency, the intra-shard consensus follows an
“Optional Trust-but-Verify Validation” model, where optimistic validators make a
140 R. Xu et al.

provisional but unlikely-to-change commitment and core validators subsequently

verify again the transactions to provide finality and ensure verifiability [19]. To
secure cross-shard transactions, OmniLedger introduces a novel Byzantine Shard
Atomic Commit protocol to handle atomically transactions processing across
shards. Furthermore, a gradually in-and-out committee members swap strategy
could reduce extra message overhead and bootstrapping the latency in shard
reconstruction.
Another epoch-based, two-level BFT protocol called RapidChain [61] is pro-
posed for scaling blockchain via full sharding. RapidChain employs block pipelin-
ing strategy to achieve very high throughputs in the intra-committee consensus.
Furthermore, a novel gossiping protocol for large blocks reduces the large overhead
on committee-to-committee communication and ensures an efficient cross-shard
transaction verification.

Ledger Structure Unlike the tradition ledger structure of blockchain in which

all blocks are organized in a single hash chain, Directed Acrylic Graph (DAG)-
based solutions [3, 23, 37] are proposed to revise the ledger structure that allows
for concurrent transaction processing to improve throughput. In a DAG ledger, links
between data blocks do not follow one-to-one mapping in a chained structure, such
that multiple blocks can connect to a parent block. The blocks can be concurrently
processed, as a result, more transactions can be recorded in the system. However,
existing DAG solutions still rely on proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanisms to
guarantee the network scalability and mitigate Sybil attacks, and it is hard to further
apply on IoT scenarios.

3 Epoch Randomness and Configuration

Among all proposed scalable solutions, sharding scheme provides the most efficient
candidate for IoT scenarios by splitting the whole network into parallel small
consensus committees that significantly reduce computation, communication, and
storage overhead. Epoch randomness generation is an important issue to ensure
that all participants are “fairly” elected as committee members under a byzantine
network environment. By dynamically choosing nodes to reconfigure consensus
committee based on a global randomness mechanism, it can prevent an adversary
from concentrating its powers or stakes in a committee and controlling blockchain
by exceeding the Byzantine tolerant threshold. In general, a good distributed
randomness generation needs to satisfy proprieties, like Public-Verifiability, Bias-
Resistance, Unpredictability, and Availability [44]. The following subsections
introduce baselines of randomness generation.
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 141

3.1 Verifiable Random Function (VRF)

Without the knowledge of the seed s, a pseudorandom oracle vi = fs (xi ) is not

variable by any party that evaluates fs at point xi . However, future output values
vj = fs (xj ) are not indistinguishable from truly random string anymore, and they
can be predictably computed by any party. Verifiable Random Function (VRF) [29]
is proposed to provide a new type of pseudorandom oracle which aims to address
unverifiability of traditional Pseudo-Random Functions (PRFs). VRF requires that
the owner of the seed s publishes a value vi = fs (xi ) along with a string proofs (i).
Thus, any party can use proofs (i) to verify vi without revealing s. Thus, VRF
can guarantee verifiability of a pseudorandom oracle without compromising the
unpredictability requirement.
The non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZK) [13] is widely adopted by
VRF solutions that need neither interaction nor sharing a guaranteed random string.
The owner of fs only publishes its public key P K as a commitment to the function,
such that any party can use P K to verify a proof of correctness proofs (i) for
an output vi = fs (xi ) generated by the owner. However, NIZK proof verification
requires high communication complexity.

3.2 Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS)

By dividing secret data s into pieces call shares that are distributed among all
participants, secret sharing aims to reconstruct original s if more than a certain
threshold of participants can present correct shares. Shamir’s secret share protocol
[40] is a (t, n) threshold secret sharing scheme based on polynomial interpolation.
Given a unique polynomial q(x) = a0 + a1 x . . . + at−1 x t−1 with degree (t-1), a
dealer splits a secret s = a0 = q(0) into n points (xi , q(xi )) where 1 ≤ xi ≤ n and
assigns them to n clients separately. Given any subset of t points, s can be recovered
by calculating the coefficients of q(x) through interpolation, while knowledge of
less than t of shares cannot calculate s = g(0).
Shamir’s secret share protocol assumes that a dealer is honest such that all clients
can receive correct shares; it is not suitable for a Byzantine network environment.
Moreover, the validity of shares needs an interactive protocol requiring multiple
rounds of communication. As a fundamental tool of cryptography and distributed
computing, Non-interactive Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS) [12] is proposed to
protect against malicious dealer. Verification mechanism of VSS allows each
shareholder to validate its shares, and however, participants cannot verify validity
of their received shares.
142 R. Xu et al.

3.3 Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing (PVSS)

Unlike VSS that support multi-party verification, Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing
(PVSS) [41] scheme allows any party to verify secret shares from other participants
without revealing any information about owner’s secret or the shares. The PVSS
protocol requires that a group of clients C share random seeds bc∈C along with a set
of third-party verifiable proofs πc∈C . Only a threshold of honest clients can recover
random seeds from those valid shares.
In the share distribution phase, for each participant i, a client c uses a (t, n)-secret
sharing scheme to produce encrypted share Si = E(si ), the commitment Ac , and
a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZK) [13] encryption consistency proof
Pi . Thus, participant i can verify received secret shares by using Ac and Pi without
revealing any information about the shares or secret. Thus, the invalid shares will
be discarded. In the recovery phase, participant i can recover bc through a Lagrange
interpolation if no less than t shares are valid and correctly decrypted. The PVSS
can efficiently protect against dishonest clients who might intentionally create and
distribute invalid shares to prevent honest participants against recovering the unique
and validate secret.

4 Network Traffic Model in Blockchain

Blockchain relies on a P2P network to achieve the node discovery, data transmis-
sion, and message exchange for the execution of consensus protocol. Thus, network
traffic model is critical for security, privacy, and scalability of a blockchain [10].
In general, P2P communication protocols of the blockchain can be categorized into
unstructured or structured models.

4.1 Unstructured P2P Network Model

Gossip broadcast algorithms in P2P network adopt an epidemic-style communica-

tion [8] to distribute updates and drive the replicas toward consistency for database
maintenance. Bitcoin and Hyperledger fabric use the gossip protocol for transaction
and block propagation.
In an epidemic gossip protocol, a node holding updates which will be shared
with others is an “infective” node, while a node waits for an update that has not been
received is called a “susceptible” node. Specially, a node holding received updates is
not willing to spread shares which is defined as a “removed” node. Given required
node types in propagation, anti-entropy and rumor-mongering are two models in
epidemic process. The anti-entropy only requires infective and susceptible nodes
and is considered as SI model or simple epidemics model. The rumor-mongering
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 143

includes nodes of the three types and is recognized as SIR model or complex
epidemics model.
A modified gossip-based multicast protocol [16] is widely used in P2P network
to provide reliable and scalable message dissemination. In push gossip process, a
node m within a multicast subgroup g with infectivity Ig (m) gossips to a node n
within the network N with susceptibility Sg (n), the expected number of messages
sent from m to all
 n in a round is Ig (m)Sg (n), and the total number of messages sent
by m is Ig (m) n∈N Sg (n). Given assumption that each g gossips independently,
the expected number of messages sent by m is

Ig (m) Sg (n). (1)

m∈g n∈N

Similarly, we can calculate the expected number of messages received by m in a

pull gossip round as

Sg (m) Ig (n). (2)

m∈g n∈N

Unstructured network traffic models rely on randomly selected neighbors as

graph rather than a predefined topology. Owing to the unpredictable nature of
information dissemination, gossip-based multicast protocol can serve as a robust
and reliable data propagation mechanism in case of Churn that nodes frequently
failing, quitting, or joining. However, the performance is greatly impacted by the
large message overhead in the synchronous communication rounds [21]. The gossip
protocol needs the time complexity of O(logn) to ensure that all n nodes become
infected with high probability. The communication overhead and propagation
latency rise considerably when the number of nodes increases with the growing
network size.

4.2 Structured P2P Network Model

The structured P2P network relies on a predefined overlay topology to enable

a predictable and deterministic broadcast mechanism. Both Kademlia and Kafka
are widely adopted by underlying communication protocol implementation of
blockchain. For example, Ethereum uses Kademlia to optimize network routing for
node discovery and Hyperledger uses Kafka to support ordering services in BFT
consensus process.
Kademlia is a P2P distributed hash table (DHT) with provable and consistency
and performance in a fault-prone environment [28]. In the Kademlia, each node has
a node ID which is an unique identifier in the L-bit key space. The whole key space
can be partitioned into L depth binary tree such that each node is treated as a leaf.
Kademlia uses a novel XOR operation to calculate the distance between two nodes.
144 R. Xu et al.

As XOR is symmetric, the smaller result indicates the closer logic distance between
two nodes. The nodes with the same common prefix will be added to a k-bucket,
which can be recognized as a sub-tree.
For a node in Kademlia, the routing information is stored in a list of k-buckets,
and each k-bucket keeps sorted nodes by time last seen. The k in k-bucket is a
system-wide replication parameter (for example, k = 20) that assumes that k nodes
are unlikely to fail within an hour of each other. All k-buckets use a least-recently
seen eviction policy to update the routing table. It is resistant to certain Denial-of-
Service (DoS) attacks because an adversary cannot flush routing table by simply
flooding the network with new nodes. Kademlia adopts a recursive node lookup
algorithm to locate the k closest nodes to a target node ID. The lookup initiator
picks α ≥ 1 nodes from its closest non-empty k-bucket and then sends parallel and
asynchronous find node request to them.
Kafka aims to provide a distributed and scalable publish–subscribe messaging
system for log management with strong consistency given node crash failures [20].
In Kafka system, a topic defines a stream of messages containing a particular
type of payload and is divided into multiple partitions. Each broker only stores
one or more of partitions to balance load. A partition corresponds to a logic log
which is implemented as a set of segment files with the same size like 1 GB. A
message stored in Kafka is addressed by its logical offset in the log rather than
an explicit message id. Therefore, it reduces the overhead of maintaining auxiliary,
seek-intensive random-access index structures that uses message ids to map actually
location [20]. To support efficient data transfer in and out of Kafka, messages are
only cached on the underlying file system page cache instead of memory cache in
process. This avoids double buffering and allows for efficient implementation on
VM-based systems. Moreover, a multi-subscriber model can optimize the network
access for consumers.

5 ECOM: An Epoch Randomness-Based Committee

Configuration for IoT Blockchains

To enable a reliable decentralized deepfake detection for video–audio surveil-

lance systems [31, 32], EconLedger [60] adopts a novel Proof-of-ENF (PoENF)
consensus-based lightweight blockchain for small-scale IoT networks. EconLedger
relies on a small random selected consensus committee to improve performance and
scalability but at the cost of partial decentralization. Thus, an epoch randomness-
based committee configuration (ECOM) is designed and implemented on the
EconLedger network to ensure that robustness and security are not sacrificed by
a small-scale consensus network including fewer validators.
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 145

5.1 ECOM System Design

ECOM works under a permissioned network environment, which provides basic

security primitives like public key infrastructure (PKI), identity authentication, and
access control. All nodes must finish registration to join the network with authorized
access privileges, and therefore, it can prevent against Sybil attacks happened in the
open-access network. In general, smart surveillance systems run on a synchronous
network condition. Thus, operations and processes in ECOM can be coordinated
in rounds with bounded delay constraints. Figure 2 presents a system architecture
of ECOM including two main functionalities: (i) epoch randomness generation to
ensure unbiasability, unpredictability, and availability of global random seed update
and (ii) random committee configuration based on cryptographic scheme.
The epoch randomness is performed by current PoENF committee M at the end
of dynasty [60]. Each validator vi ∈ M queries the current head of distributed
ledger as the chain head and then feeds the hashed value to a pseudorandom number
generator to generate a random seed Si . The PoENF committee utilizes an epoch
randomness generation protocol to forge a global epoch random seed S ∗ based on
sum of recoverable and valid random seed Si . The S ∗ will be updated across the
whole network by a security and efficient P2P propagation mechanism. All nodes
use their ID profile and receive S ∗ to join a random committee election process.
Finally, validators of the new committee establish a fully connected P2P consensus
network and record the new committee configuration into an epoch block that is
finalized on the distributed ledger. Until now, a new dynasty starts, and all nodes

Fig. 2 The system architecture of ECOM

146 R. Xu et al.

can query the latest epoch block to learn the new committee configuration. The key
design and workflows are described as follows.
Epoch Randomness Generation Each validator vi ∈ M uses its keypair
(diSK , diP K ) ← RSA.gen(vi ) that is generated by a trust KPI for digital signature
scheme, like RSA.sign and RSA.ver. While data communication channels are
protected by symmetric encryption AE.enc and decryption AE.dec functions.
Given assumption that an adversary cannot control more than f validators, current
committee size needs to satisfy m = |M| ≥ 3f + 1. Our epoch randomness
generation uses a PVSS scheme, and we let t = f + 1 be the secret share threshold
to tolerant Byzantine failures.

– Share Distribution: each validator vi chooses a private set of coefficients aˆi =

(aik )k∈[0,t−1] , where aik ∈R Z∗q for a large prime q. Then, it uses aˆi to
t−1
build a degree of t − 1 security sharing polynomial si (x) = k=0 aik x
k

for (t, m) secret sharing. Let secret Si = si (0) = ai0 , then t-out-of-m
shares for other nodes are computed as si (j ), where j ∈ [1, m]. To enable
NIZK proof, vi selects a generator G of multiplicative group G and creates
a set of polynomial commitments Âi = (Gaik )k∈[0,t−1] along with proofs
Pi (j ) = Gsi (j ) associated with shares si (j ). Afterward, vi broadcasts encrypted
shares Sharesi (j ) = AE.enc(si (j ), Pi (j ), Âi ) along with a signature σi (j ) ←
RSA.sign((si (j ), Pi (j ), Âi ), diSK ) to peers vj such that i = j .
– Share Verification: every validator vi initializes a bit-vector V̂i = (vi1 , ..., vim )
to zero, which is used to keep track of valid secrets sj (0) received. After
receiving shares from vi , each peer vj validates σi (j ) by checking output of
RSA.ver(σi (j ), diP K ). If σi (j ) is valid, it decrypts shares (si (j ), Pi (j ), Âi ) ←
AE.dec(Sharesi (j )) and saves them for consistency check and recovery round.
Each validator vi uses buffered Aˆj to verify if each sj (x) is valid. The verification
process is done by checking that Sj (x) = Gsj (x) where


t−1
k t−1 k
Sj (x) = Axj k = G k=0 aj k x = Gsj (x) . (3)
k=0

Given verification results of sj (x), vi launches a Byzantine Agreement (BA)

voting process to finalize the consistency of shares used for recovering sj (0).
During the prepare stage, each vi broadcasts the message (p, i, j, 1) as a positive
vote on sj (0) if sj (i) is valid, where flag p means prepare stage. Otherwise, the
client broadcasts message (p, i, j, 0) as a negative vote.
– Share Commitment: for the commit stage, until at least 2f + 1 positive prepare
votes are received for secret sj (0), vi broadcasts (c, i, j, 1) as a positive com-
mitment, where the flag c indicates the commit stage. If there are at least f + 1
negative prepare votes for secret sj (0), vi broadcasts (c, i, j, 0) as a negative
commitment. Finally, if there are at least 2f + 1 positive commitment votes for
secret sj (0), validator vi finalizes the consistency of shares by setting vij = 1
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 147

in V̂i , which indicates that the secret sj (0) is recoverable if at least t validators
survive at recovery round.
– Randomness Recovery: each validator i checks vij in V̂i and puts all 1-entry of
j into a set of recoverable nodes M  . If m = |M  | ≥ t, vi broadcasts sj (i) and
M  to all peers for sj (0) recovery. Once at least t shares for each j = i have
arrived, validator vi can reconstruct the secret sharing polynomial sj (x) through
a Lagrange interpolation and compute the secret sj (0). Finally, the global random
seed can be computed:


m
∗
S = sj (0), m > f. (4)
j =1

Because all honest validators of consensus committee have the same set M  , they
can make agreement on a unique global random seed S ∗

Random Committee Configuration Given a small-scale EconLedger network

including ui ∈ N nodes, each node ui uses its credit stake 0 ≤ ci ≤ Cmax to
participant new committee election. The committee configuration relies on a VRF-
based cryptographic sortition scheme [15] that chooses a random subset of nodes
as committee
 according to per-node’s credit stake. The total credit of all nodes is
C = n1 ci , where n = |N|, the probability that node i becomes a member of the
new committee is proportional to ci /C. Let current epoch randomness Se = S ∗ ,
then each node ui will be assigned a Virtual ID V I Di as

(V I Di , πi ) = V RFd SK (Se ||vi ), (5)

i

where V RF is a verifiable random function, πi is a verifiable string for V I Di , and

vi is identity information of ui .
To select committee members in proportion to their credits, each unit of credit is
considered as a different “sub-node.” If node i owns ci (integral) units of credit, the
simulated node (i, j ) with j ∈ {1, . . . , ci } represents the j th unit of credit that node
i owns, and node i is selected with probability p = Cτ , where τ specifies a threshold
to determine the expected number of nodes selected for final committee. The V I Di
generated by Eq. (5) could be used to determine how many sub-nodes are selected.
Since the probability that exactly k out of the c (the node’s credit) sub-nodes are
selected follows the binomial distribution, B(k; c, p) = (ck )pk (1 − p)c−k , where
 c
k=0 B(k; c, p) = 1. The sortition algorithm first divides the interval [0,1) into
consecutive intervals I j defined as form:
⎡ ⎤
j j +1
I =⎣
j
B(k; c, p), B(k; c, p)⎦ , j ∈ {1, . . . , ci }. (6)
k=0 k=0
148 R. Xu et al.

Given interval I j in which V I Di /2L (where L is the bit-length of hashed VID

string) falls, the number j will be used to represent how many of a node’s c
sub-nodes are selected. By using a biased resistant global epoch random seed Se ,
the V I D generated by VRF defined in Eq. (5) is essentially uniformly distributed
between 0 and 2L − 1. Without knowing private key diSK , an adversary cannot
predicate if a node ui is chosen or not. Thus, the committee members are selected
at random according to nodes’ credits.

5.2 Prototype Implementation

To verify the proposed ECOM, a concept-proof prototype is implemented in Python.

The networking and web service APIs by client and server are developed by
using Flask [14], which is a light micro-framework for Python application. All
cryptographic functions are developed on the foundation of standard python lib:
cryptography [38], and we use RSA for key generation and digital signature while
using SHA-256 for all hash operations.
Table 1 describes the devices used for the experimental study. All devices run on
the local area network (LAN) to simulate a small-scale smart surveillance network.
The Dell Optiplex-7010 manages node information and acts as a bootstrap node
to initialize a Kademlia P2P network, while 20 Raspberry Pis (RPis) simulate
IoT devices, which can work as nodes or validators to perform PoENF consensus
algorithm and ECOM protocol.

5.3 Performance Evaluation

To evaluate the latency of the running ECOM including both the round trip time
(RTT) and service processing time on the local host, a set of experiments is
conducted by executing multiple complete rounds of ECOM consensus protocol.
We conducted 100 Monte Carlo test runs and used the average of results for
evaluation. The computation costs by message encryption and decryption are not
considered during the test. As BA voting process requires a majority condition of

Table 1 Configuration of experimental nodes

Device Dell Optiplex-7010 Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
CPU Intel Core TM i5-3470 (4 cores), Broadcom ARM Cortex A72 (ARMv8), 1.5
3.2 GHz GHz
Memory 8 GB DDR3 4 GB SDRAM
Storage 350G HHD 64 GB (microSD card)
OS Ubuntu 16.04 Raspbian GNU/Linux (Jessie)
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 149

Fig. 3 Latency for completing one round of epoch randomness generation with different
validators. Each line represents time delay incurred by single step in protocol

n ≥ 3f + 1, the minimum committee size is 4. Figure 3 presents the latency caused

by completing an entire round of epoch randomness generation given the number of
validators (committee size) varying from 4 to 20.
In Create_shares step, each validator locally computes t-out-of-n Shamir secret
shares of a random seed b with computation complexity O(n + t). Thus, the latency
is almost linear scale to n, and it varies from 40 ms to 138 ms. Like secret shares
generation, Verify_shares and Sum_randomness steps only process received shares
with complexity O(n), and their delays are almost linear scale to n. Compared with
Sum_randomness which simply sums a set of recovered random seeds to generate
an epoch random seed, Verify_shares involves more mathematical operations, like
modular multiplication for NIZK proofing. Therefore, the Verify_shares step incurs
longer delay than Sum_randomness does. During Recover_shares step, a validator
reconstructs each secret by computing Lagrange basis polynomials in time O(n). As
a result, it requires computation cost O(n2 ) in total to recover all n secrets. As Fig. 3
illustrates, line of Recover_shares introduces more latency as increasing nodes than
Verify_shares does.
In Distribute_shares step, each validator sends shares to n−1 participants, so that
the communication latency becomes dominant without considering encryption and
decryption overhead. Given O(n) communication complexity for each validator,
network latency of Distribute_shares varies from 77 ms to 436 ms as nodes scale
from 4 up to 20. As Vote_shares and Collect_shares steps also incur communication
complexity O(n) by sending voting messages and verifying shares, their delays have
the almost same scaling trend as Distribute_shares shows in Fig. 3. Given results
shown in Fig. 3, we can calculate the total network latency of executing an epoch
randomness generation round, which varies from 0.3 s to 1.7 s as nodes scale from
4 up to 20.
150 R. Xu et al.

5.4 Security Analysis

Given the assumption that honest validators follow the protocol and cryptographic
primitives can provide their intended security properties, the secret sharing threshold
t = f + 1 can prevent dishonest peers from recovering the honest nodes’ secrets
before the barrier. Thus, our epoch randomness generation can ensure unbiasability.
In addition, calculating global random seed S ∗ requires m ≥ f + 1 recoverable
secrets such that at most f are from malicious peers. Given that at least one random
seed is shared by the honest validator, unpredictability of the epoch random seed is
guaranteed. Furthermore, assuming that the secret sharing threshold t = f + 1 as
well as no collaboration between the dishonest nodes, availability is ensured because
f + 1 honest nodes out of the total 2f + 1 positive voters are able to recover the
secrets.
We assume that an adversary can control no more than  n3  of committee
members, and therefore, honest validators can correctly maintain agreed epoch
random seeds. The security of committee configuration mechanism can be modeled
as a random sampling problem with two possible outputs: honest or malicious.
Given assumption that potential nodes are infinite, the power of adversary follows
the binomial distribution in form of (Eq. (7)):

 n 
n
P X≤  = (nk )mk (1 − m)n−k . (7)
3
k=0

Owing to unpredictable epoch random seed generation, each committee formation

based on a VRF-based sortition scheme is complete random. Therefore, an adver-
sarial has at most m = 0.25 probability of controlling a single round committee
selection. As a result, the probability that an adversary controls n consecutive
committee formation is upper-bounded by

1
P [X ≥ n] = < 10−λ . (8)
4n
Let system security parameter λ = 6, then an adversary can control at most 10
consecutive committee election rounds with high probability.

6 Conclusions

This chapter reviews the basics of improving performance and scalability in

blockchain systems. Given a comprehensive overview of scaling blockchain solu-
tions, epoch randomness mechanism and network traffic model are evaluated and
recognized as key challenges in designing parallel small-scale consensus networks
for heterogeneous IoT scenarios. In addition, ECOM is introduced as a case study
ECOM: Epoch Randomness-Based Committee Configuration 151

that demonstrates how epoch randomness generation and committee selection can
guarantee the robustness and security of a small-scale consensus committee under a
Byzantine network environment.
ECOM is a promising solution to enable unpredictable random committee
configuration and mitigate reduced security by fewer validators. However, several
open issues remain in developing a practical solution in real-world IoT systems.
Although PVSS-based epoch randomness generation can achieve efficiency in a
small-scale network, more investigation and test are needed to evaluate how epoch
random seed propagation latency and coverage are influenced by the network
size. Another challenge is designing a hybrid P2P communication mechanism by
combining unstructured and structured models, which greatly impacts performance
and security in IoT blockchains.

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Customer Outcome Framework for
Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone
Applications

Melissa Liow, Li Sa, and Yeap Peik Foong

1 Introduction

Blockchain-based mobile phone applications (BMPAs) have been growing rapidly

in the digital economy. Along with the increase in BMPA users, the number
of businesses accepting blockchain-based mobile payment modes is on the rise.
BMPAs present great opportunity for businesses to increase their selling of products
and forge customer loyalty. BMPAs chronologically record transactions and track
assets through shared distributed ledgers in a network. The functions of BMPAs
include making a reservation, booking a flight or a hotel room, entering into a
contractual agreement, sending and receiving money, and making payments for
products and services [1]. This technology permits trailing the ownership of assets
and the right to use when leased to a third party. Anything of value can be recorded,
trailed, leased, and exchanged on BMPAs. Replica records of these transactions are
seamlessly shared with participating agents in a network. While BMPA technology
is still in its embryonic stages, airlines, hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, and
other retail businesses find that by embracing the blockchain technology in their
operations, the stakeholders will collectively gain value from its usage.
Most of the blockchains are linked with cryptocurrencies. While blockchains
are mostly public, the participants’ identity is kept anonymous throughout the
transactions. A business blockchain does not necessarily need any cryptocurrency,
such as Litecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, and is therefore kept private. Permission
is required to access the distributed ledger, and the level of permission can vary

M. Liow · L. Sa
PSB Academy, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]
Y. P. Foong ()
University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 155
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_8
156 M. Liow et al.

depending on the participants’ role in the network. Despite the complexity of

blockchain technology, the implications for the industries can be positive and long-
standing for improving customer satisfaction, service quality, customer loyalty,
repeat purchases, and profitability [1]. Its essential features have the potential to
revolutionize many business aspects. The cryptographic security, tamper-free, and
trust-evident structure can develop decentralized autonomous businesses, create
smart contracts, digitalize fiat currencies, and offer many more applications.
Hospitality businesses pursue the likelihood of digitalizing fiat currencies, the likes
of Expedia.com, Travloka.com, TUI Group, and BitcoinSky. The process becomes
quicker, and transactions are secured through disintermediation, which in turn
reduces the processing costs [1].
Researchers have criticized BMPA in many ways, from user interfaces to
overwhelming sites and from mobile phone applications to an overemphasis on
promotional efforts at the expense of content [1–3]. These factors are likely
important contributors, but the more likely cause is the lack of understanding of the
firm’s targeted markets. Scholars argue that e-commerce, social media, and mobile
commerce should consider the desired value or motivations behind consumer use
of the sites or mobile phone applications [4, 5]. Shoppers tend to select and return
to retailers who provide superior value. Therefore, retailers must develop and offer
value propositions that are most tempting to customers.
Value judgments are the most important predictors of preference, satisfaction,
customer loyalty, and repeat customers’ usage or purchase intention [6]. Many
scholars assert that trust between the retailers and customers is critical to encourage
their initial and continuous patronage [7, 8]. Many extant studies investigated these
constructs in the context of offline consumer behavior and the online shopping
behavior in e-commerce sites. In terms of customers shopping using BMPAs,
empirical research has begun to appear in the marketing literature. Yet, many
unanswered questions still linger, including whether the offline and online customer
values and trust dimensions recognized in the retailing literature are likewise
relevant within the BMPA context. If so, to what degree these differences in value
dimensions influence their identification with the BMPA and its customers’ future
usage.
Therefore, the first objective in this chapter is to conduct a literature review
that identifies a suitable overarching research philosophy for BMPA. The literature
related to blockchain technology, AI, and mobile phone applications would give
researchers insights to understand why individuals continue to use the BMPAs when
purchasing goods and services through three lenses: the means-end chain theory,
social identity theory, and prospect theory. The second objective in this chapter
is to develop a Customer Outcome Framework designed for businesses that adopt
BMPAs. The proposed framework will be multidimensional in nature. The third
objective in this chapter is to improve the understanding of how utilitarian and
hedonic values, trustworthiness, BMPA identification, and perceived risk differ in
terms of influencing the repeat customers’ usage of BMPAs. The overall aim is to
understand customer shopping behavior in the BMPA environment.
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 157

We endeavor to discuss in the context of Singapore because it is a financial hub in

Asia, and it has been striving to be the first mover in forming an electronic payment
society in Asia. It all started with its online General Interbank Recurring Order
(GIRO) system back in 1984. Today, the nation boosts a high mobile payment rate
among the young and old. A Smart Financial Centre was setup to rollout FinTech
nationwide that shows the serious commitment of the government to achieving the
Smart Nation vision. The vision has driven the surge of applying blockchain and
artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that help ease business transactions. These
digital wallets had broadly improved people’s lives in this island city. Therefore,
the high level of digital inclusion of Singapore’s society makes the nation a suitable
research ground for studies regarding BMPAs and its consumer behavior.

2 Literature Review

A review of the extant studies and Singapore’s online government sites found
that stakeholders across different industries aim to invest in the right BMPA
technology that benefits their customers. Singapore’s electronic payment journey
will be presented, which played an integral part in educating users and inculcat-
ing responsible online purchasing behavior through secured channels. Singapore
government agencies, business merchants, its banking and finance industry, and
users form the electronic payment community of Singapore’s Smart Nation vision.
Blockchain and AI have become one of the most formidable pairs applied in the
metaverse, complementing one another’s strengths and weaknesses. The technology
pair provides personalized services to users and at the same time protects customers’
personal biodata. Some of the observable benefits with this powerful pair enable
precise data mining for the business community and into improving people’s lives.
The number of users participating in the mobile payment is increasing, and by
integrating the blockchain and AI with the mobile phone payment applications,
this chapter introduces the blockchain-based mobile phone applications (BMPAs).
This is followed by a critical review of relevant literature from 1991 to 2021. The
literature review is performed through the following three lenses: means-end chain
theory, social identity theory, and prospect theory.

2.1 Singapore’s Electronic Payment Journey

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, MAS [9], stated that electronic payments
have been around in Singapore since the mid-1980s. It started with GIRO, which
is a cashless, paperless, and convenient payment method that allows users to make
worry-free payments to billing organizations via their bank accounts. FAST (Fast
and Secure Transfers) was a new electronic fund transfer service launched in 2014.
FAST permits account holders of the participating banks to instantly transfer local
158 M. Liow et al.

currency from one bank to another bank. Digital wallets are projected to overtake
credit cards by 2024 amid the e-commerce boom, and the lingering COVID-19
pandemic had seen its popularity soar. It was cited in The New Straits Times (March
3, 2021) e-article and report from the Worldpay from FIS [10] pertaining to the latest
global payments that bank transfers constitute 12%, followed by digital wallets
(20%) and credit cards (45%) in 2020. These are also the three most pervasive online
payment methods in Singapore. Electronic payments offer users an efficient and
swift method to pay, thus helping businesses to increase productivity. Singapore’s
Smart Nation vision has been the primary driver that is harnessing blockchain and
artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve people’s lives. The convergence
of blockchain and AI can delve in machine learning and empower AI to create and
trade financial products. Blockchain technology permits secured sharing and storage
of data or anything of value, and AI can perform data mining to generate insights
of online customer behavior for value creation. The Smart Financial Centre was
setup by MAS to roll out FinTech nationwide. Electronic payment is one of the
top items in the Smart Financial Centre’s agenda. The MAS vision is to produce
an electronic payment society not only to increase users’ convenience but also to
drive innovation and address market competition. This is where Singapore’s BMPA
journey started till the present date. MAS plays a pivotal role in Singapore Payments
Roadmap. It is the central bank and the financial regulatory authority of Singapore.
MAS formulates strategies and infrastructure, develops policies, cooperates with
industries, and enables an innovative and competitive payment ecosystem that is
secure and safe. MAS aims for an inclusive electronic payment society where
electronic payment becomes accessible and user-friendly for everyone. MAS works
together with KPMG on the Singapore Payments Roadmap to create an efficient
payment ecosystem in Singapore. There was a survey conducted by KPMG with
more than 2500 stakeholders in the local payment ecosystem. The goal is to
understand the present state of how business merchants and consumers make
payments. Based on the recommendations constituted in the Singapore Payments
Roadmap, the Payments Council was formed by MAS to drive collaboration,
innovation, and adoption of electronic payments in the industry. The council was
headed by the MAS Managing Director and other stakeholders, including business
merchants, banks, trade associations, and payment service providers. The new
Payment Services Act or PS Act was passed by the Parliament in 2019. The
act streamlines and unifies the regulatory requirements for the range of payment
services, including electronic payments, in Singapore. The PS Act embraces a risk-
focused and a modular methodology to adhere MAS’ rules regarding the scope and
risks of every payment service. It allows MAS to respond quickly and be nimble
to the evolving payments landscape. Overall, maintaining stability and facilitating
growth and innovation of electronic payments in Singapore are paramount.
The nationwide electronic payment options were updated in 2021. These include
the Singapore Quick Response Code (SGQR), PayNow, and PayNow Corporate
[11]. These electronic payments were established in the Singapore market since
2019, and the growth in the volume and value has been going strong. Alongside
debit and credit card transaction volumes and values being stable between 2019 and
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 159

2021, the PayNow volumes and values have doubled in 2020 and continued to grow
strongly in 2021. Therefore, the use of digital wallet has been expanding among
end customers. The SGQR take-up rate has grown from 42 thousand merchant
acceptance points in 2019 to 120 thousand and over 260 thousand in 2020 and
2021, respectively. There are presently more than 150 thousand (or 75%) merchants
in Singapore that have accepted SGQR as a payment mode. Other than retail stores
in the shopping centers, the adoption of SGQR is widespread in hawker centers.
The Hawkers Go Digital campaign was introduced in 2020 to further promote the
adoption of SGQR into the nation’s heartlands. More than 11,000 stalls islandwide
made close to $18.3 million, which was close to two million electronic payment
transactions (over 94% is made via SGQR) in August 2021 alone. Overall, an
interoperable infrastructure has been put into a system that permits low cost, secure,
safe, and convenient electronic payments for multiple payment service providers in
Singapore. The SG Digital Office (SDA) and the InfoComm Media Development
Authority (IMDA) recently collaborated to work on NETSBIZ app. This app allows
stallholders to track their payment transactions. Enhancement features including a
clear audio alert for incoming transactions in the hawker environment and the use
of color to highlight the latest transactions and check against fraudulent transactions
are some of the plans in the pipeline [12].
A recent Visa Digital Inclusion Research was conducted by EUGINE Insights in
2021 (Visa Inc., 1996–2021). Two hundred Singaporean and permanent residents
between 50 and 80 years of age have participated in the survey. The study aimed to
explore the accessibility and literacy of e-commerce services and digital payments
among the seniors in Singapore. It was found that 36% of the seniors have done
online shopping in the past 1 year compared with 25% in 2018. The top online
purchases encompass cleaning or household products (63%), food and groceries
(68%), and clothing (69%). Thirty percent of the seniors prefer shopping online than
visiting physical brick-and-mortar stores. This trend of digital adoption is likely to
accelerate with the COVID-19 pandemic amid the concerns, such as hygiene and
safe-distancing measures. This is a confident image of Singapore seniors to partake
in the move towards digital-first experiences. Factors such as the ability to shop
from the comfort of his or her home (63%), ease of use (64%), and convenience
(79%) have driven higher e-commerce surfing rates among this market segment in
Singapore. Being the global leader in digital payments, Visa Inc. [13] is committed
to advancing digital inclusion so that no one gets left behind. It deems that more
work is necessary to change the behaviors of those who have not applied and
experienced electronic payment. While the seniors are more aware of the use of
digital wallets, Visa Inc. identifies that more education for this group of consumers is
needed so that they can enjoy the secure and seamless digital payment experiences.
According to the study, seniors in Singapore are familiar with mobile contactless
payments (56%), QR code payments (67%), and contactless card payments (90%).
Twenty-two percent, 31%, and 68% of the seniors have used QR code payments,
made mobile contactless payments, and contactless card payments, respectively.
Fifty percent of the seniors cited that they would continue to make digital payments
post-COVID-19, and 37% of them prefer to go to business merchants that accept
digital payment methods.
160 M. Liow et al.

2.2 Blockchain and AI Combination in the Metaverse

Jeon et al. [14] described the metaverse as a virtual world that goes beyond
reality. Blockchain and AI have significantly contributed to the creation of the
virtual world. The demand for virtual reality increases during the pandemic and
endemic stages of the COVID-19; therefore the industry representing the metaverse
is expanding. This section explains how blockchain and AI impact the metaverse.
The term metaverse is a blend of meta (means virtual transcendence) and verse (a
backformation from the universe). There are four categories of metaverse according
to the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF), which is a non-for-profit technology
research organization: (1) a perfect virtual story in a virtual world, (2) a mirror world
resembling the real world at present, (3) an augmented reality that demonstrates a
combination of augmented information in life and the real world, and (4) capturing
and storing daily information about things and people. The increased number of
users and activities using new technologies has generated huge amount of data in
the metaverse. As the amount of data increases in the metaverse, the value, security,
and reliability of the data have become a key concern too. Blockchain technology
offers solutions to guarantee the reliability of the metaverse data, whereas AI keeps
the rich and diverse metaverse content secure.
Blockchain and AI complement each other in the creation of the virtual world.
Humans have desires and urges for creation, and therefore humans have been
creating new cultures. Oh and Youn [15] described the new SeaCircle concept
of culture aka human cultural activities for creating. The theory identifies cre-
ativity as one of the elements of open mind and spirit. The metaverse can be
described as a platform that enables people to become more engaged in creative
pursuits by resettling the resources and space limits. Recently, the real world and
the virtual world have further converged due to the Fifth Industrial Revolution.
This phenomenon is happening as humans and things become hyperconnected.
Production and consumption are inseparable for digital Design It Yourself (DIY)
and social customization. The human (offline) world makes its own effort to
focus and own the fundamental 20% due to scarce resources while applying the
Pareto’s Law. Conversely, in the online world of information, sharing and searching
opportunities from the relegated 80% of customers would be appropriate to explain
the Long Tail Theory. This convergence is ubiquitous across many sectors in our
everyday lives, including finance, food, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and
sports. One example of the applications in metaverse is where multiple users can
freely trade products based on the transaction method and currency via community-
based platforms. Virtual assets such as Decentraland MANA and Sand in the
SandBox, which were launched in 2017 and 2020, respectively, are community-
driven platforms. Creators can monetize gaming experiences and voxel ASSETS
using blockchain technology. The metaverse creates an alternate world that would
not be possibly attained in the real world. Blockchain becomes one of the trusted
technologies, so the real thing is becoming data in the virtual world.
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 161

Blockchain was first known to the world in a paper on Bitcoin: P2P Electronic
Money System proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is a blockchain to create and
connect blocks containing data and to reach a consensus among participating
modes. Algorithms such as Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Work (PoW) are
used in this process. Blockchain 2.0 enabled Ethereum smart contract execution
with online legal effect without an intermediary. In addition, Blockchain 3.0
focuses on improving transaction processing speed and consensus algorithms and
its application in expanded fields, where the synergy of blockchain and AI is reified
more tangibly in the metaverse environment. For example, Decentraland allows
users to buy land in a virtual real estate using MANA, an ERC-20 token. Land
ownership and other collectible items are ERC-721 non-exchangeable tokens. Users
can earn income by placing billboards to buildings, freely place buildings on land
purchased from Decentraland, or open exhibitions by accumulating rare digital
content.
This phenomenon of cognitive and scientific revolution has enabled humans
to enter the phase of connected and combined intelligence with machines. The
blockchain and AI technology are speeding up this phenomenon. Blockchain
permits reliable and safe transactions through decentralization and now serves as
a digital asset for the society. AI is at a phase where creation and prediction are
achievable with pattern recognition and study using mass volume of data. When
AI and blockchain technology were combined, both have changed conventional
business models and have positively transformed the communities. However, one
of the weaknesses of AI is its inherent centralized data storage, making it an easy
target for manipulation, hacking, and data tampering. Blockchain complements AI
to address its challenges. The blockchain mechanisms offer origin and immutability
as well as control address privacy issues and enhance accountability of trust and
decisions. A tangible outcome of combining blockchain and AI is enabling trusted
digital evaluation and decision-making on mass volumes of data. It also creates
an environment that secures data sharing and makes AI understandable while
incorporating trust among devices. Despite this, the blockchain technology has its
shortcomings. The transaction speed is slowed down when a new block is added
to the blockchain. This becomes less efficient for sectors that need high speed
because consensus of all nodes is needed. Due to the irreversibility of blockchain,
correction for an error or vulnerability spotted in the script of smart contracts
becomes an impediment. The integrity of the blockchain data can be compromised
due to these vulnerabilities. Hacking millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrencies
would be disastrous. This blockchain imperfect algorithm somehow is subdued
and compensated by AI’s machine learning systems that enhance the security of
blockchain applications. AI can aid in dynamic setting with what parameters to
increase scalability, offer governance procedures, and make customization effective.
In the case of public blockchain, privacy infringement is possible as any person
can investigate the transaction ledgers, and it is costly to manage personal data
in the blockchain. AI does not perform analysis, not without prior permission,
but it is able to perform analysis on a local device belonging to the individual.
AI offers personalized services to users that do not violate privacy of personal
162 M. Liow et al.

biodata. Therefore, blockchain and AI complement each other’s weaknesses to

make people’s lives better [16]. For instance, many companies are powered by
the pair of blockchain technology and AI in healthcare record sharing (BurstIQ,
Gainfy), food supply chain logistics (Bext360), financial security (AI BlockChain),
and media royalties (Blackbird.AI, BoxSpring Media) [16].
The phenomenon of combining the values of the blockchain and AI has made
progress in recent years. Both technologies offer enhanced trust in data integrity
(authenticity), a new level of intelligence to blockchain-based business networks
(augmentation), and business process efficiency (automation) [17]. Automation
and trust in the data for loan processing in the financial service industry allow
faster closing of loan applications that enhances customer satisfaction. Healthcare
organizations can better identify patient data patterns on blockchain, while AI
surfaces treatment insights, promoting patient care while protecting privacy of
the electronic health records. The duo in the life sciences and pharmaceutical
industry add traceability and visibility to the drug supply chain and acutely improve
the success rate of clinical trials. This is possible as blockchain and AI permit
transparency, data integrity, automation of trial participation, consent management,
patient tracking, and data collection by combining advanced data analysis within
a decentralized framework. Blockchain and AI are transforming the supply chain
of various sectors through digitalization and paperless process. It makes the data
trustworthy for sharing and allows automation and adding intelligence to fulfill
transactions. A firm can increase its decarbonization efforts by monitoring the
carbon emission data of parts and products accurately to achieve a sustainable
business model.
In the metaverse, various and large amounts of secondary and tertiary data are
produced because of the high user activities. In the blockchain-based metaverse, this
data is traceable due to its unique identification tag, and it becomes a good material
for AI in the metaverse. Metaverse enables the pair of blockchain technology and
AI to create a digital virtual world where users can freely and safely partake in
socioeconomic activities that are beyond the real-world limits. The application of
these advanced technologies is accelerated and has found its role expanding in the
form of mobile payment applications in the world of metaverse.

2.3 Mobile Payment Applications

Cao et al. [18] cited that the number of users participating in mobile payment
has increased exponentially. This is possible with the coordination of banking
systems with the mobile payment applications. Based on Insider Intelligence [19],
mobile phone users of ages 14 and above, 87.3 percent of China’s smartphone
users have made at least one proximity mobile payment transaction in the past
6 months, followed by South Korea (45.6%), the United States (43.2%), India
(40.1%), and Japan (34.9%). Samsung Payments, Apple Payments, and Google
Android Payments are extending their international payment methods, including the
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 163

largest global mobile payment market players, such as WeChat and Ali Pay from
China. The newly minted emerging middle-class societies largely in the two most
populated countries in the world, China and India, are more conscious of the mobile
payment options, and their lifestyles have improved significantly. Networld Media
Group, LLC [20], found that mobile payment was the most frequently used point-of-
sale payment method worldwide, accounting for 21.5% of the transaction payment
market share in 2020. The boom is likely spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic
where customers fear of the potential virus transmission due to handling of the
paper banknotes. The mobile payment trend has seen an increase in the number of
customers from about 900 million to 1.48 billion during the pandemic timeframe.
It is projected to account for 33.4% of the worldwide point-of-sale transactions by
2024.
Mobile payment permits customers to do transaction and payment with mobile
devices such as tablets and smartphones. Through payment instructions to financial
companies and banks, customers can make fund transfers and monetary payments
through mobile devices, near-field communication (NFC), and mobile plan. Finan-
cial institutions and application providers can fulfill financial services through
Internet by enabling terminal devices and mobile payments for funds. Mobile
payments using transportation tickets, credit cards, and membership cards via a
mobile terminal convert the mobile phone into a digital wallet. Mobile terminals can
free customers from travel and reduce geographical barriers of business locations.
The connection between the Internet and mobile communication terminals has made
it possible for round-the-clock uninterrupted financial services. Mobile payments
are speedy, all-weather service, and multi-functional, and there is no need to prepare
for a small change. Micropayments are payments of small amounts of less than
USD10, and macropayments are about several dozens of USD via the Internet, e.g.,
purchases such as video downloads, drinks, and small house fixtures. Presumably
under satisfying security conditions, this requires less data transmission, storage,
and management for network efficiency and speed. The primary difference is that it
would be adequate to use the SIM card to authenticate micropayments through the
mobile network itself. On the other hand, the authentication needs to be run through
a financial institution for macropayments.
Mobile phone applications are applications developed to operate on a tablet,
smartphone, and other mobile devices that can be downloaded from mobile software
app stores for a small fee or even for free. Mobile payment apps such as Apple
Pay, Google Wallet, and Samsung Pay are creating a new trend, be it technology
sophistication or business model ideation. Therefore, a business model can be
designed by combining apps with mobile payment that characterizes collaboration
among information communication technology, finance, and retailers based on the
FinTech development [21].
Literature on mobile banking, mobile banking apps, and mobile devices has
seen a remarkable progress in the emerging technologies arena. One of the more
advanced sectors that experienced more tangible innovation and advancement in
this arena is the banking industry and its mobile banking apps. Modern smartphones
have changed the messaging between banks and individuals, and further recog-
164 M. Liow et al.

nizing the omnipresent penetration of mobile phones in electronic dealings would

transform the methods of doing business [22]. The mission is for people to make
purchases anytime and anywhere through their mobile phones. Banks, customers,
and other financial service providers get to access a worldwide computing payment
system. Tijani and Ilugbemi [23] claimed that Internet moveable banking helps
bridge time and geographical obstacles through a range of electronic services,
as customers can perform monetary transaction while on the move. It is which
people initiate, pay bills, and transfer funds via electronic means using their mobile
devices. Consumers with moveable devices have spurred the activation of moveable
banking apps by banks in the developing and advanced economies. The total
payment value reached $503 billion in 2020, 79% of smartphone owners have
made an online purchase with their device in the last 6 months, and the total
number of unique mobile users globally is projected to reach 5.22 billion by the
end of 2021 [24]. The elderly, children, and physically challenged individuals are
demanding for more location-based services, and economies of scale have made
smartphones with Internet applications affordable, forging more inclusive societies.
This consumer behavior and trend of using mobile devices and mobile banking
apps have its own share of privacy and security issues. This may be linked to
peoples’ concerns about the new service platforms as most customers do not have
confidence for the service channels [23]. It is when customers trust the interface
and connections that channel their cash can they accept new innovations in the
way that the sector demands. Security doubts and risks are what most customers
have less faith in, such as not completing transactions, the challenges to retrieve
or track non-completed transactions, and the time-consuming process that may
take weeks or months for banks to solve the problems. Spajić [24] stated that the
number of fraudulent transactions related to mobile apps has increased by 600%
since 2015 (i.e., one in every 20 fraud attacks is linked to a rogue mobile app).
About 89% of the digital fraud losses are associated with account takeovers that
resulted in $40 million in losses. This explains why the diffusion rate and adoption
level of new platforms for some banks have been slow in the developing economies.
Unlike conventional payment modes, payments using the moveable devices are
susceptible to hacking and bot attacks. Fraudsters use social media to advertise
their virtual stores over the mobile apps and sell stolen data. Mobile banking usage
figures have found some users even share their account details via email and text
messages with the apparently “legitimate organizations” on social media platforms.
For the less-developed African nations, which are less equipped with infrastructure,
cost may represent a hindrance involving Internet subscriptions and fees related to
the mobile banking apps. Extant studies have investigated the factors influencing
mobile banking growth by mostly applying traditional statistical modeling, such
as Pearson’s correlation, partial least squares, and structural equation modeling
[25–27]. Nourani et al. [28] found that the results of these models are inaccurate
and unreliable, and sometimes bias, compared with the AI-based techniques that
are flexible, robust, and accurate. Thus, the AI-based techniques are appropriate
for research that is complex in nature, for instance, studying attitudes, behaviors,
and emotions. Based on the cited strengths in Sect. 2.2, the pair of blockchain
and AI primarily complements and strengthens data reliability, privacy and security
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 165

including for mobile payment applications. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate

these effects on personalized recommendation systems. At this point, we coined
the fortified combination of blockchain with AI elements and mobile payment
applications as blockchain-based mobile phone applications (BMPAs).

2.4 Personalized Recommendation Systems

BMPAs enable personalized recommendation systems that need to be appealing

to its users to motivate them to make purchases over their mobile phones. Under-
standing the customers’ purchasing behavior is of interest to businesses that apply
BMPAs to share contents and recommend merchandises for users. Customers tend
to be exposed with mass amount of information sources, which are irrelevant,
subjecting customers to information overload. Modarresi [29] explained that this
issue of information overload can be addressed with personalized recommendation
systems. It is a high-level business intelligence platform that applies mass data
mining to equip e-commerce sites with comprehensive personalized decision
support and information services for their customers [30]. The recommendation
system for shopping in websites aids customers in their purchase decisions. By
recommending the product which customers are seeking for, the recommendation
system automatically fulfills the process of personalized selection of products to
meet the customized needs of its customers. The primary algorithms for e-commerce
recommendation system encompasses collaborative filtering [31], content-based
recommendations [32], and association rule-based recommendations [33]. Person-
alized recommendation systems enabled BMPAs to benefit business merchants as it
collects user data, intelligently offers personalized recommendations to the online
users, and accounts for their preferences and interests [34]. Since then, there is
a proliferation of social networks and online multi planetary platforms that offer
personalized services and gain support from referral systems [35]. In a growing
competitive environment, personalized recommendation systems can attract and
retain customers as these systems allow improved e-commerce services to its
users [36]. Gao et al. [37] added that a recommendation system helps business
merchants understand their customer behavior which benefits their marketing
planning strategies. This is possible as BMPAs use the recommendation systems
to create value through precise data mining analysis and findings.

2.5 Shopping Motivation Using BMPAs

Until now, there has been no concrete or unified explanation of what motivates
customers to shop using BMPAs. To understand the drivers and risks behind this
emerging consumerism, it would be helpful for businesses to identify specific
customer’s needs and wants that are associated with consumption preferences [38].
166 M. Liow et al.

Drivers refer to the factors that attract customers to enter the online or mobile
marketplace using BMPAs to fulfill their internal needs [39]. Risks would be
primarily shopping risks [40] and other perceived risks [41] for online shopping.
Therefore, observing shopping motivations via BMPAs assumes a pivotal role in
recognizing customers’ needs and meeting those needs as much as possible. In this
chapter, online shopping motivation (drivers and risks) was conceptualized as the
effort that motivates or inhibits a person in his or her willingness to use the BMPA
services while fulfilling one’s needs and wants. There has been a growing number of
studies associated with retailing in virtual environments. Exploratory studies have
intensified over the last two decades, drawing advantages such as opportunities and
affordability, as well as challenges for online retailers in using the metaverse for
dispensing real-world products through blockchain-based applications [42]. There
are other studies that have attempted to assess the potential value of virtual trade
and retailing for real companies to succeed in the electronic marketplace [43].
Beyond that, it is the virtual heterotopia that extends the consensual hallucination
that pre-dates the commercial inception of the worldwide web by nearly a decade
[44]. Various studies have investigated consumers’ intention to use smartphones for
mobile shopping [45], personal characteristics, consumption values, and behavioral
intentions in adopting mobile shopping [46–49]. Others include motivation, loyalty,
and process [50, 51], exploring the fit of real company products in the second life
or virtual world [52], information that consumers look for when shopping online
for groceries [53], conveniences and risks of Internet shopping behavior [54], and
metaverse-retail service quality [55].
In these studies, researchers have examined the benefits of Internet or online
shopping in retail and have developed guidelines when setting up virtual stores.
Some studies have explored the range of factors to improve the user experience
when shopping in the virtual environment. Nevertheless, limited research has been
conducted to study the consumer motivation of using BMPA services. While
researchers argue the main role and possible motives in their studies, a research
framework to guide the study of consumer behavior using BMPAs has been sparse.
Despite the broad consensus that motivation has a robust influence on consumer
behavior, it is a lacuna in the literature to examine the adoption of BMPAs. This
chapter attempts to understand consumer motivation, trust, adoption of BMPAs, and
repeat usage of BMPAs. To achieve this, it is necessary to comprehend better the
values and risks using BMPAs when performing online shopping. This would be
performed through three lenses: the means-end chain theory, social identity theory,
and prospect theory to discover what makes the BMPA community lives better off.

2.6 Means-End Chain Theory

Customers habitually do not consciously think about the motives underpinning their
consumption behavior; thus, researchers are faced with challenges to discover these
motives. A widely accepted theory to study motives is the means-end chain theory.
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 167

This section attempts to relate the means-end chain theory and to connect customer
value to customer behavior. The means-end chain is applied as the core research
framework presented in Sect. 2.12 in this chapter and as the method to unravel the
associations between customers’ cognitive hierarchical value structures [56]. This
method describes how a person cognitively behaves through a consumption process
hierarchically [57]. The primary principle of this method is that customers would
weigh the attributes of products that will offer them to realize their personal values
[56, 58]. There are three hierarchical levels of cognitive abstraction in the means-
end chain theory. They are attributes, consequences, and values ([59–61]. The theory
postulates that consumer behavior is driven by values which eventually influence
customers’ purchasing choices [62]. Gutman [60] claims that customers learn to
ponder their decisions when purchasing products or services based on the physical
attributes. The means (physical attributes) are fundamental to fulfill customers’
wants and ends (values). Bagozzi et al. [63] further explain that benefits can become
substitutes for the desired purchasing behavior due to the positive feelings formed
from consuming the products and services. Xu et al. [64] argue that the means-end
chain theory supports the notion that customers take actions to avoid and reduce
undesired consequences. They learn what actions that they may take to produce the
desired outcomes. Therefore, the desired outcomes, i.e., benefits and values, guide
the consumer choice behavior [59–61].
Consumer behavior is primarily goal oriented. According to Gutman [60], the
means-end chain theory is a hierarchy of goals in which higher-order goals express
a deeper level of consumer motivation. In contrast, benefits are the subgoals that are
secondary to values, and values can be measured as the ultimate goals that motivate
consumers to display certain shopping behaviors. The means-end chain theory is
an appropriate theoretical lens for differentiating lower-level goals (benefits) and
higher-level goals (values) [65].
A primary postulation of the means-end chain theory is to explain that customers
gain their values (ends) due to the positive benefits ensuing from the product or
service attributes [59–61]. It explains that customers use products and services to
enjoy benefits and values, not for the attributes per se. Henceforth, it is rational
to conceptualize the benefit-value-behavior model to study the effects on BMPA
identification and repeat customers’ usage. Scholars theorize that value which is
a superior goal may normalize customer actions that include their usage patterns
and loyalty in relational company-customer exchanges [66]. Several scholars have
established the linkage between value and repeat usage or purchase intention (e.g.,
[66, 67]). Other researchers suggest the theory on reasoned action infers that
human behavior is fundamentally driven by behavioral intention [68]. Therefore,
the relationships between benefit, value, identification, and repeat usage are used as
the basis to develop the research framework of this study.
168 M. Liow et al.

2.7 Social Identity Theory

The interactionist social psychology theory was originally introduced in the 1970s
and 1980s to account for the nature of social groups and the group processes [69].
Social identity theory focuses on the role of self-conception which is related to
the cognitive processes and social beliefs in intergroup relations and contends that
individuals logically organize themselves into social categories [69]. The research
on social identity theory has evolved since the 1980s. A range of sub-theories
that have developed from the social identity theory focuses on self-enhancement,
marginalization, nonconformity, risk reduction, motivation within groups, and
leadership between and within groups [69]. The theory has also been applied to
explain the phenomena involving organizations and their stakeholders [69]. In social
identity, when individuals turn to be substitutable components of a shared group
identity, depersonalization of the self and the rest is attained [70], which then
engenders the social identity phenomenon [71].
The antecedents of social identification represent factors that cause a group’s
identity to be attractive to persons. For example, the uniqueness of the group
characteristics from those of equivalent groups, prestige, and values are uphold
by specified members [69, 71]. Through motives of uncertainty reduction, indi-
viduals consider categories that offer self-enhancement. The significance of these
identifications includes behavioral and affective dimensions [72]. A few studies
have differentiated identification from other organizational behavior concepts such
as internalization, involvement, and commitment claiming that these may be
consequences rather than components of identification itself [72, 73]. Customers
can be identified with the organization and its applications. This is applicable
to the BMPA environment because of the unique traits valued by its customers
(identity attractiveness). The facets of the company’s identity attractiveness are
mostly communicated to the customers through press releases, direct marketing,
personal selling, and sales promotions. Although a customer views a company’s
identity as prestigious and unique, the customer may not identify with the identity of
the company and its applications. The trustworthiness of the company’s applications
affects the attractiveness of a company’s identity to customers [7, 8, 66]. If a
customer trusts the image of the company, the customer will potentially identify
and use its product applications that are communicated to them. Identification leads
customers to care and feel psychologically attached to the company which eventu-
ally results in repeat purchase intention/usage and customer loyalty. Henceforth, it is
crucial to examine the relationships between values, trust, identification, and repeat
usage in the adoption of BMPA.
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 169

2.8 Prospect Theory

Mobile phone applications using the blockchain technology has leapfrog during the
recent years. This phenomenon marks a large customer search effort for application
stores amidst fierce competition and poor utilization rates for both the developers
(host companies) and their participating retailers [74]. Host companies have resorted
to bundle their product applications to increase customer loyalty and to sustain
a good stream of revenue for their participating retailers. However, using mobile
phone applications for shopping is deemed uncertain and risky; thus customers may
not always be rational [74, 75]. One related field of research that offers some basis
for these ostensibly non-rational behaviors is the prospect theory. This theory has
been broadly used to explain the consumer behavior under risk from the maximizing
revenue standpoint [76, 77]. Prospect theory claims that individuals behave based
on their assessment of the available options and their assessment rests on their
level of risk aversion and outcomes [76, 77]. They compute the probabilities of
outcomes that are coded as losses or gains in their current situation and then sum
up a value for each option. They usually decide to follow the option that gives them
the highest value [76, 77]. Customers who identify the company’s applications that
give them the highest value influence the attractiveness of a company’s identity
to customers and, in turn, their purchase decisions [7, 8, 66]. Therefore, prospect
theory can be applied for modeling customer outcomes by assessing the losses and
gains while shopping in the BMPA environment. Prospect theory is also found to
be a suitable theoretical lens in explaining the role of perceived risk that moderates
BMPA identification on repeat customer usage.

2.9 Utilitarian Value, Hedonic Value, and BMPA Identification

To investigate the relationship between the customer perceptions of BMPA shopping

value and customer outcomes, it is important to comprehend the concept of value
and its accompanying dimensions. Extant research has gathered that value is merely
an exchange between price and quality. There are claims that value is more complex
and that consumer behavior is the outcome of multi-dimensions of consumer value
[78]. Utilitarian value and hedonic value are the most universal [79]. In this section,
these value dimensions will be examined specifically for a BMPA shopping context.
Utilitarian value is described as a judgment of functional benefits and costs
[80]. And it is pertinent for task-specific use of BMPA for shopping. These include
considering product offerings, monetary savings, and convenience during the pre-
purchase stage [79, 81]. This accentuates the need to further separate utilitarian
value as something different from hedonic value; also, utilitarian value concerns
the cognitive components of attitude, such as convenience, value for money, and
product variety in the BMPA context [79, 81]. This section solicits that shoppers
170 M. Liow et al.

may shop using the BMPAs because of the convenience of locating and comparing
retailers and conserving the psychological and temporal resources [79, 81].
On the other hand, hedonic value is described as an overall evaluation of
experiential benefits and costs, such as adventure and gratification [81]. Hedonic
value dimensions have been posited as a subject of much discussion in the mobile
phone shopping literature [79, 81]. Researchers have started to recognize other
online shopping elements such as the application’s role, best deals gained, social
implications, and shopping ideas [82]. In this discursive chapter, the aim is to
examine if all these elements are transferable to the BMPA context. Like offline and
online shopping, BMPA shoppers also shop for the off-the-beaten track experiences
and entertainment reasons that absorb the users and let them break free from their
routines [83].
Customers may respond favorably to the utilitarian value and hedonic value
derived from using BMPA as a more attractive shopping environment compared
to the conventional offline and online shopping. This strengthens the identity
communicated through the BMPA. A BMPA offers companies with the platform
to foster a specific image that customers may perceive as upholding and parallel to
their social and personal definition. Therefore, the following hypotheses have been
developed:
H1 : Utilitarian value is positively related to BMPA identification.
H2 : Hedonic value is positively related to BMPA identification.

2.10 BMPA Trustworthiness, BMPA Identification, and Repeat

Customers’ BMPA Usage

The trustworthiness of an identity influences the customers’ attractiveness to a

company and its applications. Customers are more likely to identify with the
company’s applications if they trust the image portrayed through the company’s
media channels [7, 8, 66]. Identification leads to customers’ growing concern for
the company which results to customers’ resistance to negative information while
forging repeat customers’ usage and customer loyalty [7, 8, 66]. On the other hand,
customer-company identification can lead to non-supportive behaviors [84] such as
negative word of mouth about the company and imposing unrealistic demands from
the company. This attraction toward a particular BMPA can be enhanced through
ongoing communications with the customers that forge a degree of trustworthiness
for the perceived BMPA identity. The development of the BMPA identification
ensues when the BMPA becomes a salient choice for customers when making their
forthcoming purchase decisions. It is assumed that customers who possess some
knowledge of the company’s identity are participants of the company’s loyalty
program. These customers have formed a strong identification with the BMPA
through many communications and transactions beforehand [85].
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 171

Nevertheless, BMPA identification is unlike the dimensions generally found in

customer purchase intention studies such as brand equity [86], customer commit-
ment [87], customer loyalty [88], and customer satisfaction [89]. The dimensions are
the consequences of a customer’s cognitive process of self-categorizing within the
perceived identity forged by BMPAs. Through a customer’s self-categorization pro-
cess, the BMPA identification then manifests into behaviors such as repeat customer
usage or customer loyalty. These behaviors are formed due to market-related factors
such as high market entry barriers, superior products, and excellent business models.
Even so that this competitive edge declines, the BMPA identification lingers since
customers find their sense of social categorization and self-definition by identifying
themselves with the company’s BMPAs. In short, repeat customer usage may result
from the BMPA identification. Henceforth, it is imperative for companies to nurture
a clear identity for BMPA because it sustains a competitive edge in an increasingly
competitive market.
H3 : BMPA trustworthiness is positively related to BMPA identification.
H4 : BMPA identification is positively related to repeat customers’ BMPA usage.

2.11 Perceived Risk

Shopping preludes risk. This is because a customer’s purchase decision has

results that cannot be faultlessly prophesied, and some of which possibly become
unpleasant [76, 77]. Shopping risk is more noticeable in company mobile phone
applications than in the conventional brick-and-mortar shopping due to spatial-
temporal separation between the companies and customers [40]. Past literature
establishes that perceived risk is a determinant for initial usage and repeat usage
intention [41]. In this chapter, the perceived financial risk is defined using the Cun-
ningham [90] scale that infers the likelihood of monetary loss due to maintenance
costs, hidden costs, or a lack of warranty. To better reflect the BMPA context, the
perceived risk is extended to encompass performance risk, i.e., the potential loss due
to failing in meeting the product quality expectations, the payment app function fails
to work when shopping, and when a participating retailer refuses to accept payment
using the BMPA e-payment functions, as well as privacy risk, i.e., the probability of
losing control over personal information.
Higher shopping risk potentially shifts the customers’ focus from getting hold
of the item to the shopping experience. Take gambling for example, individuals
entertain the risk of monetary loss for the states of high arousal during the timings
of ambiguity, as well as the positive arousal resulting from the winnings [91, 92].
Similarly, customers view shopping using BMPA to be riskier than the brick-and-
mortar shopping. However, these customers usually determine if the risks are within
their tolerable limits before they are willing to shop using the BMPA. They will use
the BMPA if it fulfills their needs to experience fun, gratification, novelty, and other
complex sensations while accepting the potential risks that they could face [91, 92].
172 M. Liow et al.

Therefore, the influence of BMPA identification on repeat customers’ BMPA usage

will decrease as a function of perceived risk.
H5 : Perceived risk negatively moderates the relationship between BMPA identifica-
tion and repeat customers’ BMPA usage.

2.12 Control Variables and the Research Model

The customer outcome framework for blockchain-based mobile phone applications

(BMPAs) in Fig. 1 holds onto the customers’ perceived value which is defined as
a trade-off between benefits and costs. It evaluates utilitarian value and hedonic
value as the benefits gained which is identified with a BMPA. Additionally,
the trustworthiness that customers place on BMPAs is assessed to reflect how
much customers want to identify themselves with the BMPA. On the other hand,
perceived risk becomes the major cost of shopping using BMPA and is modelled
as a moderator in Fig. 1. Overall, this framework implies that customers would
assess value and trustworthiness identified with the BMPAs and weigh the risks
when forming their intention. The means-end theory connects customer value and
customer behavior [59–61], while the social identity theory suggests customers
potentially identify with a company and trust its applications because of the unique
traits valued by its customers (identity attractiveness) [69, 71]. The prospect theory
claims that individuals behave by computing the probabilities of outcomes (losses
and gains) and decide to follow the option that offers them the highest value [76,
77].
The Customer Outcome Framework is a path diagram. The ellipses in the
path diagram represent the latent constructs while the rectangles symbolize the
observed variables ([93], p. 11; [94], p. 2). The latent constructs in Fig. 1 are the
utilitarian value, hedonic value, and BMPA trustworthiness. They are the second-
order constructs in the framework. The utilitarian value is measured by three
subconstructs, namely, product offerings [95, 96], monetary savings [97], and
BMPA convenience [48]. The hedonic value is measured indirectly by six sub-
constructs, which are adventure, gratification, role, best deal, social, and idea [98].
Meanwhile the BMPA trustworthiness is measured by three subconstructs, namely,
the benevolence, competence, and integrity [99–101]. The scale measurements of
the BMPA identification are adapted from Bhattachrya and Sen’s [102] study and
the repeat customers’ BMPA usage from Suh and Han’s [103] research work; both
are observed variables. Perceived risk is measured by items relating to financial
loss, failure to meet product quality expectations, embarrassment, non-acceptance
by participating retailers to use BMPA payment functions, and loss of control over
personal information [104, 105].
There are three control variables specified in Fig. 1 to manage the likely spurious
effects in the research model. The first is the number of past transactions that
a customer have made using a BMPA to purchase products and paid using its
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 173

Fig. 1 Customer outcome framework for blockchain-based mobile phone applications (BMPAs)

digital wallet. The other two are gender and age to ensure good representation of
male/female shoppers and different age groups to reduce bias and to improve data
accuracy. Singapore would be a suitable test bed for data collection due to the high
penetration of BMPA usage and the growing number of companies recognizing the
increased competition in the electronic marketplace.
The Customer Outcome Framework depicts three positive impacts of utilitarian
value, hedonic value, and BMPA trustworthiness on the BMPA identification. H1 ,
H2 , and H3 infer when a customer perceived a higher utilitarian value, hedonic
value, and BMPA trustworthiness; it would increase the BMPA identification and in
turn customers’ repeat BMPA usage (H4 ). However, when customers perceived risk
is high, it influences customers’ BMPA identification and consequently reduces their
repeat BMPA usage (H5 ). Pertaining to the degree of impact for the five constructs
on the repeat customers’ BMPA usage, future researchers may gather empirical
evidence to test the five hypotheses in the framework.
The model may be tested with the structural equation modelling (SEM) using
AMOS (Analysis of Moments Structures) software. SEM is found useful for
gathering empirical data that is designed to confirm a research study design rather
than to explore or explain a phenomenon [106]. SEM is capable in examining
multivariate causal relationships in ecological studies [107] such as the framework
174 M. Liow et al.

in Fig. 1. Other than the direct effects, SEM can study the indirect effects on pre-
assumed causal relationships [107] such as the moderating effects of perceived
risk on BMPA identification and the repeat customers’ BMPA usage. Although
SEM is the mostly applied technique for path modelling, researchers have taken
more interest in using the partial least square (PLS) [108]. PLS possesses several
advantages over SEM [108]. PLS has a built-in capability to cope with formative
indicators and test moderating relationships with a small sample size [108]. Yildiz
[109] evaluates PLS-SEM bias at a relatively large sample size (560 consumers) in
the mobile shopping context, but the bias does not seem to diminish when estimating
data from common factor populations. This has put forward the recommendation to
apply SEM or PLS technique, whenever it is more appropriate based on the sample
size and the study of the indirect effects on pre-assumed causal relationships.

3 Discussions

3.1 Theoretical Implications

The literature review presented in this chapter claims that there is continuing
progress in retail-related publications in terms of studying relevancy of value and
risk dimensions in offline and online shopping environment. Nevertheless, the
literature review also showed that there is lacuna in the electronic business context
and research domains. The proposed Customer Outcome Framework signifies the
cross-disciplinary research between computer science (the upstream research) and
social science in studying consumer behavior (the downstream research).
This chapter answers the call for more research effort in studying the BMPA
adoption in businesses. A continuous stream of conceptual work that will apply
critical perspectives to the BMPA adoption phenomenon is a great need for research
related to the value, trustworthiness, and risk tolerance of the end users. Thus, these
three important concepts, i.e., value, trustworthiness, and risk, need to be defined
specifically. This is to establish a win-win relationship between the company and
its customers who use BMPAs in their business ecosystems. From the academic
point of view, subsequent empirical studies and findings in Singapore’s electronic
payment market would contribute significant value to the existing mobile banking
industry and to the retailing literature.

3.2 Practical Implications

The findings of this chapter enable the stakeholders in the businesses to be better
prepared in optimizing results by investing in the BMPA technology that benefit
their customers. A few practical implications can be derived from the discussions
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 175

in this chapter. Firstly, this chapter reveals the application of BMPAs across
various sectors. As such, this chapter stimulates interested practitioners to think
about the huge potential service innovations through BMPAs beyond the end
consumer offerings such as in the climate control measures, business sustainability,
cybercrime, e-sports, real estate, e-learning, and logistics. Secondly, there is still
lack of research about customers’ perceptions, behaviors, and impacts on continued
customer patronage and impacts on companies, such as organizational restructuring,
reskilling, and jobs redesigning to prepare for improving yield from the e-commerce
businesses using BMPAs. Explicit identification of motivations (the drivers and
perceived risk) patterns would inform retailers by proposing effective marketing
strategies for different market segments. The built-in AI elements in BMPAs and the
derived data patterns can improve marketing strategies as they can be linked closely
to the customer motivation for online business transaction. Retailers can assess
the marketing strategies by monitoring the motivation fulfillment before market
launching. Comprehending customers’ expectations will offer retailers’ insights
into what customers wanting to obtain and satisfy when using the BMPAs. By
personalizing the offerings that links to these primary motivations, retailers can
meet and satisfy customers’ demands. Thirdly, the interrelationships shown in Fig.
1 in this chapter identify broadly the versatility in which different sectors would
find BMPAs useful. The Customer Outcome Framework denotes that more work is
needed of computer science engineers in two primary ways: firstly, whether they
can bundle industry offerings while offering adventure, gratification, best deals,
convenience, and fulfilling the customers’ social needs through their development of
BMPA algorithms and software features, and secondly, BMPAs that are developed
on the blockchain and AI technologies that can be programmed to meet the goals
for profit and not-for-profit sectors that concerns people’s well-being. For the
betterment of people’s lives, be it the government, companies, and individuals,
BMPAs can be further unlearned, relearned, and fortified to serve the larger
communities including environment management and social inclusion other than
economic contribution. The objective is that this leads to the triple bottom-line gains
and embracing towards the 2030 Agenda that is to protect prosperity, people, planet,
peace, and partnership.

3.3 Limitation

The literature review was based mostly on the English indexed publications from the
two largest databases with scientific publications (ABDC publications, Scorpus),
one largest archive website (Researchgate.net), and an academic search engine
(Google Scholar). It is important to note that there are relevant articles that are
not incorporated in other e-library databases and there are only a few conference
proceedings referred in this chapter. Future research might focus on reviewing
publications in other languages and databases as well.
176 M. Liow et al.

4 Conclusions and Future Research

In the recent years, blockchain-based mobile phone applications (BMPAs) have

been growing rapidly. BMPAs have become an opportunity for businesses to
increase their selling of products and to forge customer loyalty. The discussion in
this chapter conceptualizes a research framework for the businesses in the BMPA
environment applying three theories, namely, the means-end chain theory, the social
identity theory, and the prospect theory. It is gathered that Singapore would be a
suitable test bed for future data collection since it has a sizeable electronic payment
community and there is a high penetration rate of BMPA usage in this island city.
A critical review of relevant literature from 1991 to 2021 has been carried out. This
chapter visited topics on how the duo of the blockchain technology and AI has
fortified the BMPAs that enable trust, security, and convenience for its users. It is a
win-win exchange as businesses gain to learn more of customers’ preferences due to
the data mining which AI can offer. The blockchain technology and AI complement
each other weaknesses in the application of BMPA. The literature review revealed
that the different variables discussed in this chapter have varying impact on repeat
customers’ BMPA usage. Past studies signified that an increase in perceived hedonic
value, utilitarian value, and trustworthiness influence a company’s identification.
A favorable company’s identification can lead to an increase in repeat customers’
usage. Therefore, similar study of the relationship between these constructs in the
BMPA context is timely.
Empirical research on the chapter advocating Customer Outcome Framework
in the BMPA environment will be necessary in the proposed Singapore electronic
payment market. While this conceptual stage of Customer Outcome Framework
is deemed appropriate as the first stage for scoping to obtain insights of the
BMPA field, there is no empirical study on it so far. Thus, future studies may
perform qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, and longitudinal studies to further
investigate the motivations for BMPA repeat customer usage. Additionally, scholars
could investigate other mediator variables of BMPA shopping such as the level of
user friendliness and the ease of navigating the app features. There is still a lack
of research on studying the owners-managers and staff perceptions that require
their active participation in research and their willingness to disclose their business
strategies, business performance measures against industry benchmarks. Other
stakeholders such as telecommunication companies, bank officials, government reg-
ulatory bodies, and Internet services providers could be considered in future works
to study the adoption of BMPA in the entire business ecosystem. Mobile phone
applications are ever more becoming part of community lives, and individuals’
attitudes toward these BMPAs affect their frequency of usage and, in turn, the value
derived from using these applications over their mobile devices. A/B testing and
experiments could be performed to assess the value obtained for non-, ex-, first-
time- and regular BMPA shoppers. Hidden costs could include nomophobia that
can impact one’s mental health due to mobile device obsession. Oniomania that is
compulsive buying behavior or shopping addition is another. Significant harm to an
Customer Outcome Framework for Blockchain-Based Mobile Phone Applications 177

individual’s life is that when he or she is always preoccupied on their mobile devices
and neglects other life (job and family) commitments. Other potential costs include
digital eye strain over prolonged hours of using the BMPAs, potential accidents due
to loss of concentration because users are glued to their mobile devices, and even
experience loss of sense of time. Some may experience withdrawal symptoms when
their mobile devices are unreachable including restlessness, irritability, tension,
anger, and depression. Proposed studies should examine other factors from moral,
ethical principles, and society’s fairness as Singapore is a melting pot which
predominantly consists of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and others (Sinhalese, Buginese,
Sikhs, Peranakans, Eurasians, Orang Laut – seaman in Malay). Examining across
cultures in different ethnic groups should be a strategic direction for future research
efforts to confront and to obtain a more in-depth understanding of the topic.
Future research could involve across different generation cohorts (Baby Boomers,
Generation X, Y, and Z). This connection varies among individuals and regions
across the world. Henceforth, the Customer Outcome Framework can be adapted
in other countries to gather further insights. Finally, studies that are examining and
measuring the 3Ps (people, profit, and planet) and their direct and indirect impacts
of BMPA on macro (destination), meso (industry) and micro (company) levels are
recommended.

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 Part III
Blockchains and Healthcare
A Secure Decentralized
Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System
Using Blockchain

Aderonke Thompson, Hafiz Odekunle, and Boniface Alese

1 Introduction

Healthcare is a concentrated knowledge space in which vast quantities of informa-

tion are processed, accessed, and distributed all the time [2]. Storing and sharing
a massive number of records is necessary and challenging due to the sensitivity
of health information and others that restrict data, regarding security and privacy.
In the healthcare field, knowledge exchange is vitally essential for diagnosis and
decision making. Information exchange is vital for medical professionals to be able
to communicate with each other and pass patient information to the competent
authority for other purposes, such as testing. The exchange of medical information
must be achieved across a safe network and must also ensure that the privacy of
patients is maintained.
Healthcare blockchain is an innovation that helps to safely customize stable
health data, share it by blending the complete real-time information of a patient’s
health, and store it as a secured healthcare arrangement [5]. This technology permits
transactions by participants in dispersed, permanent, straightforward, secure, and
auditory ways, which allow access to records from the first transaction, which can
be confirmed and examined by any entity. The chain is continually developing and
new blocks holding references, that is, a hash value is being added to the existing
block [3]. Blockchain is structured as a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that links with
numerous network nodes. All the nodes in the system have a public key and a private
key for securing information exchange. Blockchain transaction uses a public key for
encryption to guarantee consistency, irreversible, and non-reputability of records
while decryption of the message uses the private key for integrity and verification of

A. Thompson () · H. Odekunle · B. Alese

Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 185
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_9
186 A. Thompson et al.

every transaction made by node [5]. In this regard, only the public key and private
key authentic messages go to the network for affirmation [1]. The challenge of
the technique is that solitary clients with a particular private key are permitted to
sign the transaction. Also, mistakes during transmission of the information lead to
system failure, for example, confirming an advanced signature. The transactions that
are considered legitimate are broadcasted in the network domain by the miners. The
miners decide data transactions to admit in the distributed public ledger based on the
chosen consensus protocol used, for examples proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-
stake (PoS). The approval nodes check that the communicated block encompasses
large transactions and references the former block in the chain utilizing the matching
hash value. Thus, attaining these requirements implies that the new blocks are added
to the blockchain; otherwise, it drops the block.

2 Overview and Related Work

There are different types of blockchains based on the managed data, on the
accessibility of such data, and on what operation can be performed by the user.
These include public permissionless, consortium (public permission), and private.
Public permissionless: This is a state-of-the-art public blockchain protocols based
on proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithms with open source and not per-
mission. Anyone can participate as a node or miner without permission. All
data in the blockchain is accessible and visible to everyone, although parts of
the blockchain can be encrypted to secure data and preserve user’s anonymity.
Examples are Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Litecoin.
Consortium (public permissioned): This type of blockchain operates under the
leadership of a group. As opposed to public blockchain, they do not allow any
person with access to the Internet to participate in the process of verifying
transactions; only a selected group of nodes can participate in the distributed
consensus process. It is used within one or across many institutions. When a
consortium blockchain is created within one institution (e.g., financial sector), it
is initiated for restricted public use and fractionally centralized. On the other
hand, a consortium between institutions (e.g., insurance companies, financial
institutions, governmental institutions) is unlocked for public use while still
having created a relatively centralized trust.
Private: In a private blockchain, write permissions are kept centralized to one trusted
organization, while read permissions may be public or restricted. A private
blockchain only allows selected nodes to connect to the network. It is, therefore,
yet a distributed centralized network. Private blockchains control which nodes
can perform transactions, execute smart contracts, or act as miners. It is used
for private purposes. Hyperledger Fabric and Ripple are examples of blockchain
platforms that only support private blockchain networks. Table 1 presents the
summary of the types of blockchain.
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 187

Table 1 Difference between public, consortium, and private blockchain

Public Consortium Private
Participants Permissioned Permissioned Permissioned
Identified Identified Identified
Trusted Trusted Trusted
Consensus Proof of Work, Proof Voting or multi-party Voting or multi-party
Mechanisms of Stake, etc. consensus algorithm consensus algorithm
Large energy Lighter Lighter
consumption. Faster Faster
No finality Low energy Low energy
51% attack consumption consumption
Enable finality Enable finality
Access Open Read/Write Permissioned Read and Permissioned Read and
/or Write /or Write
Transaction Long Short Short
Approval Bitcoin: 10min or
Frequency more
Speed Slower Faster Faster
Security Proof of Work Approved participants Approved participants
Proof of Stake
Other Consensus
Mechanisms

2.1 Consensus Protocols

In a world where trust is expensive, it is essential to understand the unstable nature

of trust and to figure out some measures of consensus among ourselves in respect to
that which we hold as “truth.” For the blockchain network to continue as functional,
its peers need to come to terms with a specific state of the distributed ledger and on
a way for storing data into blocks. Such terms are known as a distributed consensus
protocol and it affirms the chronological order of generated transactions.

2.1.1 Proof-of-Work (PoW)

PoW is carried out by miners who conducted through miners competing to solve
a cryptographic problem — also known as a hash puzzle. These miners help to
verify every Bitcoin transaction, where it involves producing a hash-based PoW
that is based on previous transaction blocks (read up on the Merkle Tree for more
information) and forms a new branch with a new transaction block. This means that
the work is moderately difficult for the miners to perform but easy for the network to
verify. The first miner who manages to produce the PoW is awarded some Bitcoins.
Over time, the amount of Bitcoin awarded decreases.
188 A. Thompson et al.

2.1.2 Proof-of-Stake (PoS)

Unlike PoW where new transaction blocks are created based on computational work
done by solving a complex cryptographic puzzle, PoS allows a forger (instead of a
miner) to stake any amount of cryptocurrency held, to be probabilistically assigned
a chance to be the one validating the block— the probability based on the amount
of cryptocurrency staked. Additionally, for most PoS systems, instead of receiving a
cryptocurrency reward (in the above case, the Bitcoin miners receives some Bitcoins
for solving a PoW), the forgers instead take the transaction fees as rewards.
The idea of putting coins to be “staked” prevents bad actors from making
fraudulent validations — upon false validation of transactions, the amount staked
will be forfeited. Hence, this incentivizes forgers to validate legitimately. In the
recent year, PoS has gained attention, with Ethereum switching towards a PoS from
a PoW consensus system.

2.1.3 Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS)

DPoS is similar to PoS in regard to staking but has a different and a more democratic
system that is said to be fair. Like PoS, token holders stake their tokens in this
consensus protocol. Instead of the probabilistic algorithm in PoS, token holders
within a DPoS network are able to cast votes proportional to their stake to appoint
delegates to serve on a panel of witnesses — these witnesses secure the blockchain
network. In DPoS, delegates do not need to have a large stake, but they must
compete to gain the most votes from users.
It provides better scalability compared to PoW and PoS as there are fully
dedicated nodes who are voted to power the blockchain. Block producers can be
voted in or out at any time, and hence the threat of tarnishing their reputation and
loss of income plays a major role against bad actors [10]. No doubt, DPoS seems to
result in a semi-centralized network, but it is traded off for scalability.
Like PoS, DPoS has also gained attention over the years with several projects
adopting this consensus algorithm. Since it was invented by Dan Larimer, DPoS has
been refined continuously, from BitShares to Steem and now in EOS.

2.1.4 Proof-of-Authority (PoA)

PoA is known to bear many similarities to PoS and DPoS, where only a group
of preselected authorities (called validators) secure the blockchain and can produce
new blocks. New blocks on the blockchain are created only when a super majority is
reached by the validators. The identities of all validators are public and verifiable by
any third party— resulting in the validator’s public identity performing the role of
proof-of-stake. As these validators’ identities are at stake, the threat of their identity
being ruined incentivizes them to act in the best interest of the network.
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 189

Since PoA’s trust system is predetermined, concerns have been raised that
there might be a centralized element with this consensus algorithm. However,
it can be argued that semi-centralization could actually be appropriate within
private/consortium blockchains — in exchange for improved scalability. Newer
blockchain start-ups have ventured into implementing PoA. In addition, Ethereum
testnets like Rinkeby and Kovan explores the use of a PoA consensus algorithm.

2.1.5 Access Control Mechanism with Smart Contract for Data Sharing

Sharing healthcare data is considered to be a critical approach to improve the quality

of healthcare service and reduce medical costs. Though current EHR systems bring
much convenience, many obstacles still exist in the healthcare information systems
in practice, hinder secure and scalable data sharing across multiple organizations,
and thus limit the development of medical decision making and research [7]. From
the foregoing, there are risks of the single-point attack and data leakage in a
centralized system. Besides, patients cannot preserve the ownership of their own
private data to share with someone who they trust. It may result in unauthorized
use of private data by curious organizations. Furthermore, different competing
organizations lacking partnership trust are not willing to share data, which would
also hinder the development of data sharing [9].
In this case, it is necessary to ensure security and privacy protection and return
the control right of data back to users in order to encourage data sharing. It is
relatively simply to deal with security and privacy issues when data reside in a single
organization, but it will be challenging in the case of secure health information
exchange across different domains. Meanwhile, it also needs to further consider
a suitable technique to boost efficient collaboration in the medical industry.
Securing access control mechanism as one of the common approaches requires
that only authorized entities can access sharing data. This mechanism includes
access policy commonly consisting of access control list (ACL) associated with data
owner. ACL is a list of requestors who can access data and related permissions (read,
write, update) to specific data. Authorization is a function of granting permission to
authenticated users in order to access the protected resources following predefined
access policies. The authentication process always comes before the authorization
process. Access policies of this mechanism mainly focus on who is performing
which action on what data object for which purposes. Traditional access control
approaches for EHRs sharing are deployed, managed, and run by third parties. Users
always assume that third parties (e.g., cloud servers) perform authentication and
access requests on data usage honestly. However, in fact, the server is honest but
curious. It is promising that combining blockchain with access control mechanism
is to build a trustworthy system. Users can realize secure self-management of
their own data and keep shared data private. In this new model, patients can
predefine access permissions (authorize, refuse, revoke), operation (read, write,
update, delete), and duration to share their data by smart contracts on the blockchain
without the loss of control right. Smart contracts can be triggered on the blockchain
190 A. Thompson et al.

once all of preconditions are met and can provide audit mechanism for any request
recorded in the ledger as well. There are many existing studies and applications
applying smart contract for secure healthcare data sharing. A study proposed that
patients can authorize access to their record only under predefined conditions
(research of a certain type, and for a given time range) [15].
Smart contract placed directly on the blockchain verifies whether data requestors
meet these conditions to access the specified data. If the requestor does not have the
access rights, the system will abort the session. Similarly, smart contracts in a study
[4] can be used for granting and revocation of access right and notifying the updated
information as providers move in and out of networks.
Researchers designed a decentralized record management system based on
blockchain, called MedRec [1]. In this system, patient-provider relationship contract
is deployed between any two nodes in which patients manage and share medical
records with healthcare providers. Providers can add or modify this record in the
case of patient’s permissions. Data access record is preserved in the block to track
the malicious entities when violated access activities happen. They also designed
a simple graphical interface tool that allows patients to share off-chain data with
fine-grained access control.
The similar design is proposed in [13]. Researchers developed an access protocol
based on smart contract through admin component when mobile users send the
request [12]. Smart contract will verify any transaction by predefined policies of
access protocol to prevent malicious attack and achieve reliable EHRs sharing. But
curious miners may infer personal information during the mining process due to
the processing transactions including area ID, mobile gateway ID, and patient ID. A
study creatively adopted the channel scheme of Hyperledger Fabric, which separates
different types of activities for users in the different channels to share different
grained data [8]. Chaincode (smart contract) can be launched in the channel with
different access type, permissioned operations, and selective shared data specified
in the certificate by data owners. In addition to data sharing, such a channel scheme
makes good use of Fabric to enhance data privacy.

2.2 Smart Contract

A smart contract is a tamper-proof computer program or protocol that can verify and
execute itself. Nick Szabo comes up with the idea of smart contract in 1994. It allows
executing code without the third parties. A smart contract comprises of the value,
address, functions, and state. It accepts transaction as an input and triggers event
as the output after executing the corresponding code. Implementation of function
logic determines the state of the contract. The necessity of smart contract has been
the major focus since the emergence of blockchain technology in 2008 when the
technology comes into existence through Bitcoin cryptocurrency because it has the
capacity to publicly maintain database and peer-to-peer transactions securely and
create a trustful environment. Smart contracts are auditable and irreversible. All the
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 191

transaction information is present in a smart contract, and it executes automatically.

A smart contract is machine readable, an event-driven program, autonomous, and
distributed.
Solidity is a high-level language used to implement smart contracts. Developing
blockchain platform of solidity are Ethereum, ErisDB, Zeppelin, and Counterparty.
According to Nick Szabo, the contractual clauses (collateral, bonding, delineation
of property rights) should be encoded and embedded in the required hardware
and software. This helps to minimize the requirement of any trusted third party
for communication using smart contracts and at the same time makes the system
secure against any malicious attack. In the case of blockchain-based smart contracts,
contracts are nothing but scripts residing on the blockchain, which has the ability to
execute them. One can trigger a transaction to a smart contract by using the unique
addresses assigned to it by the blockchain technology. Let us take an example to
better understand the working of smart contracts. Suppose you want to sale your
house or rent your apartment to someone, then you can simply deploy a smart
contract in an existing blockchain network. Information regarding the property
can be stored in the blockchain and anyone belonging to that network can access
that information, but they cannot change it. In this way, you can find a buyer for
your property without the need of any third party. For a wide range of potential
applications, blockchain-based smart contracts could offer a number of benefits:
• Speed and real-time updates
• Accuracy
• Lower execution risk
• Fewer intermediaries
• Lower cost
• New business or operational models (Fig. 1)
With the technology growing fast, human living standard also grows vastly. In
the recent use of developed devices and supporting technology, human can monitor
his or her health condition just sitting at home. There are lots of devices that are
already developed to read different attributes in the human body. These data can be
collected using low-end device and processing locally to get quick information [17].
Blockchain technology helps to maintain the privacy of the patients and maintained

Fig. 1 Structure of smart contract

192 A. Thompson et al.

data in digital ledger format. A smart contract can be used in that system to make
the system more reliable and automated. Using a smart contract, human can write
some terms and conditions which could be applied once data are collected. Then it
will execute these smart contracts and trigger corresponding events.
The blockchain has the capability to boost data sharing in healthcare. Researchers
provide an easier way for patients to govern their medical data by developing App
HGD (Healthcare Data Gateway) which is built in blockchain technology [14]. All
data are managed using data management layer and stored on blockchain cloud.
Patients’ data are accessible solely via an authorized user; in addition, data replica
may be enforced to be destroyed when the authorized time elapsed.
A study also proposed an exchange network approach for health information
[15]. The two contributions are as follows: it makes use of electronic health record
(EHR) semantic and design checking to organize all EHRs in the blockchain
network to solve the issue of interoperability. Also, an algorithm is proposed to
select the next miner randomly to reduce the power and system resources used in
computation of POW. In addition, it is suggested that privacy and anonymity can
be provided using blockchain encryption, smart contracts, and privacy-preserving
keyword searches, but detailed approaches were not included.
Researchers proposed a medical system called MedRec which was based on
smart contracts for effective and simpler administration of EHRs [2]. Registrar
contracts (RCs) are used to map the user’s identification string to their Ethereum
addresses to keep anonymity of the users. Summary contracts (SCs) contained links
that referenced patient-provider relationships (PPRs) to ensure that all the medical
records of patients are connected. How patients’ data are managed and accessed is
defined in PPRs. However, the detailed approaches to solve an issue such as how to
encrypt the patients’ EHR, accessed by authorized users, user authentication, etc.
A study proposed a blockchain and MedRec-based way to deal with unravel
security issues such as confidentiality, access control, privacy, audibility, and
integrity in sharing healthcare data [16]. The barriers are tackled by using a
signcryption and attribute-bases authentication (ABA) to ensure that process of data
sharing is secure. The proposed model provides the following services: (1) Data
authenticity—the validness of patients’ EHRs can be confirmed by who access the
information. (2) Data integrity—it ensures that stored patients’ EHRs are guided
against altering. (3) Data confidentiality—patients’ EHRs are stored securely and
stayed discreet from the unapproved user.
Researchers adopt Ethereum blockchain smart contracts to achieve efficient
collaboration, data integrity, and protection of patient privacy. Protecting healthcare
professional’s privacy and securing links to establish an interoperability end-to-end
reachable network among independent healthcare system are provided by [9]. The
research solves the problem by storing the patient health records in a secure off-
chain database and makes a secure socket to trade authorization-based access to
tolerant information utilizing standard public key cryptography.
A study formulated a data sharing mechanism using Blockchain [9]. The mecha-
nism was made up of three components, namely, client, control system, and storage.
It is an efficient, secure identity-based authentication and key agreement protocol.
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 193

An effective security measure based on personality validation and key understanding

protocol is adopted to assure user anonymity and authenticity. Keys were generated
to execute client confirmation and enrollment, client verification, and request
creation. A study proposes a structure that characterizes some authorization access
rules through the Hyperledger Fabric [11], where a service provider can access
medical record of patients in a crisis condition under the limitations of patient’s
permission through the system. Smart contract handled authorization and fetching
of data of all transactions from ledger which makes the framework secured, efficient,
and auditable.

3 Methodology

Blockchain is invented for storing financial-related records and provides a structure

for actualizing a decentralized system. Each node of the blockchain interacts with
another via cryptographically encrypted information exchange, and the transaction-
based state system of the blockchain is known as smart contracts [6]. It was first
fully implemented by Ethereum. A smart contract is client rights management
tools that provide coordination and enforcement frameworks for network participant
agreements without traditional legal contracts being required [7]. For instance, a
smart contract characterizes the application logic that executes at whatever point an
exchange happens in the trading of digital money.
Ethereum smart contracts create intelligent and logical representations of existing
health data stored on each node on the network. The smart contract contains
the metadata of a patient’s data, access permission, and data integrity. The con-
tract enforces that each transaction made on the blockchain system conveys a
cryptographically signed information to oversee these traits. Contracts implement
approaches to create data exchanges by valid blockchain transactions only and
execute any set of rules consigning a specific health record; so far it can be
processed.

3.1 System Design

The design integrates each node to an existing EHR system. Each node, specifically
representing healthcare providers, is expected to have already databases with
medical records saved on servers connected to the network.
The system design is made up of three layers, namely, data collection layer, data
repository layer, and data sharing layer.
Data collection layer In this layer, electronic health records (HER) are generated
by a service provider, i.e., a medical doctor. The EHRs are signed by a medical
doctor using content extraction signature (CES) scheme and the signed EHRs are
194 A. Thompson et al.

forwarded to the patients. Patients can extract sensitive information of EHR and
create authentic extraction signature in order to avert privacy in case there is leakage
during the data sharing.

Data repository layer This layer is responsible for storing the EHR and its
indexes. The layer comprises of the following components:
1. EHR manager: This represents the different health institutions in the local
system; these local systems are connected to blockchain network; the primary
role of the system in our design is to store the EHRs and generate indexes that
points to the stored EHR. The EHR manager consist of the following:
(a) API library: API library will manage and control the operation of the system.
The API executes a function call to interact with blockchain by parsing
blockchain protocol to connect with an Ethereum client.
(b) Ethereum client: This operates an extensive set of tasks, which include
peer-to-peer network connection, encoding transactions, and transmitting
transactions in addition to keeping a verified local copy of the blockchain.
(c) Database manager: This manages access to the node’s local database and
ensures permission governance storage on the blockchain. The database
manager checks the blockchain contracts for address verification request
which is acceptable to query access. On verifying the address, the query is
run on the node’s local database and then results are returned to the client.
2. Blockchain server: This serves like a cloud server, which is responsible for saving
and communicating the electronic health records (EHRs). The EHR storage
location links and predefined access permission (smart contracts) of the patients
are stored in the blockchain. The smart contract ensures that data are shared
securely and records each access request and activities in the blockchain for the
purpose of auditing in the future (Fig. 2).

Data sharing layer The authorized users (patients, healthcare providers,

researchers) can initiate a request for patients’ EHRs which can be granted or denied
based on the predefined conditions set by the patients. Also, patient can revoke
access given to a user at any given time. The logical and intelligent access control
is designed using Ethereum’s smart contract. The contract contains the storage link
of patient’s EHRs, access permission, and timestamp. The contract enforces that
each transaction made on the blockchain system carries a cryptographically signed
instructions to manage data integrity. The smart contract is structured as follows:
(a) Identity catalog contract (ICC): Identity catalog contract is one of the major
contracts deployed on electronic health record management system (EHRMS);
this contract only occurs once and invokes by every node present on EHRM
network. It maps patient identity strings to their Ethereum address public key
and provider IP address (Fig. 3).
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 195

Fig. 2 Proposed system design

(b) Relationship contract (RC): The relationship contract established a patient-

provider relationship (PPR) between all entities who have access to EHR of
a particular patient. For each contract, one patient and provider are connected to
it. The PPR is also made up of a list of unlimited third parties who are granted
permission to only view the patient EHR. Patient, provider, and third-party
relationships are stored on the blockchain and enable the third party to locate
all providers in EHRMS network that has access to a particular patient’s EHR
instead of searching for them one after the other. EHRMS enables the patient
to have total control over who accesses their EHR and complete audits of their
EHR which are being accessed through PPR contracts.
196 A. Thompson et al.

Fig. 3 Relationship graph between contract and network nodes

(c) Inventory contract (IC): IC holds a list of references to RC, representing all
the participant’s previous and current transactions with other nodes in the
system. The contract represents actors in EHRM. Patients communicate the
system by utilizing an inventory contract as a proxy. Information about entities
present in the system are stored in these contracts. Information stored on the
contract include patient-provider relationship (PPR) and some addresses that
are associated with the individual account. These contracts require only for the
patient as it serves as a pointer to all PPR that is stored in one place on the
blockchain and also for easier retrieval PPR if the patient needs to recover their
account using recovery secrete text.

3.2 Content Extraction Signature

In this work, document processing operation call extraction is used to remove certain
selected part of the signed EHR before it is stored in the EHR manager and available
for user on the blockchain network. This is done to revoke sensitive data that prevent
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 197

anonymous participation of patients on the blockchain. Content extraction signature

allows a patient P, the owner of EHRs which was signed by a doctor D, to extract
part of EHRs and send only those parts to a user U, which helps us to assure the
patient’s privacy.
The content extraction signature (CES) scheme can be defined as follows:
CES = (GK, Sig, Ext, Ver) which represents four algorithms, namely, key gener-
ation algorithm, signature generation algorithm, signature extraction algorithm, and
signature verification algorithm.

3.2.1 Key Generation GK(k)

This algorithm chooses a security parameters k and generates a public/private key

pair (pk, sk).
Pick a large prime number P and a generator g in Zp
y ← pg;
Q ← (p-1)(g-1);
Select a random number q in such a way that gcd(q , Q) = 1.
Compute:
d ← q-1 mody;
Publish Public Key pk ← (y,q) and Private Key pk ← (y,q,d)
Algorithm 2

3.2.2 Signature Generation Algorithm Sig (SK, M, CEAS)

This algorithm accepts private key (sk), EHRs document (M), and a content
extraction signature structure CEAS and produce content extraction signature σF .
Parse Doctor private key sk ← (y, q, d); Patients EHR, M and
Content Extraction Signature Structure CEAS
N ← Len(M);
T ← {0,1};
For i [n]
h[i] ← H (CEAS ||T ||i||Mi );
σ[i] ← h[i]d mod y ;
σF ← H (CEAS ||T ||<σ[i]>i[n] );
Return σF

3.2.3 Signature Extraction Algorithm Ext(pk, M, σF , X)

This algorithm accepts a public key pk, a EHR document M, a Content extraction
signature σF , an extraction subset X, and produce an extracted signature σE .
Parse pk = (y ,q )
Parse$σF ← H (CEAS ||T||<σ[i]>i[n] )
σ ← i∈X σ[i] mod y
σE ← (CEAS,T,σ)
Return σE
198 A. Thompson et al.


3.2.4 Signature Verification Algorithm Ver(pk, M , σE )

This algorithm accepts a public key pk, an extracted subdocument M , and an
extracted signature ,σE , and produces a verification decision d ∈ {Acc, Rej}, where
Acc implies “Accept” and Rej indicates “Reject.”
Parse pk = (y,q )
Parse σE ← (CEAS,T,σ)
Parse M1
X’ ← CI(M’):n ← len(M’)
For i∈X‘
h[i] ← H (CEAS,T,n,i,M’[i])
if $
σq ≡ i∈X‘ h[i](mod y ) and X‘ ∈ CEAS
Return Acc
Else Return Rej

4 Implementation

The designed system, electronic health record management system (EHRMS),

works by joining three components together: (1) a front end which is a web
application that allows patients/provider to access EHRMS; (2) an EHR manager
that communicates with provider databases, and file system; and (3) an Ethereum
blockchain that controls access rights to EHRM and connects each EHR manager
to the peer-to-peer network. In summary, patients initiate access contracts that are
saved on the blockchain. Therefore, the contracts determine providers’ actor that
should be permitted to access the EHR.

4.1 Front End

This is a component of the system that the user interacts with. All patients and
service providers communicate with the system through this interface. The front end
was developed using React framework. React is a JavaScript library for building a
user interface with simple views for each state of the application; it communicates
to the local and remote server through WebSockets. Users’ private keys and other
details are stored on local machines while providers use a remote server to store
information of users that have a relationship with them (Figs. 4 and 5).
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 199

Fig. 4 EHRMS front end landing page

Fig. 5 Service provider home page

200 A. Thompson et al.

4.2 EHR Manager

The EHR manager segment of EHRMS connects with the basic file system
and facilitates correspondence between EHRMS hubs. It is essentially written in
GoLang, albeit a few collaborations with the blockchain network require script
written in JavaScript.
Remote procedure calls (RPCs) are orders given by one PC to conjure functions
on another. The protocol is transport rationalist and can be applied to the Transmis-
sion Control Protocol (TCP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), WebSocket, and
different protocols for sharing information over the web. EHRMS utilizes RPC in
two different ways, between the users and a local database, and between the users
and a remote provider database.
Local RPCs are utilized to interface between parts of the user interface written
in JavaScript and the EHR manager written in GoLang. The EHR manager
is fundamental for composing client information to the host file system. This
incorporates usernames, passwords, and secret texts.

4.3 Ethereum Proof-of-Authority

Blockchain network was set up with three different systems. Each system represents
the provider node, and each node was set into motion as a validator to the genesis
block on the proof-of-authority (PoA) blockchain.
PoA is an algorithm the makes use of consensus mechanism that relied on the
identity at stake. In PoA, an authorized account known as validator approved all the
transactions and blocks chained into the network (Fig. 6).
In EHRMS, the validator provides a service known as the Ether Faucet, and
the Ether Faucet is the fulfillment of the value of the ether required to perform

Fig. 6 Smart contract calls on the Ganache platform

A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 201

a transaction on the network. Because of convenience, this process is obscure for

system users. EHRMS requests for enough ether necessary to carry out transactions
from a provider, for all transactions made by a user. This usually happens when
patients perform their contract with an agent or when a provider becomes a validator.
Providers that are validators automatically generate ether, as nodes endorse the
blocks. Three specific types of smart contracts have been created, compiled, and
deployed on the PoA blockchain to handle access control to EHR using a solidity
programming language. The smart contracts are summary contracts, contracts for
patient-provider relationships (PPRs), and contracts for registrars contracts. The
compiler generates byte code, and each byte code is uploaded to blockchain EVM
to represent a specific operation. The compiler generates byte code, and each byte
code is uploaded to blockchain EVM to represent specific operation.

4.4 Storing EHR

A patient (P) has an encounter with a medical doctor (D) and the D generates a
health record as EHRs for P. The D sends EHRs to P; upon acquiring the EHRs,
P uploads the indexes of the EHR to the blockchain with the catalog of authorized
user (U).
EHRMS allows each user to create a pair of keys during registration, the doctor
(D) creates content extraction on EHRs using a pair of keys (pk, sk) and encrypt
EHRs using symmetric key kd for the purpose of confidentiality. All users in the
blockchain network possess public key (pki ) and private key (ski ) to accomplish
data sharing.
In our system, CES scheme is used to extract sensitive information from EHR
to assure patient privacy. The doctor serrates EHRs into nine parts (name, age, sex,
ID, contact, next of kin, medical history, diagnosis, prescription), and it is denoted
as M = {m1 , m2 , m3 , m4 , m5 , m6 , m7 , m8 , m9 }. Then the doctor defines the
content extraction access structure CEAS = {2, 3, 7, 9} to avert virulent extraction.
The process of content extraction signature is started by generating public/private
key (pk, sk) using key generation algorithm. Next is for the D to sign the EHR
data M using the signature extraction algorithm. After the completion of signature
algorithm, the D encrypts EHR (M, hii ∈ [1, 9] , σF , CEAS, T) and patient’s public key
pkp and sends both encrypted data to patient P.
%   &
Message = Ekd M, hi i∈[1,9] , σF , CEAS, T , Epkp (kd ) (1)

Upon receiving the encrypted data from D, P decrypt kd and get M. The P uses
CEAS to extract content of the signature and the corresponding EHR using signature
extraction algorithm.

Data = {(Mi , hi , T ) , σE } (2)

202 A. Thompson et al.

P stores the extract signature and corresponding EHR in EHR manager and
returns the storage location link. P partakes in the blockchain and anonymously
by presenting the signed storage location link SIGskp (Ind), and then a request (Rq)

is sent to the blockchain where i ∈ CI(M ) and t is timestamp.
% &
Rq = SI Gskp (I nd i ) , H (I nd i ) , Epkp (I nd i ) , t (3)

I nd i = (link i , hi , t) (4)

After receiving, the request validator checks the validity of each transaction and
collates all data during the period into a data set Dataset = {Rq, t}. The validator
forms a new datablock by hash the data set Datahash = H(Dataset , t), and digital
signature SI Gskv Data set , Data hash . The validator broadcasts the data block to
all the nodes on the blockchain.

V alidator → All : Dblock = Data set, Data hash, pk vi , SI Gskvi (Data set , Data hash ) (5)

4.5 Sharing of EHR

To ensure save sharing of EHRs, P predefines access permission in the smart

contract, i.e., access right and access activity, for instance, write, read, and duration
of access. Smart contract is automatically prompted to run the corresponding
operation once the predefined condition set is met. Data sharing process starts
by initiating an EHR sharing request transaction (Rq) to the blockchain network.
User U makes this request which includes the access target (ID), object to access
(obj), and access content. Validators accept the transaction request and verify the U
identity. If U is valid, the transaction will be stored in the blockchain.

U → V alidator : Rq = (I D, obj, ind, t) , ind ∈ [1, 9] (6)

If access conditions are met by the request, smart contract is prompted to decrypt
the indexes of EHRs with patient private key skp and retires the cipher-text of
indexes to U: else the request is rejected.

Message = Epku (ind i , t) (7)

A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 203

Table 2 Key recovery query Key recovery/DB size 100 (ms) 1000 (ms) 10,000 (ms)
execution time with varying
database size 1 1.75 1.78 1.84
10 1.80 2.20 2.13
100 2.00 7.80 9.88
1000 4.38 11.00 13.12

5 Evaluation

This section gives a performance study based on a series of experiments conducted

to evaluate our system (EHRMS). We will first explain how the public key is
obtained.
The first test was to determine a user’s public key retrieval time connecting the
EHR manager (gateway) database. We employed MySQL database system in the
tests, on a host PC with Debian 9.8 OS, 4 GB RAM, and an Intel Core I5 1.6 GHz
processor. Another machine running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with 8 GB RAM and an
Intel Core I5 2.3 GHz processor served as the EHR manager (gateway). Using three
database sizes: 100, 1000, and 10,000 EHR, 1, 10,100 keys fetching time-taken
was measured. For each database size, Table 2 illustrates the query execution time
to obtain certain keys number. It is observed that the query execution time varies
depending on the retrieved keys as well as the size of the database.
The contracts are developed and implemented in a private blockchain using
Ganache and Truffle. Ganache, a personal Ethereum blockchain for developers’
smart contracts, construct smart contracts, decentralized applications (dApps), test
software, and inspect state while maintaining control of the chain. Truffle is an
Ethereum virtual machine-based programming environment, testing framework and
asset pipeline for blockchains (EVM). The first thing that was noticed during the
network’s construction was the maximum amount of gas that each block could
hold. Ganache uses 6,721,975 gas blocks by default, while Main-net presently uses
8,000,000 gas blocks. We initially confirmed the gas cost of the smart contract
we designed before setting the limit quantity of gas per block on the developed
blockchain. The system executes an address mapping that changes a contract’s
privacy preferences, as indicated in the method in Fig. 7. The contract cannot be
updated if the EHR manager determines that it does not include the requestor’s
address. We believe that one or more research institutions may request surveillance;
thus each must have its own registered address.
A smart contract uses a certain quantity of gas, which is then stored on the
Ethereum blockchain. We conducted studies to determine the gas cost of each
contract by adjusting the number of addresses meet the user’s privacy settings. Table
3 displays the results collected. As can be seen, the cost of gas rises as the number of
addresses mapped in the contract grows. We picked ten addresses for each contract
since storing values on the Ethereum network has gotten expensive.
The limit amount of gas is set for each block to store 10 contracts based on the
value acquired in the previous experiment. Table 4 compares contracts saved in our
204 A. Thompson et al.

Fig. 7 Privacy preference smart contract

Table 3 Gas cost varying the Addresses Gas cost

address quantity
1 183,733 gas
10 320,090 gas
100 1,524,958 gas

Table 4 Contracts stored by Network Gas cost

block in different networks
Default Ganache 11
Ethereum Main-net 13
EHRMS Network 10

network to those stored in Main-net and the regular Ganache network. The results
demonstrate that the number of contracts saved in our network with Main-net and
Ganache differs by a slight margin. Because the gas size of each block in Main-net
varies over time, this variation has no effect on the network’s functionality.
Then, a limit of 320,090 gas per block is established in our network, allowing us
to store exactly 10 contracts every block. Because we employ a private blockchain,
this value has no impact on network performance.
To register and verify the contract, the registration time of contracts in the
blockchain was evaluated through the gateway, taking into account that each stored
EHR refers to a contract. For this experiment, we used an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system
with 2 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 3.8 GHz processor to host our blockchain.
By establishing a link with the blockchain, we next used the web3.js package to
register and validate the contracts. Following that, we measured the time it took to
register 1, 10, and 100 contracts. The results are shown in Table 5. We deduced from
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 205

Table 5 Execution time for Contract Execution time (s)

contract catalogue in
blockchain 1 0.63
10 4.80
100 39.20

Table 6 Execution time to Blocks Execution time (s)

obtain a contract in
blockchain 1 0.53
10 0.57
100 0.59

these findings that time-taken to register transactions in a blockchain varies linearly

with the number of contracts being registered at the same time.
Following that, the address of each contract generated was used to search the
blockchain for it and analyze the gateway’s connection time to the blockchain. We
ignored the time it takes for the gateway to retrieve the contract address from the
database. As shown in Table 6, an increase in the number of blocks has no effect on
the time it takes to obtain a contract recorded on the blockchain.

5.1 Security Assessment

We will assess the security of the developed smart contract in this part. We use a
methodology to identify the primary sorts of attacks that can be carried out against
smart contracts in this evaluation. We discovered three plausible contract assaults
among them:
1. Reentrancy: Calling a smart contract function many times by different users
can result in inconsistencies in the function’s final result. We choose to use the
change Preferences method for n different users in order to evaluate this attack
in our contract.
2. Front-running: A changePreference() transaction can be observed in the plat-
form’s mempool (i.e., memory pool) before it is processed, allowing a person
to react in advance. The memory pool serves as a repository for unconfirmed
transactions. A transaction is created and then sent to the network and stored
in the mempool. We want to check how numerous transactions in the mempool
behave in our tests.
3. Gas limit denial of service (DoS): When a user attempts to exceed a block’s gas
limit with one or more transactions, the transaction is refused, and the transaction
is not executed. In our experiments, we try to find an exploit in the contract that
allows us to go above the gas limit.
To carry out the first sort of attack (Reentrancy), we used multiple addresses on
the blockchain to call the changePreferences() function at the same time. We did
this by registering the addresses that might have access to the blockchain in the
206 A. Thompson et al.

Table 7 Reentrancy attack Addresses Expected result Final result

result varying the number of
addresses 2 True True
5 False False
10 True True

Table 8 DoS probability in Complexity Probability of DoS

relation to contract
complexity O(1) Impossible
O(1) High
O(n 2) Extremely high
O(2 n) Extremely high
O(n!) Extremely high

smart contract. As previously stated, the maximum number of addresses that may
be stored in a contract is ten; thus the test was limited to that number. We check
whether the flow of calls to a single contract function can cause inconsistencies in it
in this test.
According to the results obtained, the contract established was not influenced
by the Reentrancy attack, as shown in Table 7. We discovered that the attack was
ineffective due to the changePreferences() function’s simplicity. This assault may
have an impact on contracts with a higher level of complexity.
The Front-Running attack was carried done by observing the transaction mem-
pool in Truffle Console and using the changeMonitoringType() method. We wanted
to find the blockchain transaction in the mempool after running the method. How-
ever, because we use a private blockchain with few transactions, the function was
executed immediately. As a result, there was no time to complete another transaction
before the previous one was completed. Another factor contributing to this effect
was the contract’s simplicity, which shows that when the changeMonitoringType()
function was called, a new block was formed. The Bloom filter record displayed
tries to protect the user’s privacy and defend against third-party attacks.
We investigated the contract to generate denial of service attacks in the third test
(Gas Limit DoS). We used both contract’s functionalities in this experiment. This
test, unlike the first, seeks to generate an exploit in the contract in order to surpass the
block’s gas limit. Unlike the Reentrancy attack, which aims to maliciously change
the value of a transaction using an exploit without exceeding the block’s gas limit,
this sort of attack prevents a transaction from being executed.
Based on the results of the tests, we discovered that the contract we built is
tamper-proof against Gas Limit DoS. Because of the smart contract’s simplicity,
when a function is called several times, it is processed promptly, preventing DoS
attacks. However, we discovered that the algorithm’s complexity has a direct impact
on this security concern. The created algorithm’s complexity is classified as O(1),
making the attack unachievable. When the contract design is not done appropriately,
Table 8 shows the possibility of a DoS attack occurring based on the complexity of
the algorithm.
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 207

To show the contract’s intricacy, we utilized the Surya tool to create a graphic
representation. Surya is a smart contract system utility tool that gives a multitude of
visual outputs as well as information about the contracts’ structure. It also allows
you to query the function call graph for manual contract inspection. The contract
functions do not interact with one another and cannot be invoked externally by other
smart contracts. This method simplifies contracts and eliminates security concerns.
We used the audit tool Mythril to assess the security of the constructed smart
contract, as we did in the previous experiment. Mythril is an Ethereum Virtual
Machine bytecode security analysis tool. It employs symbolic execution, Satisfiabil-
ity Modulo Theories (SMTs) solution, and taints analysis to uncover security issues
in smart contracts. This program looks for code that could lead to inconsistencies in
security and can uncover flaws in Ethereum and other platforms’ smart contracts.
The security warning MythX SWC-103 appears in the report generated by the
Mythril program. When we specify in the contract a distinct version of the pragma
utilized in the compiler, a floating pragma is issued. Version 0.6.4 was used to create
the contract while version 0.6.7 was used by the solidity compiler installed on the
PC used in the tests. This technique can be problematic since old versions of the
pragma can cause errors in the contract’s execution. To fix the problem, we’ll need
to update the contract to utilize the same compiler version as the machine.

5.1.1 Privacy and Sharing

Patients’ privacy is preserved by separating each patient’s identity from provider

identities. A new Ethereum account is created for separate patient-provider relation-
ship by health providers. This enables the patient to establish public relationships
with providers without exposing personal information of the individual who are
involved in the relationships. But, communication is done indirectly via their
provider’s account; nonetheless, the account is for patients’ transactions provision
with ether.
Also, the system employs content extraction signature (CES) scheme to remove
sensitive part of EHR signed by the doctors. CES generates the valid signature
extraction which cannot be forged without the private key of the signer.
We restrict the amount of data to be stored on the blockchain to a small set
by creating the reference the EHR. The references and predefine permissions are
stored on the chain. It is important that every patient should have some data
storage as on-chain. A 9727-byte executed transaction creates an identity catalogue
contract. Thereafter, respective patient and provider relationship requires a 5007-
byte transaction, with contract updates entailing 220 bytes. This effectively provides
estimation of the required bytes for storage by every single node.
208 A. Thompson et al.

5.1.2 Storage Management

Blockchains need all the nodes to store information and links it to the blockchain
because blockchain cannot save massive data. If these data are stored directly in the
blockchain network, it will increase computational overhead and storage burden due
to the fixed and limited block size. However, data privacy leakage is imminent. We
restrict the amount of data to be stored on the blockchain to a small set by creating
index of the EHR, which references the HER coupled with the index that is stored
on the blockchain.
We apply the architecture for off-chain storage since it enhances large storage
volumes of encrypted original EHR service provider local storage, and blockchain
for on-chain verification only stores few indexes of the corresponding raw data.
This reduces the blockchain storage load and private data integrity and privacy.
Moreover, users can leave and rejoin the system at any time, and then get access
to their historical record according to the index downloaded from the most recent
block in the blockchain.

5.1.3 Data Audit

EHRMS also relies on audit log management as security mechanism since some
exceptions may have resulted from the misuse of access privileges or dishonest
behavior by data requestors. Audit log serves as proofs when disputes arise to hold
users accountable for their interactions with patient record. Thus, immutable public
ledger and smart contract in the blockchain provide immutable record for all of
access requests to achieve traceability and accountability. Audit log majorly consists
of important information such as timestamp of logged event, requester user, data
owner ID, access type (create, query, update), and validation result of the request.

6 Conclusion

Electronic health record management systems rely on sharing architectures that are
state of the art to maintain privacy. The design makes use of a private blockchain,
smart contracts, and CES for anonymization. Because each patient’s records are kept
separate, their privacy is protected. For each patient-provider connection, healthcare
professionals are generating a new Ethereum account to assist individuals in
establishing public relations with providers without releasing personal information.
Despite the fact that communication isn’t done directly through the main account of
their supplier, ether is also used to provide patient transactions. The system employs
content extraction signature (CES) scheme to remove the sensitive part of EHR
signed by the doctors. CES generates the valid signature extraction which cannot be
forged without the private key of the signer.
A Secure Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare System Using Blockchain 209

As a web application, the developed system can be used on a variety of platforms,

including PCs and mobile devices. By allowing all network nodes to check and
disseminate all transactions and block them according to the established rules
defined in the smart contracts, the system strikes a balance between security and
comfort.
The use of decentralization concepts and blockchain frameworks to develop
robust, user-specific, and interoperable EHR systems is demonstrated in this study.
Data access is managed by Ethereum smart contracts, which keep verification
logs and EHR entries and enable patients with comprehensive record reviews,
care auditability, and knowledge exchange through multiple storage and provider
networks.
The findings validated the viability of the architecture as designed. According to
the outcome of the research, the applied smart contract is impervious to a variety of
attacks. With regard to security considerations, the approach utilized in this work to
build a basic complexity contract supported the proposed design. To be clear, more
sophisticated structures may require even more complicated contracts.
In these situations, a more thorough security study is required in order to
discover any weaknesses that could jeopardize the contract’s correct functioning.
The research presented in this publication builds on prior findings by Yue et al.
[14]. It is worthy to note that emphasis is on the established architecture’s security,
converging entirely on the smart contracts structure, in addition to providing more
details about the proposal and evaluating its performance. As a consequence of the
performance and safety testing, we are able to show that the proposed architecture
can be implemented.

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An Investigation of Blockchain
Technology and Smart Contracts
Deployment in Smart Medicine 4.0

Anna Polubaryeva

1 Introduction

1.1 Smart Life

Currently, almost all areas of human activity are becoming “smart”: this means
that everything is interconnected and digitalized, and a large number of software,
devices, equipment, technics, technicians, and other various staff are used in order
to carry out activities in a separately taken area. Medicine is not an exception at
all; on the contrary, it is one of the advanced areas that are on fast forward toward
an Industry 4.0. Smart medicine occupies a special place in the smart ecosystem,
also because it belongs to the critical infrastructure in any state. This means that
it not only receives the close attention of governments and society but also is in a
great demand from population who is the main user of this critical infrastructure.
In the field of “medicine,” the Smart Medicine 4.0 has its unique space as well: it
is the latest and the most important part of medicine, which is developing, although
not rapidly, like other industries, but progressively and confidently. Transition to
“smart” medicine is now a priority in many countries.
At the moment, the transition from Industry 3.0 to Industry 4.0 has just begun,
and although the healthcare sector is making this transition gradually, the pace of
this transition is not as quick as, for example, in other sectors, such as manufacturing

Part of this work was done when the researcher visited the University of Nicosia under the Erasmus
Student Exchange Program.

A. Polubaryeva ()
Secure Information Technologies Department, ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia
Department of Computer Science, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 211
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_10
212 A. Polubaryeva

and logistics. A satisfactory transition is observed primarily in the countries that are
pioneers and leaders in the transition to Industry 4.0 paradigm and, in particular,
to Smart Medicine 4.0 (Germany, Italy, other EU countries, the USA, the UK, and
China). Thus, it could be concluded that smart medicine has many challenges to be
addressed as well as positive and negative aspects.

1.2 Smart Contracts

Smart medicine is developing and/or is under development in many countries. The

use of blockchain and smart contracts in medicine was proposed from the very
beginning; however, it is only over the period from early 2010 to the present that
the idea of using blockchain and smart contracts in the field of smart medicine
has grown incredibly. Many countries now develop the overwhelming blockchain
ecosystem for healthcare, the one of the largest is in the EU [1], which intends to
embrace the broad number of initiatives and deployments offered by the blockchain
researchers. Various use cases, schemes, and ideas for these technologies have been
proposed, including hybrid ones, for example, using federated learning and machine
learning [2]. And one of the most intriguing and practically applicable challenges is
to provide, as well as increase, the level of security and privacy.
Speaking of security and privacy of the healthcare sector, it shall be noted that
the methods proposed for the protection of security and privacy are currently very
diverse and sometimes based on opposite concepts and principles. For example,
there are opponents for using decentralized systems as a foundation for the
smart medicine framework, whereas others insist on centralized systems. Privacy
enhancement techniques [3–6], federal technologies [7], fog technologies [8], big
data methods [9], and different hybrid methods are offered apart from blockchain-
based methodologies.
And if initially the priority was simply to use a verification function of the smart
contracts in smart medicine, nowadays, the use of blockchain for the purposes of
improving the quality of life for disabled people and tracking Covid-19 does not
seem to be something surprising [10]. In addition to the tasks of direct participation
in the provision of medical services (in one or another manner and scope),
smart contracts and blockchain are very actively proposed for implementation to
ensure security and privacy in the smart medicine paradigm (for devices, hospitals,
medical data storage systems, etc.). However, it is a blockchain that is the better
solution among all other possible options due to its inherited and built-in functions
and abilities. Thus, the results of studies by various authors (academicians and
practitioners) show that due to their unique qualities, blockchain and smart contracts
can significantly improve the enhancement and support of privacy and security in
the healthcare sector. In this chapter, smart contracts and blockchain technologies
for smart medicine will be discussed.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a brief description
of the blockchain technology and its specific elements (e.g., smart contracts) while
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 213

at the same time discusses its main characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages.
Section 3 presents the findings of a thorough and detailed investigation of the
blockchain and smart contract applicability in the healthcare sector. Section 4 con-
cludes. The term “actors” used throughout this chapter includes all the participants
involved or may be potentially involved into the smart medicine ecosystem.

2 Current Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts

Issues and Challenges

2.1 Blockchain and Smart Contracts in a Nutshell

Before moving on and revealing the benefits of blockchain for security and privacy,
including for the healthcare sector, it is necessary to give a brief description of this
technology and its specific elements, such as a smart contract, as well as illustrate
its main characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages.
Blockchain is the tool that currently best ensures the security of the Internet
of Things (IoT) and medical devices included in it. The blockchain has specific
characteristics such as peer-peer communication, transparency, trust, immutability
[11], auditability [12], and autonomous workability (it can work without any
additional trigger). The combination of these characteristics makes it one-of-the-
kind tool which allow using it in many areas: cryptocurrency and blockchain
technologies provide a unique opportunity for various spheres and industries to use
this technology not only for the deployment of businesses, services, and applications
but also for the provision of high protection equipped with cryptographic methods
and algorithms. And this makes blockchain and Ethereum in particular an excellent
tool for softening security issues during the deployment of smart contracts. The
Ethereum is considered by many as the best blockchain platform which may be
used for various purposes.
A blockchain is a system that serves as a tamper-proof ledger distributed on an
assemblage of communicating nodes, each and all of which shares the same genesis
block – an initial block of information, which has no parent block. In order to add
information to the blockchain, a node includes information in a block with a pointer
to its parent block; this creates a chain of blocks and hence called blockchain. One of
the important components of blockchain technology is the mining process, which is
as follows: a node solves a crypto-puzzle and provides the solution as a proof of its
work to get a reward [13], and as a result, the new block is created. This new block
will be used in the future transactions and creations. There are few platforms for
developing blockchain-based application: Ethereum, R3 Corda, Hyperledger Fabric
(HF), Quorum, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Ripple, and so on.
Since 2008, there are a lot of research, experiments, and proposals on the
topic of blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies. Initially the blockchain
was supposed to be used only for payments between peers; however, over time,
214 A. Polubaryeva

the technology was proposed to be used for all sorts of other purposes, such as
distributed storage and academic research on consensus protocols, and one of such
applications is to enable the smart contracts [14].
The smart contract can be defined as a self-executing financial instrument that
synchronizes its state through blockchain transactions, may interact with decentral-
ized cryptocurrencies, has its correct execution enforced by the consensus protocol,
and takes user contribution. In the Ethereum environment, it may also be considered
as an autonomous agent executed by an Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) and is
the core foundation and the main building blocks of any distributed application
(DApp) [15]. Giving a basic description, smart contracts are small, terminating,
deterministic computer programs written in a high-level language like Solidity or
Viper, or it can be described as a piece of code that executes on a blockchain. The
computation and state are all public. The Solidity is an assembly-like, contract-
oriented, stack-based, quasi-Turing complete language which consists of 65 unique
opcodes [16] and is the most applied one for developing of smart contracts. In
Ethereum network, when a code is deployed on the blockchain, the EVM is going
to run it as long as the conditions apply; moreover, the triggering functions in the
smart contract may be executed from any account only if two conditions are met:
address of the smart contract is known, and the function caller has enough Ether
to trigger. Smart contract has the ability to aggregate user votes, negotiate with
other contracts, store and represent tokens and digital assets, and make and receive
cryptocurrency payments. Smart contracts have an important benefit because they
provide a significant added value: the code handling the business logic in it is not
so vague as in conventional servers, and getting public, thus, is going to be easily
verifiable.

2.2 Advantages in Comparison with Non-blockchain Systems

2.2.1 Generic Blockchain Advantages

Despite all challenges blockchain and smart contracts demonstrate at the moment,
blockchain technology has undeniable advantages over non-blockchain systems.
These benefits can also be used for security, privacy, and other aspects in various
ways. These advantages are, in particular, as follows:
(a) The secure storage of the ledger data and the transactions using the special
structure based on both encryption/hashing and Merkle tree. This structure also
ensures integrity of the data stored in the blockchain [17]. All cryptographic
algorithms in blockchain increase the data security as each block contains the
cryptographic hash of the previous block.
(b) Low cost of the maintenance [18] – the execution is getting automatic after the
smart contract was deployed.
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 215

(c) Immutability and traceability of each transaction in the network, where each
operation is recorded, logged, and hashed; thus, it is easy to carry out an audit
of the transactions, including unwanted or unlawful ones [19].
(d) The databases are less vulnerable to attacks due to the unchangeable nature of
the blocks in the blockchain; thus, it can provide strong immutability.
(e) A distributed peer-to-peer architecture which allows the blockchain system to
control and eliminate a single point of failure. Hence, the low (or reduced) risk
of the failure due to the decentralized and distributed nature of the blockchain.
(f) Not only the accounts encrypted with high security but also externally owned
account (EOA), being an anonymous account, protects the identity of the owner
because it is not possible to determine such an owner of the account and their
data attached; consequently, the blockchain provides higher confidentiality and
privacy for the account’s owner.
(g) A unique business logic of the smart contract, which allows its use in any
possible field [19].
(h) All nodes in the blockchain have a copy of the blockchain with all transactions
recorded in it in keeping, and this means a higher availability of the data stored
in the blockchain.
(i) The higher level of the flexibility of the environment for the run time of devices
and IoT devices due to the lack or rareness of the single point of failure
mentioned above [20].
(j) Infeasibility. The blockchain system is extremely robust due to the distribution
of the copies of the data through different locations [18].
(k) The design of the blockchain aimed in general to provide integrity and
availability: each block stores all the transaction data. The integrity of data in
the blockchain ensured by the Merkle tree form of the nodes [17].

2.2.2 Blockchain Advantages for Healthcare Industry

The following ways of using blockchain to provide a higher level of transparency

and trust among actors of the decentralized IoHT system and Medicine 4.0 can be
highlighted at the moment:
(a) With the execution of the smart contract and EOA, patients and other covered
entities may control and check the data related to their health and verify many
actions and operations, for example, if they are still patients of the hospital.
(b) Smart contracts in the blockchain enables an abstraction layer which helps to
the various healthcare providers and other healthcare-related entities that have
different electronic health records (EHRs) and privacy/security standards to be
in a secure and constant communication and transfer the data using this layer
[21].
(c) Healthcare industry may be benefited by such a characteristic of the blockchain
as interoperability: the EHR and other data stored in the blockchain in the IoT
216 A. Polubaryeva

have a content-wise interoperability caused by the ability of the IoT to transfer

the same data from one node to another [22].
(d) A decentralized nature of the blockchain allows all actors of the healthcare
industry to participate limitlessly in healthcare data transmission as well as
provides excellent availability and resilience of the data and operations.
(e) The blockchain-IoT ecosystem with different tools of secure transmission of
the data is going to help to reduce the general cost of the data transfer in the
healthcare.
(f) Data sources of EHRs can be secured with greater power since CIA triad
(confidentiality, integrity, and availability) will be enhanced by the decentralized
storage method provided by the blockchain network and its nodes. Each CIA
component in healthcare system may be benefited by the blockchain as follows:
encryption techniques help to increase a data confidentiality, hash values
will provide healthcare records and information with data integrity, and data
availability becomes easier in the blockchain environment than in traditional
health ecosystems [23].
(g) The usage of the blockchain technology will guarantee faster healthcare services
and products providing and supplying since the blockchain may provide IoT
healthcare facilities and patients with the advantages determined by the decen-
tralized nature of the blockchain, namely, the ability of the nodes to transfer
information quicker. Additional tools, for instance, wearable IoHT devices and
such configuring cellular technology as LPWAN or 5G, may increase the speed
of transmission [23].
(h) The immutability and transparency features of the blockchain can assist in
retaining the medical and personal data of the patient in an intact block
and assimilate the genuineness of ongoing e-healthcare services, respectively.
Furthermore, actors may participate in the entire process to designate the
validation of transparency [22].
(i) Constant real-time update of the information stored in the blockchain network
that gives an advantage to the blockchain in healthcare industry, where fast
transmission of data is crucial [21].
(j) The blockchain may suffuse IoHT by adding improvements to system inte-
gration, coherence, confidentiality, and compliance [24], because usually the
blockchain consists of two elements: transactions, which are the operations
made by the participants of the BC, and blocks, which record the transactions
and guarantee its arrangement is unmodified.
(k) The tremendous and crucial advantages of the blockchain and smart contracts
for healthcare industry, one can generally consider, are the wide scope of
blockchain applications in the multiple actions which can be performed in
Healthcare Industry 4.0 using blockchain network [25–27], such as research
incentivizing, the blockchain-based access control, consent management, key
management, claims management, data verification, narrowband IoT device
management, etc. Some of these applications will be considered later in Part
D of Sect. 2 of this chapter.
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 217

(l) The medical data shared among the different healthcare actors, combined with
new smart labels that use the IoT to remind and track a patient’s treatments,
would give extremely helpful data not only for health professionals but also
for machine learning algorithms of the AI analyzers aiming to give more
personalized treatment and, hence, will lead to improvement of the healthcare
and security mechanisms [28].

2.2.3 Blockchain and Smart Contracts Challenges

Blockchain, as a means of protection against attacks on IoMT and IoHT, is proposed

by modern researchers quite actively, especially in the last 2 years [3, 19–22, 24, 29–
45]. In addition, blockchain and smart contracts are recommended to be applied in
various areas, as mentioned above. Despite the prospects and many positive aspects,
blockchain also has its own shortcomings, which must be identified in order to try
to overcome them in the future. Blockchain in the IoT and IoHT environments is
facing the following challenges [29, 46]:
(a) Storage facility stringency challenge. The needed storage capacity in the IoT
context is far lower than the ledger-based blockchain technology for sensors
and actuators. IoT allows for the processing of a single central database, where
each ledger must be saved at each node, similar to blockchain. When compared
to regular IoT devices, it consumes greater space over time.
(b) Lack of facilities challenge. This issue seems a minor one; however, if not to
address it in a proper manner, it may cause the limitations in blockchain and
smart contracts implementation into the majority of the IoT projects.
(c) Privacy and reputation challenges. These issues are considered as the major
negative sides of the blockchain due to the fact that it is not only data persistently
stored on a ledger, but the whole network has an access to such a data because
of the nature of the blockchain, which is pseudonym and can protect the users’
identity; however, the privacy and reputation can suffer because of analytic
methods which exist in the blockchain (crypto-puzzle, consensus algorithm,
etc.). These methods can lead to traceability of the transactions to a specific
identity of the owner of the account or other assets in the blockchain [3].
(d) Manpower challenge. There are not many efficient and qualified employees who
are familiar with the blockchain and smart contracts technology.
(e) Processing time challenge. The authentication process can take various time
slices due to the difference in the computational capacities of the peers in
the blockchain which can lead to the different processing time. Thus, unpre-
dictability becomes a new challenge that may lead to impossibility to build new
schemes, processes, and infrastructures with blockchain implementation.
(f) Scalability challenge. Concerns about the permissionless blockchain platforms’
scalability are a major hiccup to their widespread implementation. The limita-
tion on the scalability means that Ethereum platform has a limited maximum
transaction throughput [47, 48], which is caused by the such inherent feature
218 A. Polubaryeva

of the blockchain as linear raise of the time to process individual transactions

while the number of the participants grows. The main trigger for the choice
of the transactions to be included into the blockchain is the decision of the
miners, whose main desire (mostly) is to gain more money. Thus, this restrain
the scalability as well as a bootstrap time [48], and lack of consensus finality –
the time needed for a new node to download and process an entire transaction
history. The lack of consensus finality is another key factor of influence on
scalability (toward “scaling out of scaling”) and the ability of new nodes to
join the network [49]. However, there are many research works and proposals
that exist by now and continue to grow, related to the methods which allow to
override this scalability problem [49, 50], for example, with the use of such
techniques as plasma and sharding that make it possible to create a parallel
performance of the transactions and, consequently, increase tremendously the
workability of the blockchain platforms with the implementation of the data
partitioning [50].
(g) Legal issues. There are no legal acts in the USA, the EU, and other countries
which regulate the blockchain and smart contracts in a full manner and
allow to control them. The authors in [29] consider this problem as the most
significant drawback. The lack of the proper legal regulations may trigger many
problems if infrastructures or institutions implement blockchain technology
without consistent legal framework and support, due to the fact that any new
technologies may lead astray the initial intentions.
(h) Mandatory observance of certain conditions for the operation of the blockchain.
In [19], a number of limitations of blockchain usage are mentioned. The peer
nodes execute set of functions, which allows operating on the ledger data
and performing powerful complex operations. Blockchain cannot be used in
every system; there are a few requirements that must be completed before a
blockchain-based architecture can be deployed. There are crucial conditions and
terms that must be considered while using the blockchain: need for sharing of
data; need for immutable logs of operations occurred; multiple actors involved
in the system; whether there is a leader or a group of leaders controlling the
system on which the system is trusted, and whether there are uniform rules
throughout the participants. Moreover, there has to be significantly less chance
of amendment of the rules and norms of the transactions.
(i) The serious bugs in smart contracts itself. It includes anything from transaction-
ordering requirements to exceptions that have been mishandled. The EVM
provides inter-contract execution to allow reuse of code via calls to library
contracts, thus complicating the existing difficulty of getting high certainty [51].
(j) Privacy leakage and selfish mining related to consensus algorithms proof of
work (PoW) and proof of stake (PoS) [37].
(k) Absence of the thoughtful standardization and sufficient official policies in
healthcare industry. There are few standards by now developed by blockchain
communities and associations (for instance, ISO 22739:2020 Blockchain and
DLT, ISO/TR 23244:2020, ISO/TR 23576:2020) and few are under develop-
ment; however, the blockchain and other professional’s communities are still
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 219

in the process of creating proper and sufficient standards for blockchain and
smart contracts usage and implementation into mundane working procedures of
different infrastructures and application to the various areas.

2.2.4 Security of IoT and IoHT Critical Infrastructure: Blockchain as

a Solution

The issue of digitalization of all sectors of the economy and the transition to “smart”
industries and “smart” social infrastructures is increasingly being discussed, but in
reality, movement in this direction is proceeding very slowly; however, this does not
mean that it is not worth working out security issues now: the sooner the problems
are identified and possible and potential solutions are found, the easier it will be
in the future to build a competent information security protection system in the
healthcare sector.
The situation with regard to information security in healthcare remains constant.
The predictions made by the researchers until 2020 were fully confirmed: the
authors [52] indicated that the healthcare sector generates a tremendous scope of
data which is under operation every second. For example, the worldwide medical
data exchange and traffic for a year 2020 was approximately 2314 exabytes.
This prediction came into life, and nowadays, it is predicted to be growing every
single year. Such a large amount of valuable data attracts cybercriminals, who are
increasingly monetizing healthcare data.
According to the forecasts of the authors of [53], the growth of cybersecurity
market in healthcare industry is expected to reach USD 27.10 billion by 2026.
Why medical data is valuable? The medical data, as noted by both academics and
companies specializing in cybersecurity, becomes an object of great value due to its
pure nature, since the information security of medical institutions, medical devices,
and personal data of the patients is the security matter of every single person in
the world. Studies show that the price of medical data, including information about
patient health data, is 50 times higher than financial information. The cost of one
medical card can be as high as $60 on the black market, which is 10–20 times more
than credit card information [54]. According to forecasts [54], in 2019, healthcare
should have been subject to 2–3 times more cyberattacks than the average for other
industries, and these forecasts came 30 true. Inadequate security methods, weak
and generic passwords, and vulnerabilities in the code open the way for attackers
to manipulate the data of healthcare institutions. In addition, with the development
of the use of cloud technologies and IoT systems in healthcare, their vulnerability
is growing. According to [55], in 2019, “smart healthcare” is the leading target
for cybercriminals. As noted earlier, in most countries, healthcare is classified as
a critical infrastructure, which means that the interest of attackers doubles: not
only material values are at risk but also the well-being of citizens of a particular
country. “Criticality” or importance also grows due to the fact that biomedical
research generates valuable data, there is an active exchange of medical information
between medical institutions over computer networks, the medical environment
220 A. Polubaryeva

(healthcare environment) becomes associated with many systems, and, accordingly,

cybersecurity problems are also growing and require immediate resolution and
response. The general trends in data storage have also changed, and it is now
difficult to ensure the resilience of security systems with the current growth of cloud
infrastructure and the IoT. If the gradual introduction of connected medical devices,
digitalization, and the development of smart hospitals takes place around the globe,
it is necessary to foresee all possible risks in advance, using the most prospective
and effective technologies at hand, such as blockchain and smart contracts. Due to
its positive and even negative moments (what can be eliminated and developed into
a benefit), blockchain is the cast of the role of the instruments for solving problems
in many aspects and economic sectors.

2.2.5 Summary

It could be argued that the use of blockchain and smart contracts in Smart Medicine
4.0 is, if not mandatory, then definitely an advantageous technology that can be
implemented at all levels of the healthcare system, to all types of actors, and to
improve any devices and equipment. Section 3 will consider in more detail the
ways of practical application of the blockchain and smart contracts. As will be
shown further, the ways of developing the smart medicine with the introduction
of blockchain technologies and smart contracts in full or in part are different and
can be applied by each individual healthcare facility depending on its needs, tasks,
and problems it faces.
The main advantage of “smart” medicine is that it includes elements and advan-
tages (though also disadvantages) of digitalization and cyber-physical systems. The
main advantage of using blockchain and smart contracts is that if the shortcomings
of these technologies are overcome or mitigated (in the future), then the degree of
security in the healthcare sector, as well as the level of their overall development
by accelerating many processes (authentication, data transfer, etc.) with the help of
blockchain, will grow exponentially. In fact, smart medicine with smart contracts is
doubly smart medicine. And this is an advantage for every single person on Earth.

2.3 Legislation and Legislative Initiatives Related

to Blockchain and Smart Contracts in Different
Jurisdictions

Legislation on the blockchain, smart contracts, healthcare, and smart medicine is

also important, as it reflects the already existing trends and sets trends for the future
and also reflects all the challenges that are facing the smart medicine industry.
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 221

2.3.1 General Legal Regulation Provisions of Blockchain and Smart

Contracts

Currently, the legal status of blockchain and smart contract, as well as the definition
of their legal nature, remains an open question. After an in-depth study of the
legislation of various countries, it can be argued that the blockchain and the smart
contracts, unlike cryptocurrency, tokens, and ICOs, are not properly regulated by
law; moreover, even relatively good recommendatory acts are absent. Some believe
that the reason for this is the reluctance of the state authorities of some countries to
let economic leverage out of their hands and allow the development of decentralized
economic relations [56]. This is indeed the case, as states prefer to use already
accustomed, traditional instruments, since new tools always bring more risks and
unpredictability and may affect an economy and people.
The only country in which the court has recently issued a precedent decision,
according to which the smart contracts were equated to ordinary contracts, is the
Great Britain [57]. However, this still does not cover the entire field of activity
and application of the smart contracts; accordingly, there are still many questions
and problems to be resolved. In other countries such as the USA [56, 58–62],
EU [63–65], and Canada [66–69], mainly in the legislation, it is said about
cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and ITOs, and only general definitions of smart contracts
and blockchain are given without any details [70]. Work on the study, development,
and application of the blockchain and smart contracts in various countries is being
actively pursued; many state bodies and committees have been created. However, up
to now, completed and full-fledged laws and regulations have not been adopted or
approved. The study also showed that legislation on the use of smart contracts and
blockchain in healthcare is also not currently adopted, despite the fact that in the
state of Virginia [71], an act has been adopted that is aimed at creating the healthcare
provider credentials data solution ruled by the Department of Health Professions
and shall solicit proofs of concept to establish or improve a system for the storage
and accessing of healthcare provider credentials data, utilizing blockchain or a
similar technology. However, despite the fact that this is the only act in the world
at the moment that at the state level mentions the possibility of using blockchain in
healthcare, it is still a declarative act consisting of one article.
The legislative consolidation of the status of smart contracts and blockchains in
healthcare was also not found according to the results of a large study of different
laws, regulatory acts, and so on, although, for example, the use in agriculture has
already begun to be legislatively developed in the state of Colorado [72]; in the
states of Connecticut and North Dakota, a campaign on the use of blockchains and
smart contracts for votes and elections [62, 73] started; in Nebraska, the same is in
the insurance industry [62]; etc.
222 A. Polubaryeva

2.3.2 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996

(HIPAA)

The most elaborate rules are the HIPAA Regulations for a healthcare sector, which
contain the broadest list of actors and companies providing healthcare services. The
main concept that exists in HIPAA is the concept of “subjects” – covered entities.
The introduction of this concept is fundamental as it helps to understand which
organizations must comply with the HIPAA requirements. Covered subjects are
healthcare providers (namely, doctors, clinics, psychologists, dentists, chiropractors,
nursing homes, pharmacies, but only if they transmit any information in an
electronic form in connection with a transaction for which the US Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) has adopted a standard), a health plan (namely,
health insurance companies, HMOs, company health plans, government programs
that pay for healthcare, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the military and veterans’
healthcare programs), and a healthcare clearinghouse (includes entities that process
nonstandard health information they receive from another entity into a standard (i.e.,
standard electronic format or data content), or vice versa) [74]. Covered entities
are subject to HIPAA checks conducted by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR)
of the Ministry of Health and US Social Services (OHS), that is, these are the
very individuals and organizations that must strictly adhere to the HIPAA Rules.
Facilities and companies that have agreements with HIPAA are business partners
that legally obliged to handle protected health information (PHI) in a manner that is
consistent with HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Guidelines.
The second important HIPAA group is a group of actors called the business
associates, which includes third-party providers who provide services on behalf
of one of the covered entities actors that require access to or use of protected
health information (PHI). It should be noted that directly in the HIPAA regulations,
companies such as AWS, GCP, and Azure are classified as business partners, that
is, some software companies are immediately named in HIPAA and designated as
actors. Even the insured risks of the healthcare provider and the business partner
depend on the extent to which they comply with the HIPAA Rules: covered entities
must demonstrate their cybersecurity to minimize the likelihood of inadvertent
disclosure of PHI in the event of data and information breaches [75]. Vendor risk
management is a particularly important part of cybersecurity risk management for
organizations that employ third-party vendors. Before entering into any agreements
with business partners, healthcare organizations must complete a cybersecurity risk
assessment to understand how the business partner is managing information security
and whether it is HIPAA compliant.

2.3.3 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Unlike HIPAA, the GDPR [63] focuses on personal information. There, the
classification is made according to the following principle: depending on the legal
status, these can be public and private actors (cl. 5 of the GDPR) – that is, these two
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 223

categories include both natural persons (e.g., patients) and all possible organizations
(e.g., healthcare providers and various service providers).
Depending on the functionality performed, this is a data subject, a data controller
(or joint controller), and a data processor (chapter 4 of GDPR, cl. 45). The data
subject is a person/entity which obtains an identifier that can include name and
location. In healthcare, these are mainly patients and their representatives. The data
controller is a person/entity that manipulates with personal data: specifies operations
or processing activities (cl. 7 of GDPR). In healthcare, this can be all healthcare
providers and any person providing healthcare to a patient. The data processor
is the analyzer of the data subject’s data on behalf of a data controller or joint
controller. This, for example, could be AI analyzer, IoMT device, and so on. Health
issues are separately mentioned in the GDPR (cl. 45), where they are named among
other components of public interest. However, in addition to referring healthcare to
this category of cases and specifying under which law the controller should act,
the GDPR does not contain specific provisions or specifics of regulation in the
healthcare industry or cases.

2.3.4 Smart Medicine as a Target: The European Union Agency for

Cybersecurity (ENISA) Recommendations

The recommendation document for providing a professional degree of information

security in smart hospitals was developed by the European Union Agency for Cyber-
security (ENISA) [76]. These recommendations have a huge practical orientation
and deep study of information security issues in smart hospital. The smart hospital
of the future will function exactly as a single organism that absorbs all types of
actors, devices, and services, which accumulates not only all types of assets but also
all types of information (medical, personal, and financial data). The smart hospital
is a basic unit for the future smart medicine paradigm.
Interconnected clinical information systems and networked medical devices are
named as two cornerstones of the smart hospitals due to its position on the smart
hospitals: they are new IoT elements that support and provide the work of the entire
hospital. According to clause 2.2 [76], many hospitals are now becoming smart
hospitals that are intelligently connected and have autonomous decision-making
mechanisms. Smart hospitals have a tremendous scope of assets (mainly tools and
equipment) which shall be considered not only as a part of cyber-physical system
but also as a part of the smart medicine.
It is also worth noting that in these recommendations, the concept of data
is considered and presented in more detail. Among other things, the documents
regulating the activities of ENISA provide for the need for certification in the field of
cybersecurity, which creates the need to introduce any actors of certification bodies
into the interaction scheme.
ENISA has also developed currently new recommendation documents related to:
224 A. Polubaryeva

1. The Cloud Security for Healthcare Services (where cloud service provider and
customers aka healthcare organizations, cloud service provider, and medical
device manufacturer are presented as a separate group of actors). Moreover,
there are separate types of healthcare cloud services – nonexhaustive overview
of the currently identified cloud solutions for healthcare systems: enterprise
resource planning systems (ERP systems), health information systems (HIS),
communication services, office management, cloud-based network, health data
analytics, medical devices, telemedicine services, medication monitoring, and
supply chain management [77].
2. The Procurement Guidelines for Cybersecurity in Hospitals [78].
3. The Security and Resilience in e-Health Infrastructures and Services [79] (their
recommendations are directed to: public institutions responsible for e-health
strategy, e-health competence centers, e-health platform operators, academia,
user associations – networking organizations, standardization bodies, ICT indus-
try (suppliers). In this infrastructure the patient and the healthcare professional
are highlighted.

3 Internet of Health Things Blockchain and Smart Contracts

During the past few years, IoMT showed a tremendous increase that led to the
massive researches in the field of application of the blockchain in the healthcare
ecosystem. This is also conditional upon the fact that all medical and personal
data of the patients are highly valuable as they can be of great importance to all
stakeholders within the healthcare industry. The recent and leading-edge relevant
works of different technical teams all around the world have various focuses;
however, the main conclusion that can be made is that nowadays the majority of
the authors agreed and proved that the blockchain is a future instrument to increase
the level of security and privacy in the IoHT. About 60 works were studied on
the application of blockchain or mixed blockchain techniques, and in this chapter,
the most interesting ones are presented shortly for better understanding of the
blockchain role in the development of IoHT and protection and enlargement of its
security.

3.1 Attacks on the Healthcare Sector: Defense on the Base

of the Blockchain

The general scheme using the blockchain technology and one-time password (OTP)
in healthcare against attacks was proposed by the authors of the work [29]. The main
essence of this scheme is that tokens are used for security and privacy – they have
a short life period and are constantly updated, giving access to patient’s data to the
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 225

patient himself or to third parties (authorized ones). The proposed scheme describes
the login process of the user using tokens and the mechanism of its usage. The token
shall be generated each time when a user tries to sign in into “patient’s database” –
but nothing is said about how this database is created, how actors get access to
it, what this database ultimately contains, and what kind of information about the
patient is stored in this database. The authors’ proposal in fact is that for intrusion
detection, it is enough that token’s short activation (for a determined amount of time)
on the blockchain public or private network will suffice to resist a cyberattack. For
prolongation of the access, a new token has to be generated. In addition, they offered
that the token serves as a dummy number that contains a personal information of the
user which is encrypted with the help of the hash function and stored in blocks. The
authors neither specify how it works nor what mechanisms are used. In addition, it
is not specified whether the patient’s medical information is included in the personal
information, what exactly it consists of, and what role Wide Area Sensor Network
(WASN) plays in the scheme.
OTP proposed in this work is rather advantageous issue; however, it can be
also considered as a disadvantage, because it can make it difficult to work with
medical data (constantly entering a password is very difficult and sometimes fraught
with loss of time). Moreover, the description on the detection of attacks (external
and internal in healthcare institutions) using blockchain is well performed. The
main drawback of this work is that it is focused on the network layer and has no
detailed distinction of the persons who can enter the IoHT. The authors indicated
that with the blockchain encryption mechanism, it will ensure the security of the
information stored in the token and the user’s information as well as information
on detailed user’s operations within one session (connection to the database of the
administration).

3.2 IoT-Blockchain-Based Monitoring Model and Smart

Contract as a Verification Link for Smart Healthcare
Purposes

A more cryptographical angle is presented in [30] where it was proposed to use

the following model. Wearable medical devices (WMD) are equipped with cryp-
tographic protection, namely, the implementation of the smart contracts installed
on PC or patient’s smartphone, which can make an analysis of the gained and
formatted medical data of the patient. Moreover, an IoT-blockchain-based model
for the remote patient monitoring is proposed, with the higher level of the security
and privacy. This higher level of protection is achieved through the use of various
elements, including advanced, cryptographic techniques such as lightweight one,
like ARX encryption scheme, ring signatures (with such significant privacy features
as signers anonymity and signature correctness), double encryption scheme, and
Diffie-Hellman key exchange technique concept. The latter serves to enable a public
226 A. Polubaryeva

key (PK) protection against an attacker. The authors showed how the analysis is
carried out in the smart contract and then based on the results of such analysis how
a health alert event (transaction performed by the actor of the healthcare) is created.
To be precise, the data is sent to the smart contract, which is used as a verification
link: formatted information is analyzed in and by the smart contract along with
the threshold value. Then the threshold value makes a decision whether the health
reading is matching the normal standard health data type (the one that is considered
as a normal in the system) or not [30]. If the health data transmitted is considered
by the smart contract as normal, the sender may sign the transmission adding a
digital signature after that overlay network sends a signal to the health provider.
If the health data transmitted is considered by the smart contract as abnormal, the
smart contract is going to make an event and sends an alert to the patient, overlay
network, and cloud servers. The overlay network is used in this case only for storage
of transmission alert. According to the authors of [30], this blockchain-based IoT
model provides reliable data communication over the network (double encryption
scheme to make the symmetric key more secure over the network) and storage over
the cloud.
This work offers a good set of cryptographic protections. Instead of only one type
of encryption technique, both encryption schemes, symmetric and asymmetric, were
used for different purposes: ARX encryption algorithm (using a particular branch of
the symmetric key, called ARX algorithms, to encrypt the data for blockchain. These
algorithms are made up of the simple operations, addition, rotation, and XOR, and
support lightweight encryption for small devices). £ asymmetric algorithm is used
for public key encryption.
The last but not least unique feature proposed by the authors is a combination of
the methods used: they introduced a useful set of cryptographic means, including
Diffie-Hellman key exchange technique, symmetric and asymmetric keys, ARX
encryption algorithm, digital signature, ring signature. This compilation of the
methods wasn’t not found in the other works dedicated to the security in healthcare.
The authors also proposed an implementation and usage of the overlay network: it
was used for simplification of the transaction and controlling measurements. The
function of it is to be aware of abnormal operations and send alerts and notifications
to healthcare providers. The omission in this part is that they mentioned only
providers, but not all interested parties.
Moreover, a sound scheme of cryptographic protection with the participation of
the overlay network is given. The authors also highlighted two different overlay
network functions depending on whether the data is normal or abnormal. However,
overlay network is used only for storage of transmission alert. In addition, a
term health alert event has been introduced. Health alert events should also be
anonymous and privacy preserved to the overlay network. This alert interpreted as a
transaction made by a separate user, and in order to increase the level of security on
the health information transferred, the alert may embrace all advance cryptographic
techniques with the use of a new algorithm proposed by these authors. One other
positive moment is that they highlighted the sender, receiver, and network functions
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 227

(where the entity who is sending the information could be treated as a sender and
the entity who is receiving the information could be treated as a receiver).
However, in spite of massive advantages of the work, it has a few omissions: the
entire system is offered only for remote patient monitoring, and this is only a small
part of the medical services that can be provided. In addition, for some reason, they
call data “readings”, which narrows the transmitted information and does not give a
full picture of the data transmission in IoHT.

3.3 Successful Implementation of the Blockchain and Smart

Contracts for Secure HER Sharing in E-Healthcare

In [45], the researchers based their progressive blockchain-based model on the

Ethereum platform and made a suggestion that this technology is the best for
the purposes of the healthcare sector’s security and privacy assurance, since their
EHR sharing blockchain-based architecture with the use of decentralized storage
interplanetary file system (IPFS) demonstrated a higher level of protection for e-
health (during evaluation of performance metrics and analysis) against external
attacks.
The authors demonstrated the advantages of the Ethereum platform for providing
security and privacy for the healthcare system. This was illustrated in the example
of the mobile cloud blockchain system; therefore, it is beneficial for the future
development of the telemedicine and remote patient control. It implemented the
order of access to medical data (EHR access) in the mobile application, without
having missed the user registration phase. However, it missed other important phases
that were mentioned and analyzed in many other works, some of which will be
discussed below.
Experiments have shown that their system provides a higher level of security
and privacy indicators such as flexibility, availability, decentralized access, identity
management, user authentication, integrity, and data privacy. The important thing
is that they, unlike many, have emphasized the data privacy. On the other hand,
despite the fact that the authors mentioned that in the Ethereum blockchain the smart
contract is an account that consists of data and code with multiple programmable
functions, they didn’t indicate the functions which smart contract may carry out.
However, it was mentioned that functions defined in the smart contract can be
triggered by a new transaction sent from an account of an actor, in order to transmit
data, handle the request, and handle an access management. This refers to the
functions of smart contracts and helps to further develop the idea of using smart
contracts for each type of data transfer transaction separately.
The omission of the work is that the healthcare provider is shown in a very narrow
sense, even the hospital is not mentioned as a unit of medical care; however, the
hospital is shown also as an actor, which manipulates medical data separately from
the specialists working in it, and this is the positive aspect, because it refers to a
228 A. Polubaryeva

smart hospital in its theoretical idea. Moreover, the admin and HER manager were
added into the smart hospital scheme: there are two centralized authorities, where
HER manager receives data from all patients and then stores data.
The other advantage is that this work highlights the fact that data on patients can
be of two types: personal information and medical data. The significant advantage
of the work [45] is the division into an area (in the meaning of the location), for
example, rooms, surgery area, and so on, which allows for systematization of the
data coming from patients belonging to the same group (area), while each area has
its own ID, which was taken into account by authors when constructing the data
block structure of cloud EHR storage system (to access a specific group of data
in the blockchain). At the same time, an e-health record itself acts as one of the
areas. It is beneficial that they separated a policy storage as a tool and even created
a separate base for policies, and this is an important addition to their structure,
as well as recognition of the importance of policies. However, the meaning of the
policies (policy list) is more related to an access control system: a peer in the
blockchain (healthcare provider or patient) may accept some policy that reflects
their relation in medical services (when the access to the EHRs of the patient has
only a specific doctor). The policy list contains smart contracts of all actors for
identification and further access control, when the smart contract performs a new
operation. The authors separated and described the following functionalities of the
smart contracts within created scheme: access control (new scheme proposed), data
offloading, data sharing (including data updating, data return, data request, record
hash value), verification, user registration form with Ethereum account, EHR access
results of an authorized user, transaction record of authorized EHR access, EHR
result of an unauthorized user, and transaction record of unauthorized EHR access.
The authors showed the enormous potential of the blockchain and the functional-
ity of smart contracts for the e-health industry: a detailed and profound experiment
with assessing changes in the security level was carried out, a special architecture
for medical records sharing was developed with the inclusion of various types of
smart contracts, new actors, and types of transactions.

3.4 Health Records Authorization Process

with the Implementation of the Permissioned Blockchain
and Smart Contracts: ABAC as an Important Tool for
Smart Healthcare

The researchers proposed in [39] their model of the authorization process of EHR
with the use of the permissioned blockchain and smart contracts technologies and
with the attribute-based access control (ABAC) model for improvement of the
existing authorization model for manipulations with EHR and other medical data
and enhancing the privacy and security characteristics of them. The Hyperledger
Fabric platform, which has many useful built-in features, was implemented into this
new scheme. This means that, first, in permissioned blockchain, all peers have to
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 229

be registered by a special authority – the Membership Service Provider (MSP) [80,

81] – and, second, due to the fact that this type of the blockchain allows the use
of ABAC which is directly built into the code of the smart contract [80], the smart
contract ought to be altered every time when the ABAC rules need to be modified,
which leads to a permanent redistribution of the smart contracts and consequently to
the more secure tamper-evident and distributed access control model suited toward
use cases that require privacy. The paper [39] also highlights the importance of
using policies; however, the policies are not included in the scheme presented
in the work. The ABAC and role-based access control (RBAC) models both rely
on a policy-driven implementation. At the same time, a description is given of
the advantage of the ABAC access system: the authors claim that this particular
technology is suitable for the healthcare system, because it is supported by the
Hyperledger Fabric (HF), which was originally created as a foundation layer to
transport enterprise-grade blockchain platform that has a built-in element to support
confidentiality and privacy of each possible customized model of the blockchain
usage for different types of areas. This special feature of the HF is achieved due
to the implementation of the transport layer security (TLS), channels, and private
transactions. And this means that ABAC which uses HF benefits from its features.
The other noteworthy idea offered in [39] is an introduction of the PatientEHR
as a type of smart contract. It is a benefit of this work since it is applicable
specifically to this category of data (EHR of the patient). The functionality of the
smart contracts is also presented by the authors: patient’s record can be created,
viewed, and updated with the PatientEHR smart contract. On the other hand, there
are no other types of smart contracts mentioned or described; moreover, the work is
generally and primarily related to the access control and EHR. Other types of data
are not considered. Accordingly, many other functions of the smart contracts and
the blockchain are not given, and there are much more of them than to provide and
delimit access to EHR.

3.5 Extended Usage of the Smart Contracts: Functionalities

of Smart Contracts

The work [17] is related mainly to the remote monitoring of the patient using
Ethereum platform; however, this work contains the best list of the smart contracts
functionalities offered by the authors who proposed the blockchain network and
smart contracts technology for healthcare system: remote healthcare system (RHS)
smart contracts and paradigm of smart devices (with the special processing mech-
anism for them). The researchers illustrated the processes of the initialization of
each RHS smart contract and execution of each smart contracts function for three
separated types of actors: healthcare provider (hospital), healthcare professional
(doctors), and the main group – the patients. The authors offered various types
of smart contracts (here – “SC”) to perform different functions, namely, remote
healthcare system SC, registration SC (doctor registration and patient registration),
230 A. Polubaryeva

authorization SC, monitoring patient SC (or health monitoring system SC), and
check patient SC included into the proposed blockchain network. It is a prospective
proposal that deserves further consideration and development. These are the only
authors who, in addition to patient monitoring, have highlighted such function of
the SC as a check patient, and this function allows to not only analyze a patient’s
data but also control their health in the real time and react quickly using the ability
of the smart contracts.
Moreover, other significant algorithm shown by the researchers is the processing
mechanism of the medical devices to accumulate and assess parameters of the
collected medical data which is used to define a normal and abnormal data from
patient’s sensors (consequently the data that indicate the normal and abnormal
state of the patient’s health’s parameters) after evaluation of the data recording
time on the smart contract. The mechanism sends proper activation or alert signals
to the doctors or does nothing in case of lack of emergency. One of the main
advantages of the work [17] is the proposed detailed verification of the smart
contracts mechanism with implementation of the execution of the remote healthcare
system smart contract for the security purposes. This verification scheme is able
to demonstrate the absence of the hackers to intervene into the functions of the
smart contracts if all functions of the developed smart contract within a period of
the registration of actors and data exchange smart contracts were operating in due
course. Thus, it was proved that the proposed model is effective against hackers.
Furthermore, the authors carried out an analysis of the blockchain-based remote
healthcare system and the non-blockchain-based remote healthcare system and
showed advantages of the former.
On the other hand, although the authors claim that in order to understand clearly
how their system works, they explored the use of smart contract for each participant;
among the participants, only healthcare providers (only hospitals) and healthcare
professionals (only doctors) are distinguished, without an implementation of some
other actors and service providers.

3.6 GDPR Insight: Combination of GDPR and Blockchain

The work [34] concentrated on the data privacy in IoT applications and compliance
with the GDPR with the use of the blockchain technology and smart contracts for
helping users to control the access and possession of their medical data. These
control measurements require the consent from users before any data manipulation
is performed by cloud-hosted services or smart medical devices. The blockchain is
seen as an instrument of more safe tracking transmission of the personal medical
data by the IoMT device due to the fact that the blockchain network is more
auditable in terms of actor’s actions and their identity verification. The researchers
offered the model which includes three smart contracts automated verification
undertook by IoMT devices on patients’ medical and other data and which can
enable a GDPR observance. The tests performed using Ropsten testing network
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 231

showed that the direct connection exists between the fee paid by the patient (user)
and the amount of violations of the GDPR found. It was also offered a combined
method to automatically verify GDPR rules on data processing units with the
purpose to verify GDPR compliance for IoT devices at design time and with the
use of combination of GDPR and the blockchain. The main goal of this work was
to illustrate the business processes and its components for a number of IoT devices
using blockchain-based virtual machine (VM). The focus of this work is mainly on
the smart devices and improvement of the privacy of data collected by such IoT
devices from unauthorized persons, including miners.
Three types of the smart contracts proposed by the authors for verification of
the GDPR compliance are the following: privacy contracts (stand for privacy policy
and user consent), submission contracts (one which has a log function to send an
information to the blockchain and what has a process name, a device’s address, as
well as information regarding blockchain-related activities: executed activity on user
data, the personal data that has been processed by such activity, and the encryption
status of this activity in the blockchain, which was deployed by a container for
storage purposes) [34], and verification contracts, where verification contract may
call both privacy and submission smart contracts.
Verification cost and intrusion detection is the other idea offered: This mech-
anism for determining the insertion of the GDPR compliance into the blockchain
ecosystem is well shown. The functionality and purpose, as well as the limitations
for full nodes and lightweight nodes when working on a blockchain platform, were
well shown. The whole verification scheme is shown using blockchain exactly as a
business process, which is also important for the healthcare system, where there are
many actors who provide paid services.
Moreover, a formal model (following the privacy-by-design approach) is pro-
posed for supporting GDPR compliance checking for smart devices. The authors
proved that the more actors participate in the operation, the more gas consumption
shall be expected. “Gas” is the “currency” (payment method) used in blockchain
system to make any transaction. This forces further research in the field and sets
tasks for the future in order to reduce gas consumption and reduce the cost of
transferring data as well as determine (and then control) the budget to allocate to
support compliance checking.
The classification of actors according to the GDPR (a data subject, a data
controller or joint controller, and a data processor) was given; however, the authors
did not bind (allocate) them to the actual actors in IoHT. These three types of actors
are classified by their functionality: how they perform the verification function. It
may be seen as a drawback, because for sure the verification function is not the only
one that can be used to provide a privacy and security protection and assurance
using smart contracts. The main omission of this research is that it focuses on
data collected from smart medical devices; other types of data are not considered,
despite the fact that there are still EHR, databases, and other elements of the
IoMT ecosystem. The work focuses in detail on GDPR compliance, what led to
abandonment of other legal and regulatory acts related to control in healthcare;
however, this approach and the mechanism may be useful to create the same
232 A. Polubaryeva

compliance system with blockchain implementation for the other legislation or

standard compliance (take it as an example for development).

3.7 Healthcare Data-Trading Market Based on Blockchain

In the work [18], the researchers showed how secure and trusted patient-centric,
transparent, and secure data sharing in IoHT network can be reached using the
integration of the blockchain and theory of games. The authors emphasized that in
healthcare sector medical devices traditionally interact with centralized cloud-based
server, because the network is usually limited by only one health institution, and
these institutions cannot share the personal health data (PHD) to such third parties
as providers, cloud, and other IT service providers and various analytics without a
patient’s consent. In the IoT era, this is inappropriate to have such boundaries and
obstacles; it is significant to collect and implement all actors and devices/equipment
of the IoHT ecosystem and provide the secure data sharing in it, so that the patients
can give their consent and all participants of IoHT can interact freely.
However, a model offered in the work [18] also has many advantages which
may benefit the IoHT: they introduced an evolutionary game theoretic scheme
so that it is possible to find out the impact of verification on the level of trust
within the various actors of the health data-trading system. Therefore, this theory
combines research on trust and theory of games with the main goal to detect and
eliminate untrustworthy players from the interactions and operations. As one of the
advantages of using blockchain, the authors indicate a practical and trustworthy
data-trading application of the proposed model aimed to build a healthcare data-
trading market for patients, hospitals, and researchers based on the blockchain
platform PHD-trading system, which collects multiple local consortium blockchain
platforms distributed geographically and near the source of data.
The authors used in their work the term personal health data (PHD) that is
less succinct than the term EHR, but more detailed and focused on personal data
and therefore more privacy-oriented. The main idea of the paper is to show how
effectively to manage the health data. The main advantage is the system of rewards
the researchers proposed: when patients receive them (rewards) in the form of
tokens (in the form of health tokens in case they accomplished any improvement
in terms of their health) for sharing at their own risk their data with third parties,
involved in this PHD-trading system. That is, in fact, patients are given a wide range
of powers. But at the same time, this is also a minus, since patients may not always
understand which data is private, which is not, which data must be transferred to
improve health, and which is not. Thus, it is clear that this work says more about the
healthcare market, and not about security and privacy, which is also a disadvantage
of this work, since in addition to the market value of patient data, these data have
other values (for the health and safety of the patient).
An excellent scheme supporting functionality of the healthcare ecosystem was
proposed by the authors which includes such actors as data requestors, sealers, and
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 233

patients; however, it does not embrace all possible actors involved in providing
healthcare services. The term “data requestors” includes a lot; however, it is not
really specific and there is no direct list of actors in it (there is only an example of
a pharmaceutical company and what data can be requested and for what). “Health
authority” is not quite an intelligible term, especially within the framework of IoT,
since it can be some kind of government agency and at the same time it can also
be a private clinic (i.e., separation is required here). These health authorities in
the blockchain-based trading system are considered as managers for the sealers
who administer each transaction on the blockchain, for example, management of
the trading-related transactions, access control policies, the shared data processing,
as well as supplying closer computing and AI services [18]. One of the benefits of
health authority is the support of the high-speed interaction between users (patient
and all other entities) with low computational burden. The term “patient” also
includes a medical device (IoT wearable medical device) – this is not entirely true,
since a device can be implantable. Moreover, a medical device should be highlighted
as a separate tool. The interesting fact is that in the paper the researchers were also
introduced as one additional actor, as authors claim that data is being collected for
further research in order to improve the healthcare system in the future.

3.8 Blockchain-Based Healthcare Monitoring Architecture

The authors of [43] also took into account such a mandatory system in the field of
medicine as the life monitoring system, to which employees of a medical institution
have access. This is a system for remote monitoring of the patient and their condition
by medical staff, which uses wearable and other home sensors to establish health
parameters of a patient’s health state with the accumulation of all data in remote
database. Hence, the architecture proposed in this work (healthcare monitoring
architecture), respectively, consists of two components: medical devices blockchain
and consultation blockchain. The allocation of the monitoring and control system
into a separate segment is important novelty, since with the growth of telemedicine,
such technologies and architectures will be developed and be implemented, and,
accordingly, their security must be taken into account and ensured without fail. It is
also significant that the live monitoring system is highlighted; this paper is the only
one that paid attention to this type of instrument. However, this system can also
be connected to implantable medical devices (IMD) and wearable IoMT devices
and, therefore, the fact that the authors did not mention this, at least briefly, is a
disadvantage of this work.
The positive aspect of the presented new healthcare monitoring architecture [10]
is that it introduces two important types of blockchain: medical devices blockchain
and consultation blockchain that collaborate to some specific extent with patient,
medical device, and health workers and support the monitoring system with the data
collected in order to compare the health data of the patient and, thus, react faster.
234 A. Polubaryeva

However, the proposed architecture covers only telemedicine and identifies only
three actors (health worker, patient, and hospital), without specifying what the
concept of “health worker” includes, but it shows that this health worker is the main
actor in this framework. On the other side, the proposed architecture may be used
for development of further IoT-blockchain-based schemes which will include all
possible scenarios and actors.

3.9 IoT-Blockchain Ecosystem: Combination of Blockchain

and Swarm Exchange Techniques

In the study [22], the researchers offered an electronic health record servicing
scheme in IoT-blockchain ecosystem (BIoTHR) for secure and reliable patients or
other health data transmission in the IoT network using a private blockchain plat-
form in combination with the swarm exchange techniques. The latter is designed on
top of the underlying blockchain-IoT layer and aimed to empower the security and
privacy of IoHT ecosystem. The transmission performed through secured swarm
nodes of peer-to-peer interactions with the implementation of the autonomous
encryption-decryption methods accomplished with the timely monitoring of health
data transferred via IoT network. The swarm exchange techniques associate security
services to EHR blocks as well as employ a content-addressable network protocol in
order to transmit EHR in a safe manner. Due to the immutability of the blockchain,
medical data that is stored in blocks is secured in a way that also provides its
privacy and integrity [82, 83]. One of the main characteristics of IoT, which is
mentioned by the authors of [22] and other authors, as a challenging one, is
a heterogeneity of the IoT and IoT sensors: the blockchain and IoT solutions
demand a constant reconciliation to match a heterogeneous norm of EHRs. This
fact can lead to the security and privacy problems [82, 84], because the majority
of the data sources of EHRs consist of many structured and unstructured data
types that may be considerably large (e.g., medical imagery), and consequently,
it is difficult to transmit it safely without additional security measures provided
by the blockchain. Thus, the researchers in [52, 82, 84] emphasized as well that
healthcare sector, as one element of critical infrastructure, has a great demand for
the security and privacy protection regulations (requirements) which have to involve
privacy-aware authentication, data storage, integrity, secure transmission, tamper-
proof monitoring, and other related issues.
The advantage of the work [22] is that various types of nodes are specially
separated, depending on what they are responsible for (IoT body temperature node,
IoT pulse rate node, IoT blood glucose sensor node, etc.). The benefit of this is that
using the swam technique where many nodes communicate with one another in a
clustered way in the blockchain ecosystem, all nodes will allow to increase the level
of the exact health services (for each separate parameter of the health) as well as
the level of the secure data transmission within a specific sector of the healthcare.
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 235

All in all, this led to a more transparent and safer HER and other medical data
transmission.
Another important contribution of the work is that the authors presented a
concept of “trusted” and “untrusted” parties that helps to develop an idea of trusted
key list in the swarm node, which may be used by the patient or other actor to
complete validation or other data exchange procedures in more secure manner, and,
consequently, the entire environment will be considered as secured and trusted. The
fact that this process complemented with the strict swarm exchange policy (what
situated nearby and supply the process with straightforward exchange facilities and
data transmission) makes the presented IoT ecosystem more reliable and resilient to
attacks. However, the idea of the trusted parties wasn’t disclosed in detail within the
framework of the introduced concept of trusted environment (e.g., patient, caregiver,
doctor, medical professional, government agencies, and insurance organizations).

3.10 Blockchain-Based Database with Higher Level

of Security Protection

The work [85] generally related to the creation of the database that can in a secure
manner gather any types of data during a clinical trial and then store it, in secure
way as well. The blockchain framework in the proposed scheme is used as a network
blockchain and as an external record management blockchain and consists of the
IoT, wearable medical devices (sensors), and computational power. The external
record management blockchain is aimed to operate the data accumulated after visit
of the patient to the doctor, and then it has to be added to the chain using the PoS
algorithm that sets into action upon the consensus of all interested parties involved
into providing health services. The primary goal of the network blockchain is to
manage an online cloud storage where all, aggregated by the wearable device’s
health records, are distributed and processed. This blockchain-based framework is
proved to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of the data in the healthcare
systems, since all data is processed in the blockchain nodes. Most importantly,
imagery (medical imagery systems) and prescription of the doctor were singled out
as a separate type of the EHR, while other papers do not contain this type of the
data. The purpose of distinguishing two types of blockchain is to manage the data
which is being generated during the patient’s visit to a doctor. It will help to provide
a higher level of security protection of each type of the data.
The beneficial issue presented in the work is that the policy maker was singled
out: this actor was mentioned and separated only in this work. That’s important,
because the level of security and privacy in separate healthcare entity and in the
whole healthcare infrastructure (industry) depends significantly on policy makers.
The main work’s omission is that it is not shown in great detail how the proposed
framework will operate; the authors presented only a general scheme that is not
explained at all: how the elements of framework (actors, blockchain and cloud
236 A. Polubaryeva

infrastructures, and so on) will all interact with each other, will it be possible to
use a framework in case if cloud computing is unavailable (in general or at a certain
moment), and how exactly the authors propose to increase the level of security.?

3.11 Information Diffusion Security Strengthening Using

a Blockchain and Theory of Trusted Zones in Smart
Medicine

In [24], innovative BC-based framework – a blockchain decentralized interoperable

trust (DIT) framework for IoT – is introduced. This IoHT blockchain technology
provides a paradigm shift in securing ways of information diffusion. The Ethereum
and Ripple blockchain platforms were used for development of this framework in
order to collect and associate the requests in the various trusted zones of the IoHT.
The proposed framework claimed to ensure not only traditional features provided by
the blockchain but also an ability to support secure and effective communications
between nodes that could be further grown and handled in an efficient manner.
The offered framework based on the Ethereum platform and Ripple blockchain that
manage a request over the trusted zones improves the encryption and IoHT access
control tools and provides the confidentiality and integrity of the health data using
IoT-based multi-cloud solutions if data was compromised via advisory attacks.
The concept on trusted zones introduced shortly may be illustrated as follows:
one zone relates to the patient, and the second one relates to the healthcare system.
The trusted zone in the meaning of the research presented is the number of
virtual members and primary objects (equipment and devices) that communicate
using a health edge node and blockchain (namely, for this case, a Ripple chain)
communication abilities, where members may vote on the transactions conformed
by them. The omission there is that only the hospital and the laboratories (healthcare
provider) and the patient have their own zone; other actors are not taken into
account, in spite of the fact that in terms of security, these actors either must have
their own trusted zones or they should be included into some of the available zones
in order to safely transfer data. Otherwise, the security and privacy may be affected
using these minor actors and their weaknesses. In fact, a new trusted zone is always
created after the first request from any member so that operation can be validated
by the blockchain. To join the trusted zone, every primary object (e.g., medical
device) must execute a secure transaction. This concept of the authors of [24] is a
prospective innovation offered which can be developed later.
Generally, DIT IoHT truly where a smart contract guarantees authentication
of budgets and indirect trust inference system (ITIS) reduces semantic gaps and
enhances trustworthy factor (TF) estimation via the network nodes and edges. In
addition, different cases were explored (emergency case, notification case, and
normal case); however, the smart contracts of different types of functionality for
each case weren’t proposed or showed.
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 237

The drawback of the work is that the scenario on interconnections between

few actors was illustrated, between patient, ambulance, and doctor (in the blood
pressure sensor-ambulance-doctor-blockchain-health edge scheme). However, since
the scenarios can be different and include not only these actors from the healthcare
system, the idea is illustrated incompletely. An advantage that may be mentioned
is that it describes the work of the validation process: if a new transaction is to be
appended to the chain, all the participants in the network must approve (validate)
this transaction. The researchers have made this by applying an algorithm that
verifies the transaction (including two types of communication) and created for its
implementation an algorithm of aggregation rules and association rules for smart
contract zones. The problem here is in definition of the term “valid” by exact
blockchain system, which may be different in the various blockchain networks.
The general particularity in this work is that actors (participants) were tied to
nodes: between nodes (i.e., patients, healthcare providers, suppliers, etc.) on the
healthcare IoT network. That is, not even the actors are listed or named, but nodes
act as users, which are associated with different entities or persons.

3.12 Hyperledger Fabric Network Architecture

with Introduction of Different Types of the Smart
Contracts

The work in [19] focuses on securing electronic medical records (EMR) with the
help of blockchain technology. Medical and personal data protection using the
blockchain is also a prospective direction of the research, since there were and will
be many attacks on medical records as it was pointed out in works [86]. In [19] the
use of three-tier application (front-end application, middleware APIs, Hyperledger
Fabric Blockchain Network, MySQL database server) was proposed.
The researchers offered in this work a term intermediate solution provider, but do
not disclose it in their diagrams and descriptions, and this seems to be an oversight,
since it is necessary that all possible third parties providing services should be taken
into account in such diagrams. The hospitals and any intermediate solution provider
have been added to Hyperledger Fabric Network Architecture proposed by authors.
The offering of the group of the intermediate solution providers is a benefit of this
work due to the fact that often information leaks through these intermediate actors,
and the proposed separation also refers to the HIPAA rules.
The authors indicated that the database will be encrypted by the RSA algorithm,
but it is not specified how the persons who serve these databases should act if
the algorithm is overcome and the attacker gains access to the databases and how
all parties should act, taking into account the requirements of HIPAA and other
regulations and rules.
Since authors write that together all listed actors form a consortium blockchain
network, there can be a new organization appended to the ecosystem – which means
238 A. Polubaryeva

that all new additions must also comply with regulatory purposes. This is a positive
part of the proposed scheme, since it offers the possibility of including new actors;
however, it does not work out the details of such inclusion and expansion of the list
of actors.
The authors used HF because it has a benefit: the certificate authority, which
is built into Hyperledger Fabric, provides all actors with encryption keys and
certificates. However, the advantage of it is that it can be replaced with any other
popular identity management services as Hyperledger Fabric supports pluggable
CAs. The benefit of the work [19] is that it perfectly distinguished various types of
data (medical records, wearable data, medical history data, medication, lifestyle).
Moreover, the authors explicitly pointed out that they used two main categories of
actors – patient and healthcare provider, which develop the ideas behind HIPAA.
The main development made by the authors of [19] is an enlarged and detailed list
of the functionality of the smart contracts, which is also illustrated at the schemes.
There are such types of the smart contracts capacities as registration, login, upload
data (upload patient record for the first time, updating new patient record), request
data (including requesting patient data access, publish request using the blockchain
nodes), respond to request (including fetch incoming patient requests), view data
(including fetch provider request list), and revoke access (however, it is not shown
how the smart contracts are used and which types of smart contracts exist in this
group). Such advanced elaboration of functions of the smart contracts with the
implementation into their scheme the idea of necessity to follow the rules (EU
General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] [63], Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act of 1996 [HIPAA] [74], the European Union Medical Device
Regulation of 2017 [EUMDR] [87]) makes this work prospective for the future
development.

3.13 Key Agreement Protocol for IoMT Ecosystem Based

on Blockchain

Offered by the authors of [37], Blockchain-Enabled Authenticated Key Manage-

ment Protocol for Internet of Medical Things (BAKMP-IoMT) environment is
mainly related to the IMD and secure transmission performed by these devices
(IMD) for an end healthcare provider. The secure key management scheme pre-
sented in this research includes a transaction of the medical data from patient
with IMDs to personal servers (e.g., smartphones) and then to the cloud servers
where healthcare data resides in a safe manner due to the implementation of the
blockchain technology into its work. Patient’s data can be accessed by the user
from the cloud server after completing the strict steps of the user authentication
process. The cloud server in this model serves as a blockchain-miner node of the
IoMT and is considered as a main storage of all medical data which supports the
blockchain nodes. The formal security verification and security verification were
performed by employing AVISPA, and the threat model was built after experiments.
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 239

As a result, the researchers proved that the proposed new BAKMP-IoMT model
is resilient against IMD physical capture attack and the data modification attack at
the cloud server, protects ephemeral secret leakage (ESL) attack, may resist replay
attack, is able to protect against the man-in-the-middle attack (MITM), is able
to protect privileged insider attack, and is secured against various impersonation
attacks as well as preserves anonymity and untraceability properties. Consequently,
it demonstrated higher security and functionality level in comparison with the other
relevant models due to the sequencing of the stages of BAKMP-IoMT and the
sufficiency of each stage and also due to the mechanisms that are embedded in each
individual phase.
BAKMP-IoMT includes the following eight stages: (1) pre-deployment (this
includes patient registration, IMD registration and cloud server registration), (2) key
management (key management between a IMD and personal server; moreover, key
management between a personal server and cloud server), (3) user registration, (4)
login, (5) authentication and key agreement, (6) blockchain construction and addi-
tion, (7) password and biometric update, and (8) dynamic IMD addition (dynamic
IMD addition, dynamic personal server addition, dynamic cloud server [miners]
addition). That is, in fact, more related to the delineation of the blockchain’s
functionality; there is no more detailed list of smart contracts.
The main benefit of the work is that the profound threat model was created by
the authors using few different methods – with implementation of few techniques
such as Canetti and Krawczyk’s adversary model (CK-adversary model) and the
guidelines of widely used DY threat model. In addition, such actors as trusted
authority and relative of patient were implemented into the framework proposed,
and this trend is prone to cover more distant actors and it also has a great importance.
And last, but not least, involving a different scenario, the researchers showed and
computationally proved that the growth of number of devices and actors (IMDs and
users) leads in all cases to more blocks in the blockchain while transmitting the data
(that’s logical because new blocks are created if there are more data transmitted) and
that computational costs augment in these cases as well.
The one significant advantage of this work is that the authors calculated every
step and showed all the algorithms, a lot of cryptographic details, as well as that it
was the loading biometric data for user authorization (in addition to the password)
highlighted in the work.
The other one is that the authors showed differentiation of functionality of
the blockchains, namely, patient registration, IMD registration, cloud server reg-
istration, user registration, and login phase; however, this is all without the
implementation of the smart contracts into it, only the description of the blockchains
was given, and it would be more advantageous if authors added some ideas regarding
smart contracts.
240 A. Polubaryeva

3.14 Forensics-by-Design IoMT Authorization Using

Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Forensics-by-design approach for securing healthcare management systems

(forensics-by-design framework for managing access to medical data and devices)
is presented in the work [42]. It is related mainly to the IoMT authorization based
on the blockchain and smart contracts, with integrity guarantees built in this system.
The blockchain and smart contracts technologies are used in this work to design an
architecture which allows to create a trust domain and then manage access control
to medical data and medical devices.
There were three features of the critical IoMT ecosystem singled out: the users’
roles and capabilities, the interaction of users with the IoMT devices, and the access
domain. The smart contracts were used to handle the authorization, perform and
maintain system policies, and start transaction log integrity and privacy. For this
purpose a new algorithm – a consensus proof of medical stake – was proposed
in combination with the blockchain, the one which validates the operations, and
the general focus was made on the medical devices and data it collects. All the
actors (stakeholders) are the clients of the offered blockchain architecture. Using an
Ethereum platform, users (actors) have an access to the data by linking the users to
the health and technical data, respectively, via such unique identifiers as Ethereum
accounts of users and devices. Appending such information and data enables potent
storage and a comprehensive smart contract architecture, because this information
(from the creation of data by the medical devices to its utilization) may be received
through the functions implemented within the smart contracts.
The main drawback of this work is that the authors have proposed and tested
their scheme and architecture in a theoretical ideal environment in which, as they
imply, all attackers do not want to be penalized (there could be economic or
reputational penalties, e.g., reputational risk may be presented as node’s voting
power [impact] is halved after any violation). However, in reality, not always
everything corresponds to these specified ideal conditions. The great designation
of this work is that in addition to the manufacturer as an entity, it also singled out
manufacturer technicians – an actor rarely indicated in other papers. Clarifications
on types of the medical devices are given many times in this work; it is even
divided depending on their location (in patients’ body or home or in hospital/clinic).
Moreover, IoMT devices (medical devices like implantable, hospital devices, etc.),
IPFS (interplanetary file system (IPFS) 2 protocol), and treatment plan are listed as
an important part of the IoHT environment in the work. End user is indicated as an
untrusted domain with untrusted device.
The main achievement is the distinction and detailed description of such types
of functionalities of the smart contracts as registration smart contract (RSC), actor
handling smart contract (AHSC), and log management smart contract (LMSC);
these categories and its functional content are a significant contribution made by
the authors into implementation of the smart contracts into smart medicine. The
principal idea is that when calling a suitable corresponding function for registration,
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 241

authorization, or managing logs, the user, the well-directed system based on

blockchain technology, will perform these functions in more secure manner.

3.15 Blockchain for Medical Insurance

In [41], it was proposed to single out the healthcare insurance companies into a
separate category of healthcare providers and to use the blockchain technology
to protect information recorded for insurance purposes, since the authors rightly
pointed out the need to integrate IoT and health insurance. The work mainly
provides an overview of existing technologies based on the blockchain, applicable
to IoT, primarily to IoHT. As one of the important points noted in [41], the
use and implementation of the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)
should be indicated in order to avoid the involvement of a third party to conduct
transactions. DAOs are an entity that is run through rules encoded as a smart
contract, and their financial transaction record and program rules are maintained
on the blockchain. The smart asset company Digix is represented as token on the
blockchain implementing proof of provenance protocol.
The researchers offered a good integration of blockchain and healthcare insur-
ance. Moreover, the authors have written how smart contracts and the blockchain
can benefit the healthcare insurance industry. Not in great detail this work indi-
cated that it can support automated claims, a transparent and reliable payment
mechanism, and can be used to enforce contract-specific rules; thus, due to this
automation, a number of insurance operations will decrease that in turn results in
the reduction of costs and time on insurance claims.
In general, the work has little connotation, and the solution of some problems,
not to mention the results, is more focused on business goals rather than technical
content. In the scheme proposed, there is no patient at all; however, the patient is an
actor who gives a consent to the transfer of data to both the hospital and the insurer.
Some functions of wearable devices are transmit and verify insurance claim – but
this is only in the picture; the text does not say anything about it at all and this is an
omission, since at least it was important to mention it. However, the work includes
such functions of the blockchain as a collection of the medical information and
performance of a personal guidance.

3.16 Summary

There is a plethora of research efforts devoted to many aspects, sometimes com-

pletely different, in many areas related to blockchain and smart contracts in smart
healthcare, and many techniques have been proposed using blockchain, including
mixed techniques. Some deserve attention and development, some can be integrated
into existing mechanisms or schemes that will be created in the future, and some
242 A. Polubaryeva

will be developed into something completely new, as yet unknown. Researchers

worldwide have just begun to perform the investigations in this direction. All
existing studies and published calculations, diagrams, and architectures have been
published mainly in the last 2 years (from 2018 to 2022). However, despite this,
the topic has been worked out quite seriously, and one challenge which has to be
addressed in the future is the lack of synchronization of innovative proposals with
existing or emerging standards and regulations in the field of the blockchain and
smart contracts.

4 Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, the endeavor to give concise information about the use of blockchain
and smart contracts in Smart Medicine 4.0 was made. After the relevant standards
and research works related to the cyber-physical systems, Industry 4.0 and IoHT,
were reviewed, it was established that it is necessary to consider new methods
of improving the Smart Medicine 4.0 and providing security and privacy in the
healthcare industry. Given that traditional measures to ensure information security
and personal data protection are not sufficient for IoT devices and IoHT industry in
general, due to their specific characteristics, such as limited storage, scalability, and
heterogeneity of IoT devices and other features of IoHT studied out above, it may
be proposed that the blockchain and smart contracts shall be implemented into the
paradigm of the Smart Medicine 4.0. This way is beneficial and prospective, since
it is the most appropriate new technique that combines all the qualities required to
protect and support the medical sector and may be used with the implementation
of various existing and new emerging methods and methodologies for protecting
information security and personal data.
The main idea of this chapter is that the blockchain and smart contracts technolo-
gies are extremely promising for the medical field: many researchers, practitioners,
and state agencies are working on their development and challenges. As mentioned
above, the use of blockchain technology and smart contracts in healthcare is one of
the priority areas for both theoretical understanding and comprehensive practical
application. On the other hand, “in the future, healthcare providers must expect
new and more sophisticated attacks. Because healthcare providers provide critical
services, they are more likely than others to pay the ransom to rebuild their systems
as quickly as possible. This makes the sector an attractive target” [86, 88, 89]. This
means that the introduction of new methods of protection, which can resist more
technically advanced hackers, is inevitable.
One thing is certain: the use of blockchain and smart contracts is one of the
priority areas, and many authors consider these technologies as accelerators and
precisely “blocks” for use in smart medicine, not only for data transmission,
performing various technical and medical functions, but also for the improvement of
the level of information security and, accordingly, the safety of patients. According
to the author of this chapter, the directions in which the use of blockchain
An Investigation of Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts Deployment. . . 243

and smart contracts in principle and in smart medicine should develop are the
invention and implementation of various types of smart contracts, each of which
will be responsible for performing a clearly defined function in the smart medicine
ecosystem, while all actors that will perform such operations will have their own
tools, mechanisms, and roles for creating and using smart contracts.
Currently, smart medicine and everything related to it are under the control
of government agencies and medical corporations [90], as well as agencies and
companies involved in information security. The reason is clear: the smart medicine
is the medicine of the future.

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 Part IV
Blockchains and Currency
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for
Bitcoin

Miguel Ángel León-Chávez, Lucas Pandolfo Perin,

and Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez

1 Introduction

In 1982, Chaum introduced the concept of e-cash in [15] employing blind signatures
allowing untraceable payment systems offering auditability and control and at
the same time offering personal privacy. The e-cash, electronic money, electronic
coin, or digital money tries to emulate its paper money counterpart in terms of
functionality, i.e., it is a medium to exchange goods, it is a unit of measurement,
and it stores a value. Since then, e-cash has added several properties to its
definition, such as the following [37]: independence, security, privacy (anonymity),
offline payment, transferability, divisibility, and untraceability. Many protocols were
published [6, 37] in order to meet these properties. However, they all required
a central authority (the Bank), responsible for minting the electronic coin and
detecting double-spending.
In 2008, unknown author(s) under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto [34]
published a seminal paper that resolves the previous problems in a distributed
way through a peer-to-peer network, the Bitcoin protocol. According to Nakamoto,
“the network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain
of hash-based proof-of-work (PoW), forming a record that cannot be changed

M. Á. León-Chávez ()
Computer Science Faculty, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla, México
L. P. Perin
Cryptography Research Centre, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE
e-mail: [email protected]
F. Rodríguez-Henríquez
Cryptography Research Centre, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Computer Science Department, Cinvestav IPN, Mexico City, México
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 251
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_11
252 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

without redoing the PoW.” The successive linking of transaction blocks using
PoW was called the blockchain. Today, this paper has originated more than 2000
cryptocurrencies worldwide uncountable works related to blockchain applications
and alternatives to PoW consensus protocol.
Bitcoin utilizes two cryptographic algorithms: hash functions and digital signa-
tures. In particular, it uses the SHA256 and RIPEMD160 as the hash functions and
the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) based on the Koblitz curve
secp256k1 parameters. ECDSA is based on the discrete logarithm problem (DLP)
defined as follows: find a scalar k ∈ Fn from the equation Q = [k]G, where Q and
G are two points on an elliptic curve secp256k1 defined over the prime field Fp by
the equation, y 2 = x 3 + 7. Here p and n are two 256-bit prime numbers.
During the last 45 years, the DLP problem and the integer factorization problem
(IFP) have been used as hard mathematical problems providing the security
assumption foundations of modern cryptography. However, in 1994, Shor [45]
published two polynomial-time algorithms for solving both the DLP and the IFP
on a quantum computer. Therefore, once such large quantum computers become
available, the security of all applications based on these problems will be vulnerable,
e.g., RSA digital signature, Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), and ECDSA, as
shown in [1, 23, 39, 41]. Even more, in 1996, Grover [25] published a quantum
algorithm to speed up database search. This algorithm could be directly adapted to
weaken symmetric cryptographic algorithms, such as the hash functions employed
by Bitcoin, possibly affecting the PoW protocol.
In the context of cryptocurrencies, some believe that the threat of quantum attacks
can be partially mitigated by not disclosing the public keys and avoiding address
reuse. While this might be true for newly created wallets, public keys inevitably
have to be made public for authorization of transactions. At this point, there is a
gap where quantum attacks are viable. According to [14], these gaps can occur
while transactions are broadcast but are still pending validation by miners. Another
possible scenario is the case where transactions fail to consolidate or get rejected
due to insufficient funds, low fees, or any other reason. Malicious parties could
benefit during the interval when the public key is made public and forge new
transactions to hijack their funds by recovering the private key using a quantum
computer. New cryptographic primitives are thus required to prevent these attacks
such as the adoption of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), i.e., algorithms that are
quantum-resistant and classical-resistant simultaneously.
An additional argument in favor of the adoption of a post-quantum version of
Bitcoin has to do with the high influence that reputation has on the price of the
highly volatile cryptocurrencies. If large-scale quantum computers are available, it
would arguably be public distrust on those cryptocurrencies still relying on classical
cryptography.
On the other hand, in 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, worried about theoretical and
practical advances of quantum computing, published an internal report on PQC
(NISTIR 8105) claiming that some instances of RSA, DSA, and ECDSA could
potentially be broken by as early as 2030. Consequently, NIST published a request
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 253

for Public Key Post-Quantum Cryptographic Algorithms [35]. As an outcome,

multiple candidates are expected to be standardized and added to the Digital
Signature Standard (NIST 186-4) as well as recommendations for Pair-Wise Key
Establishment Schemes, replacing DLP (NIST 800-56A) and IFP (NIST 800-56B).
From 82 initial candidates, 69 moved to the first round of the NIST PQC
competition. In 2019, only 26 candidates advanced to the second round, consisting
of 17 public key encryption and key establishment schemes and nine digital
signatures schemes [36]. On July 22, 2020, NIST published the status report on the
second-round candidates [2], and it announced three third-round finalists for digital
signatures as well as three alternate candidate algorithms for standardization at the
end of 2024.
The PQC digital signature candidates that reached the third round are Crystals-
Dilithium, Falcon (Fast-Fourier Lattice-based Compact Signature over NTRU), and
Rainbow. In addition, GeMSS (Great Multivariate Short Signature), Picnic, and
SPHINCS+ are considered alternate candidates. These algorithms are based on
problem assumptions that are difficult to solve using quantum and classical com-
puters, as follows: Crystals-Dilithium and Falcon are lattice-based cryptographic
schemes, whereas Rainbow and the alternate GeMSS are Multivariate-polynomial-
based cryptographic. Picnic and SPHINCS+ are based on symmetric primitives and
hash functions, respectively.
Moreover, the NIST status update on the third round [33] presented during the
third NIST PQC standardization conference held on June 7–9, 2021, and NIST
announced the following: (a) it expects to select at most one algorithm based on
lattice for standardization. (b) Cryptanalytic results have created some concerns
about the security of both multivariate schemes Rainbow and GeMSS. (c) There
will be a new call for PQC digital signature scheme proposals, which are not based
on structured lattices and target specific applications, for example, a scheme with
very short signatures.
In [18], it was presented an extensive comparison of the characteristics and
the performance of the most promising post-quantum public key encryption and
digital signature schemes for blockchains. This chapter analyzes the post-quantum
digital signature candidates accepted in the third round of the NIST competition as
alternatives for Bitcoin and points out the challenges for their adoption. As presented
in the following subsections, short signatures are not enough for applications such
as Bitcoin, which also requires small public key sizes.
The outline of the remainder of the chapter is as follows: the related work
is summarized in Sect. 2. Section 3 identifies the Bitcoin security requirements
and constraints on the PQC digital signatures proposals. Section 4 gives a brief
description of the NIST finalists and alternates. Section 5 presents the performance
analysis of the classical and PQC digital signature algorithms. In Sect. 6, design
challenges for adopting post-quantum solutions in Bitcoin are explained. Finally,
the conclusions and the future research work are drawn in Sect. 7.
254 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

2 Related Work

In the context of the Bitcoin protocol, several proposals have been published to
replace its ECDSA digital signature scheme using the Koblitz curve secp256k1
parameters. This section organizes the proposed solutions according to underlying
mathematical problems that are difficult to solve using either quantum or classical
computers as follows: lattice-based, hash-based, and multivariate-polynomial.

2.1 Lattice-Based

The authors of [21] proposed a post-quantum blockchain (PQB) based on the lattice
short integer solution (SIS) problem. The authors use the lattice basis delegation
algorithm to generate secret keys by selecting a random value and using preimage
sampling algorithm to sign the messages. In addition, they design a double-
signature defined as the first-signature and last-signature in the scheme to reduce
the correlation between the message and the signature. The authors claim that the
sizes of the signature and secret keys are relatively shorter than others published
PQ digital signatures based on lattice but without application to the blockchain. The
authors did not propose concrete parameters for their approach.
In [47], the authors propose an anti-quantum transaction authentication scheme
in the blockchain. In this approach, the public and private keys are generated from a
set of master public and private keys (Seed Key). The authors use the Bonsai Trees
technology and propose a new authentication method to extend a lattice space to
multiple lattice spaces accompanied by the corresponding key. The authors did not
propose concrete parameters for their approach.
The authors of [31] also proposed a lattice-based signature using the Bonsai Trees
technology. The authors did not propose concrete parameters for their approach.
In [11], the PQC digital signature algorithm qTESLA was proposed to be used
in Bitcoin. The NIST candidate qTESLA reached the second round of the NIST
competition. However, according to [2], it has a poor performance. The public key
sizes of q-TESLA-p-I and q-TESLA-p-III are about 15 to 20 times as large as those
of Falcon and Crystals-Dilithium, in addition to larger signature sizes as well. On
the other hand, qTESLA is roughly 2 to 5 times slower than Falcon and Crystals-
Dilithium. For these reasons, qTESLA did not advance to the third round.
The authors of [43] proposed the usage of Crystals-Dilithium, concluding its
relevance for quantum secure blockchains.
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 255

2.2 Hash-Based

In [14], it was proposed a Blockchained PQ Signature (BPQS), which is a modified

version of the hash-based XMSS scheme. BPQS provides a fallback mechanism
to support many-time signatures. The authors present a performance analysis
and conclude that it is computationally comparable to non-quantum schemes, in
particular, to ECDSA. Nevertheless, the main drawback of this approach is that the
size of its output signature increases linearly with the number of signatures.
In [46], it was presented the eXtended Naor-Yung Signature Scheme (XNYSS).
This signature combines a hash-based one-time signature scheme with Naor-Yung
chaining for creating chains of related signatures. The authors claim that their
proposal achieves smaller signatures and better performance than other hash-based
signatures, such as XMSS. Table 1 shows the signature size for the long-term
signature using the security parameter (n = 32), the branching factor (b = 3),
and Winternitz parameter (w = 16).
Both the Quantum-Resistant Ledger (QRL) [40] and the Bitcoin Post-
Quantum [3] cryptocurrencies use the XMSS scheme. The cryptocurrency
IOTA [19] employs the Winternitz one-time signature (W-OTS) and the Ed25519
digital signature to provide a security level of 128 bits.
In [42], the authors propose to use the Novel One-Time Signature (NOTS), which
offers minimum key and signature sizes from all of the existing OTS schemes.
According to the authors, using SHA256 as the Hash function NOTS achieves an
88% reduction in both key and signature sizes as compared to the popular WOTS
scheme.
PQChain was proposed in [5] implementing a hash combiner (CombH1 H2 ) that
combines two hash functions H1 and H2 such that a given hash function property
(for example, collision resistance) is preserved as long as at least one of the hash
functions H1 or H2 has that property. The authors propose combining SHA3 with
other Hash functions to diversify the portfolio.

2.3 Multivariate-Based

In [44], the authors proposed an Ethereum post-quantum variant using Rainbow

as its digital signature. The authors’ approach requires a public key storage server
storing both the public key and the address of each user. This mechanism was put
in place because Rainbow’s public key is considerably large. Hence, the transaction
does not need to include the large key material; it only needs to include the short
address generated from the public key. Verifying signatures requires that a node
requests to the storage server the public key of the corresponding address. Hence,
the solution in [44] becomes highly centralized. Table 1 shows the values for the
security strength of 128 bits.
256 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

Table 1 Public key, secret key, and signature sizes (in Kilo bytes) for the post-quantum solutions
proposed in the literature
Digital signature Class Public key Secret key Signature
Dilithium [43] Lattice 1.3 – 2.4
AQTA [47] Lattice 157.8 550.4 308
qTESLA-I [11] Lattice 1.5 1.2 1.4
XNYSS [46] Hash – – 2.3
NOTS [42] Hash 1 1 1
Rainbow(21, 36, 22) [44] Multivariate 136.1 101.5 0.079

Table 2 Bitcoin security and performance requirements

Security Requirement Bitcoin
Digital signature 128 bits ECDSA-secp256k1
Private key length 256 bits 256 bits
Public key length Small 64 bytes
Signature length Small 64 bytes
Hash code length Small 256 bits
Address length Small 25–36 bytes
Block size Small 1–4 MB
Key generation time Offline 0.10 ms [14]
Signing time Fast 0.34 ms [14]
Verification time Fast 0.25 ms [14]

3 Bitcoin Security Requirements

This section describes Bitcoin security requirements and constraints regarding

the security strength of its cryptographic algorithms, space, and time required
for constructing the transaction blocks. Table 2 summarizes those main Bitcoin
requirements, where the entries in bold indicate the constraints required for avoiding
a hard fork.
In public key cryptography, each user owns a public/private key pair. The private
key is only known by its owner, whereas the public key is known key by all the
users in the system. The key pair is generated in such a way that knowledge of
the public key and the signing/verifying algorithms does not permit to deduce the
private key. At the same time, it is computationally easy to sign/verify the plaintext
using the keys. A digital signature scheme has three main primitives: key generation,
signing, and verification. In key generation, the signer generates his/her private and
public keys. To sign a document, the signer typically first computes the hash of that
document using his/her private key to produce its signature. Given the document
that was signed, its corresponding signature, and signer’s public key, any entity can
accept/reject that signature.
Bitcoin [34] defines an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. “Each
owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 257

transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of
the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.”

3.1 Digital Signature Algorithm

Bitcoin specifies the usage of the ECDSA using the Koblitz curve secp256k1 [13]
parameters providing a security strength of 128 bits, i.e., the number of operations
required to break the algorithm is approximately 2128 . This same digital signature
scheme is also used by other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, XRP, Dash,
Litecoin, Zcash, EOS, TRON, Ripple, Byteball, and Tezos. The main reasons for
the popularity of ECDSA among the cryptocurrencies are its small key sizes and the
excellent performance of its signing and verifying processes.
The recommended parameters of the Koblitz curve sec256k1 are specified by
the sixtuple T = (p, a, b, G, n, h). The elliptic curve secp256k1 is defined by the
equation y 2 = x 3 + 7 operating over the prime field Fp , where p is the prime
p = 2256 − 232 − 29 − 28 − 27 − 26 − 24 − 1. The base point G in compressed form
is equal to G = 0279BE667EF 9DCBBAC 59F 2815B16F 81798. The so-called
group order n of the point G and the cofactor h are given as

n = oXF F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F F E
BAAEDCE6 AF 48A03B BF D25E8C D0364141 :
h = 01.

Using these parameters, a user generates his/her key pair consisting of a private key
integer k, which is randomly selected in the integer interval [1, n], and a public key
curve point computed as Q = (xQ , yQ ) = [k]G.
Hence, the size of the private key is 256 bits, which can be represented as 32
bytes or 64 characters in hexadecimal, and the public key is a point on the curve
(xQ , yQ ) of size 512 bits (xQ = 256 bits and yQ = 256 bits). However, the public
key can be compressed to 257 bits by replacing the y-coordinate of Q by a sign bit
(see below). The signature is the pair point (r, s) of size 512 bits (r = 256 bits and
s = 256 bits).
In Bitcoin, the public keys (in script) are given with a prefix 0x04 followed by
x y, where x and y are 32 byte big-endian integers representing the coordinates
of a point on the curve or in compressed form given as sign x where sign is
0x02 if y is even and 0x03 if y is odd. The signatures use DER encoding to pack
the r and s components into a single byte stream.
The private key allows spending the electronic coin (Bitcoin, BTC) by signing a
transaction from one Bitcoin wallet to another. Usually, the user never handles the
private key; instead, he/she will use a seed phrase that encodes the same information
as the private key. There are three private key formats: hierarchical deterministic
(HD) wallet keys, Base58 wallet import, and mini private key. A single seed value
258 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

generates many private keys and each corresponding public key for HD. The seed
value, also named master extended key, consists of a 256-bit key and a 256-bit
chain code, for 512 bits in total. Base58 import format is a way of encoding an
ECDSA private key to make it easier to print and copy. The mini private key format
allows encoding a private key with 30 bytes. This format is especially convenient
for applications where space is critical, such as QR codes.

3.2 Hash Function

Bitcoin uses SHA256 and RIPEMD160 to generate the Main Hash and address
derivation. The Main Hash is the double hash (dhash), i.e., dhash(a) =
SHA256(SHA256(a)). Main hash is used in the following processes: Proof-of-
Work for mining purposes, generation of the Merkle tree that accommodates the
hashes of each one of the transactions included in the block, and as a mechanism
for chaining the blocks included in the blockchain. A Bitcoin address is the hash of
a public key and is derived as follows in the original protocol:

Version = 1 byte
Key hash = RIPEMD160(SHA256(public key))
Checksum = First 4 bytes of dhash(Keyhash)
Bitcoin Address = Base58Encode(Key hash||Checksum).

Nevertheless, the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 142 specifies the fol-
lowing two addresses for segregate witness (segwit), a soft fork specified in
BIP141: Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) and Pay-to-Witness-Script-
Hash (P2WSH). The Key hash field is again 20 bytes for P2WPKH addresses and,
due to multi-signature purposes, 32 bytes for P2WSH addresses. A new field of one-
byte value between 0 and 16 is added to the previous format to take into account the
witness program version.
The BIP141 defines a new structure, called witness, that is committed to blocks
separately from the transaction Merkle tree. This structure contains data required
to check the transaction validity, but it is not required to determine the transaction
effects. In particular, scripts and signatures are moved into the witness. BIP141 also
changes the restriction on the block size, from 1 MB up to 4 MB. It must be noted
that this change avoided a hard fork in the Bitcoin blockchain, and at the time of its
implementation, it was the subject of an intense debate.
Furthermore, this soft fork was accomplished with a new transaction digest
algorithm for signature verification, specified in BIP143, to minimize redundant data
hashing in verification and to cover the signature input value. Its main restriction is
on the public key size, where only compressed public keys of 33 bytes are accepted
in P2WPKH and P2WSH.
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 259

Table 2 summarizes the Bitcoin security requirements, where the entries in bold
indicate the constraints that PQC digital signatures must meet to avoid a hard
fork. In [14], ECDSA-secp256k1 was implemented on an octa-core Intel Core i7-
7700HQ at 2.80 GHz and using the Bouncy Castle Crypto APIs v.2.1.1, release 1.59,
2017.

4 Post-Quantum Digital Signatures

Even if the integer factorization problem and the discrete logarithm problem are
no longer secure to attacks from large-scale quantum computers, there are other
computing problems believed to be hard to solve using either quantum or classical
computers. These problems are classified in [8] as secret key cryptography, hash-
based, lattice-based, multivariate-polynomial, and code-based.
Secret key cryptographic, such as the Advanced Encryption Algorithm (AES),
is based on permutations and substitution boxes known as S-boxes, which appear
difficult to tackle using quantum computers. For some time, it was assumed that
Grover’s quantum algorithm could be used either to reduce the security of any k-
bit secret key block encryption algorithm or k-bit hash function from k bits to just
k/2 bits. However, it turns out that Grover’s algorithm does not seem to parallelize
very well, so much, so that some researchers even doubt if an attack based on
this algorithm will ever be efficiently implemented. Indeed, even under the most
optimistic assumptions, it appears that the security level of AES could be reduced
from 128 bits to about 97.19 bits in the most pessimistic scenario when using
Grover’s algorithm [22].
Lattice-based cryptographic schemes, such as NTRU, Crystals-Dilithium, and
Falcon, are based on the difficulty of solving several related problems such as
the shortest vector problem, the closest vector problem, and the shortest integer
solution. Let n be linearly independent vectors bi defined over Rn , and a lattice is
defined as any linear combination with integer coefficients of such basis as in (1).

n−1
L(b0 , . . . , bn−1 ) = xi bi : xi ∈ Z. (1)
i=0

The shortest vector problem consists of finding the shortest vector in the lattice
considering its Euclidean norm. The fastest known solution takes 2O(n) time
and space. There also exists a polynomial-space algorithm that takes 2O(nlog(n))
time. The lattice-based NIST candidate algorithms, such as Crystals-Dilithium and
Falcon, exploit what is called structured lattice schemes, which allows them to
achieve significant efficiency for signing and verifying at the price of potential losses
of security that must still be explored.
Hash-based cryptographic schemes, such as SHA-2 and SHA-3, are based on the
security properties of the hash functions, i.e., collision-resistant, preimage-resistant
260 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

(one-way), and second preimage-resistant. Moreover, this scheme is considered

quantum-safe because of the same reasons discussed above.
The idea of SPHINCS+ is to authenticate a large number of few-time signature
(FTS) key pairs using an abstract data structure named hypertree. FTSs are signature
schemes that allow a key pair to produce a small number of signatures, in the order
of ten for the SPHINCS+ parameter sets. A (pseudo) random FTS key pair is chosen
to sign each new message. The signature consists of the FTS signature and the
authentication information for that FTS key pair.
Picnic is based on a zero-knowledge proof system and symmetric key primitives
like hash functions and block ciphers algorithms.
Multivariate-polynomial cryptographic schemes, such as HFEv− , Rainbow, and
GeMSS, rely on the multivariate-polynomial problem over finite fields. The public
key is the polynomial sequence P1 , P2 , . . . , P2b ∈ F2 [w1 , . . . , w4b ], where b
is the desired security level in bits, and where the 4b variables w1 , . . . , w4b
have coefficients in F2 . Each polynomial is square-free of degree two, and it is
represented as a sequence of 1 + 4b + 4b(4b−1)
2 bits. The public key is large, and it
has 16b3 + 4b2 + 2b bits. However, the signature of a message is short, and it has
only 6b bits, namely, the 4b bits of the variables w1 , . . . , w4b ∈ F2 , and an 2b-bit
string r, satisfying (2).

H (r, m) = (P1 (w1 , . . . , w4b ), . . . , P2b (w1 , . . . , w4b ))), (2)

where H is a standard hash function. The verification process is simple as it requires

b3 bit operations to evaluate the polynomials P1 , . . . , P2b . The main advantage of
this crypto scheme is that the signature is small with respect to all the other NIST
post-quantum candidates. The security of this scheme lies on the difficulty of finding
the sequence w1 , . . . , w4b ∈ F2 such that the polynomials P1 , . . . , P2b can be
produced. Using a brute-force approach, the probability of finding such a sequence
is 2−2b . On the contrary, the signee takes advantage of a predefined structure for
generating the polynomials. This problem is known as the Hidden Field Equation
(HFE). It is possible that an attacker can also take advantage of this structure. In fact,
a powerful attack taking advantage of the structure used by the NIST candidates
Rainbow and GeMSS128 was recently published in [9].
Code-based cryptographic schemes, such as McEliece’s hidden Goppa-code, is
based on error correcting codes. A linear code C[n, k] defined over Fq , with q =
pm , p a prime, is a k-dimensional vector in the subspace (Fq )n . A code can be
defined by a generating matrix G ∈ (Fq )k×n or by a parity verification matrix H ∈
(Fq )k×n with r = n − k as,

C = {uG ∈ Fnq |u ∈ Fnq } or (3)

C = {v ∈ Fnq |H v T ∈ 0r },

where H GT = 0. A vector s is called a syndrome of v, if H v T = s T .

Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 261

Two codes are said to be equivalent if they differ by a permutation in the

coordinates of their elements. Formally, a code C  generated by G is equivalent
to a code C generated by G if and only if G = SGP for some permutation matrix
P ∈ (Fq )n×n and a singular matrix S ∈ (Fq )k×k . The permutation matrix is used
as a public key for signatures. After finding a syndrome that can be decoded with
the message, an error correction vector is used as a signature along with a value
taken from a random oracle. In order to verify a signature, the permutation matrix is
multiplied with the signature, which is checked with the help of the random oracle
value.

4.1 NIST PQC Digital Signature Finalists

NIST defined five security strength categories [35] as follows, listed in order of
increasing strength:
Level 1: At least as hard to break as AES128 (exhaustive key search)
Level 2: At least as hard to break as SHA256 (collision search)
Level 3: At least as hard to break as AES192 (exhaustive key search)
Level 4: At least as hard to break as SHA384 (collision search)
Level 5: At least as hard to break as AES256 (exhaustive key search)
Table 3 summarizes the length in bytes of the public keys, private keys, and
signatures associated with NIST third-round finalist and alternate schemes as
reported by their authors. We stress that no scheme proposes the security level 4,
i.e., resistance to collision search on a 384-bit hash function.
There are three NIST finalists digital signature schemes, Crystals-Dilithium,
Falcon, and Rainbow.
Crystals-Dilithium [32] was designed to provide NIST security levels 2, 3, and
5. The secret key is a set of parameters, but the signer can store a 32-byte value
and then re-deriving from this seed all the other elements of the secret key. The
authors also proposed a Dilithium-AES variant that uses AES-256 in counter mode
instead of SHAKE, to expand the matrix and masking vectors and to sample the
secret polynomials.
Falcon (512, 1024) [38] was designed to provide security levels 1 and 5. The
secret key consists of four polynomials, and their values are not reported in the
third-round proposal, although these values are about three times as large as the
signature. According to the authors, the secret key could be compressed down to a
small PRNG seed of 32 bytes.
Rainbow [17] is based on the Oil–Vinegar signature scheme which is a class
of multivariate public key cryptosystems. Rainbow is characterized by producing
extremely small signatures and highly efficient signature and verification times.
On the downside, the sizes of Rainbow public/private keys are considerably large.
Moreover, Beullens published in [9] an important attack against Rainbow that
seriously compromise its security guarantees.
262 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

Table 3 NIST finalists and alternates length in bytes of the public key (PK), private key (SK),
and signature (S) as reported by the authors
Digital signature schemes Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 5
Finalists Crystals-Dilithium [32] PK – 1312 1952 2592
SK – 32 32 32
S – 2420 3293 4595
Falcon (512, 1024) [38] PK 897 – – 1793
SK 32 – – 32
S 666 – – 1280
Rainbow [17] PK 158K – 861K 1885K
SK 101K – 611K 1376K
S 66 – 164 204
Alternates Picnic2-FS [48] PK 32 – 48 64
SK 16 – 24 32
S 13802 – 29750 54732
SPHINCS (small) [28] PK 32 – 48 64
SK 64 – 96 128
S 8080 – 17064 29792
GeMSS128 [12] PK 352K – 1238K 3040K
SK 13K – 35K 72K
S 33 – 53 75

There are three NIST Alternate digital signature schemes, Picnic, SPHINCS, and
GeMMS128.
The authors of the Picnic scheme [48] propose the following three variants
by varying the parameters of both the zero-knowledge protocol used and the
transformation that is applied:
Picnic-FS: uses ZKB++ with the Fiat–Shamir transform.
Picnic-UR: uses ZKB++ with the Unruh transform.
Picnic2-FS: uses a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof of knowledge with the
Fiat–Shamir transform.
Table 3 only shows the Picnic2-FS variant for the security strengths 1, 3, and 5
because this variant provides the smallest signature length of the three ones listed
above. We present in Table 3 the largest signature sizes reported by the authors.
However, the authors also provide the average and the standard deviation of 100
Picnic signature sizes.
The authors of SPHINCS+ [28] propose parameter sets achieving security levels
1, 3, and 5; for each of these levels, they propose a size-optimized (ending on “s”
for small) and a speed-optimized (ending on “f” for fast) variants. In Table 3, we
only present the values corresponding for the size-optimized scheme.
According to the authors, the advantages and limitations of their proposal can be
summarized in one sentence: “On the one hand, it is probably the most conservative
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 263

design of a post-quantum signature scheme, on the other hand, it is rather inefficient

in terms of signature size and speed.”
GeMSS [12] is a multivariate public key cryptosystems that has key sizes and
computational timings larger than the ones associated with Rainbow.
Even though NIST requested to test the submissions on a PQC Reference
Platform, an Intel x64 running Windows or Linux and supporting GCC compiler,
each author measured the computational efficiency on a distinct platform. Since
each scheme was implemented on different CPUs at different frequencies, it is
difficult to compare the timing computational complexity of the finalists and
alternates. Fortunately, multiple research groups have developed platforms that
allow to draw a fair comparison, as discussed in the next section.

5 PQC Digital Signatures Performance

Several research groups have implemented different tools and platforms that permit
to have a fair evaluation of the NIST finalist and alternate digital signature
schemes. The authors of [16, 27] present hardware and hardware/software co-design
testbeds for comparing the performance of the candidate schemes. Software libraries
executing on multiple platforms have been reported in [4, 7, 29, 30]. In this section,
we present the timing performance reported in [7], as briefly explained next.
ECRYT Benchmarking of Asymmetric Systems (eBATS) [7] is a project that
reports the performance of many public key schemes. It is based on SUPERCOP,
a toolkit conceived for independently measuring the performance of cryptographic
software using multiple CPU architectures and multiple computers, ranking from
1 up to 64 CPU cores at different frequencies. Concerning public key signature
algorithms, eBATS measures the performance of cryptographic schemes based on
the following main criteria:
• Time (in clock cycles) to generate a key pair
• time to sign a short message (59 bytes length)
• time to open a signed short message, i.e., verify a (larger) signed message and
recover the original short message
In Table 4, we present a performance comparison of all the NIST finalists and
alternate digital signature schemes. The timings of the finalist and alternates are
given as reported in [7] when signing and verifying processes of 59 bytes on an
AMD EPYC 7742: 64X2250 MHZ processor. Furthermore, we normalize these
timings with respect to classical ECC curve P-256 timings. Following [7, 26], we
have assumed that ECC key generation and signature require approximately 73,000
clock cycles, whereas verification takes about 200,000 clock cycles.
From a close observation of Table 4, note that none of the alternate candidates
represent an option for being used in Bitcoin. They are problematic in terms of the
sizes of the public keys, signatures, and/or because of their timing performances.
264 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

Table 4 Summary of the size and computational timings associated with all NIST finalists and
alternates compared to classical ECC curve P-256 timings. Following [7, 26], we have assumed that
ECC key generation and signature require approximately 73,000 clock cycles, whereas verification
takes about 200,000 clock cycles. The timings of the finalist and alternates are given as reported
in [7] when signing and verifying processes of 59 bytes on an AMD EPYC 7742: 64X2250 MHZ
processor
Size (bytes) Time with respect to ECC
Schemes PrivK PubK Sig KGen Signing Verif
Classical schemes ECDSA-256 32 64 64 1.0 1.0 1.0
RSA-2048 512 256 256 1000 25 0.2
NIST finalists Dilithium-2 32 1312 2420 1 2.5 0.4
Falcon-512dyn 32 897 666 195 7.6 0.3
Rainbow 1 Classic 49000 58800 66 72 0.5 0.1
NIST Alternates GeMSS128 13438 352190 33 778 9429 1.2
Picnic2l1-FS 16 32 13802 0.1 1516 300
SPHINCS-s 64 32 8080 588 10133 10

One can also see in Table 4 that Rainbow enjoys an excellent signature and
verification timing performance. However, Rainbow has a humongous public key
size, and it has recently suffered a devastating attack [9].
It is interesting to remark that a number of hash-based digital signatures have
been used in several cryptocurrencies currently active. For example, Quantum-
Resistant Ledger (QRL), Bitcoin Post-Quantum, and IOTA, all use hash-based
digital signature algorithms, which although not standardized can resist quantum
attacks. However, the size of the signature of hash-based schemes still constitutes a
critical issue for their adoption.
We stress that the two lattice-based candidates, Dilithium-2 and Falcon, have
a verification time performance that is even faster than ECC. Since verification is
arguably the most critical operation for cryptocurrencies, we conclude that adopting
these two schemes for a post-quantum version of Bitcoin would not present issues
with respect to timing performance. The (considerably) larger size of Dilithium-2
and Falcon public keys and signatures still remains as a point of concern though.
(See Sect. 6 for an extended discussion of this issue.)

6 Implementation Challenges

This section discusses the challenges for integrating post-quantum signatures in

Bitcoin, mainly considering the running time performance of the post-quantum
algorithms previously described and the space requirement of storing public keys
and signatures to validate transactions in the blockchain.
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 265

6.1 Running Time Requirement

Keeping the throughput of the cryptocurrency, namely the number of transactions

per second, stable is crucial for its wide adoption. Therefore, the computational cost
of digital signatures and their verification must be efficient. Since miners must verify
that all transactions are valid before reaching consensus and publishing a new block,
signature verification running time is undoubtedly the highest priority requirement
for the signature scheme. For example, the daily average number of transactions per
block for Bitcoin can vary from approximately 800 to 2700.1 If the verification of a
single signature takes 100 ms, verifying the signature of all block transactions would
require up to 4 and a half minutes. That corresponds to about half of the expected
time to publish a new Bitcoin block in the case of Bitcoin.
Considering all the finalist candidates of the NIST competition, as shown in
Table 4, signatures can be efficiently verified from 2.5 to 10 times faster than
ECDSA. The signature verification performance degrades for the alternate candi-
dates to the point of running 300 times slower than ECDSA, which is unacceptable.
Signatures are generally performed to sign transactions before they are broad-
casted to the Bitcoin’s memory pool. This task is performed independently by
the users and does not require much running time performance as verification.
Signatures are computed only once, whereas they are verified many times before
being included in the blockchain. However, there are cases where signatures must
be fast, for example, exchange brokers or payment applications that broadcast many
transactions in a short period. It is perhaps not surprising that the Finalist candidates
perform better in this category than the alternates, which can be up to 10,000 times
slower than ECDSA. Compared to RSA, finalist candidates are faster at signing,
indicating that these schemes can bring a better trade-off for signing and verifying
running time. That is not necessarily the case for key generation, which can be
relatively slower. Nevertheless, key generation is performed mostly offline and by
the users. Slower performance should not impact as much as it does for signature
verification, and all candidates are at least faster than RSA.
On this note, the biggest challenge of deploying finalist candidates regarding
running time performance would be to support these algorithms in dedicated
hardware and other types of embedded applications, where often resources are
constrained. Luckily, there have been significant advances to implement lattice-
based candidates in small devices, also due to their compact keys and signatures
[24, 30].

1 https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transactions_per_block.
266 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

6.2 Space Requirement

The maximum block size is fixed in the Bitcoin blockchain and cannot exceed 4 MB.
Therefore, considering the block size restriction and the current size of public keys
and signatures of the NIST candidates, the adoption of post-quantum signatures
significantly reduces the maximum number of transactions in a single block. The
trivial solution would be to increase the maximum block size to the point where it
can admit the same number of transactions per block, thus preserving the current
Bitcoin average throughput of 5 transactions per second. However, as mentioned
before, increasing the maximum block size is not generally agreed upon in the
Bitcoin community, thus reaching an impasse.
Ruling out the alternate candidates due to their poor signing and verifying
performance, it is clear that the lattice-based schemes are the optimal choices for
consideration. Because public keys must also be included with the signatures to
validate the transactions, Rainbow’s huge public key makes it unsuitable in practice.
Moreover, the recommendation of avoiding address reuse brings deeper concerns
over adopting schemes with large public keys, as these keys must be stored to
preserve the continuous validation of the entire blockchain.
More recently, Bitcoin has activated a new feature with BIP 340 that enables
multi-signatures and signature aggregation to speed up the verification process
while reducing space requirements for more complex transactions. According to
[10], multi-signature schemes allow signers to sign a message jointly, generating a
short signature. A verifier can efficiently verify this signature and assert whether all
signers signed the message. Aggregated signatures is a similar technique, but signers
can individually sign distinct messages and aggregate their signatures, producing a
short signature for all messages. The authors propose a compact multi-signature
scheme that also allows public key aggregation. However, the proposed scheme is
not post-quantum-resistant.
Since there are no post-quantum signature schemes with short public keys and
short signatures simultaneously, signature or key aggregation could be an exciting
solution to reduce the impact on the transaction throughput. However, there are no
efficient multi-signature or aggregation schemes for the lattice candidates in the
current state of the literature.

6.3 Public Key Recovery

Cryptocurrencies have adopted a public key recovery mechanism to reduce space

usage in the blockchain. It is possible to recover the ECDSA public key of the signer
using the signature and the signed message. Doing so avoids repeating information
in the transactions, and comparing the address field with the obtained public key can
confirm the recovery process. Hence, the public key does not need to be stored in
the transaction, reducing the total space used in a block.
Post-Quantum Digital Signatures for Bitcoin 267

Post-quantum signatures and public keys are much bigger than ECDSA. Hence,
a public key recovery method can further improve space requirements for their
adoption. One example is the Falcon signature scheme that allows a public key
recovery mode by including additional information in the signature [20]. As a result,
the size of a signature increases by a factor of two, and the public key becomes a
hash output. Recall that the hash of the public key corresponds to the address field
that is already present in the transaction. The authors describe the Key Recovery
Mode of Falcon in the updated version of their official specification.2 Although they
do not include it as part of the standardization process, it can reduce the total size of
the signature with the public key by about 15%.

7 Conclusions

The DLP and the IFP have been the security assumptions of modern cryptography
during the last 45 years. These assumptions will no longer be secure with the arrival
of large-scale quantum computers in the near future. Bitcoin and other blockchains
utilize the ECDSA signature scheme instantiated with the Koblitz curve secp256k1.
This curve was selected because it achieves a high timing performance, which in
turn imposes hard constraints on any substitution proposal of the NIST competition,
including the post-quantum digital signatures Crystals-Dilithium and Falcon.
This chapter discusses challenges to deploying post-quantum signatures into
cryptocurrencies. The running time performance of finalist post-quantum signature
schemes of the third round of the NIST competition is satisfactory. Furthermore,
optimizations can speed up the verification process, which is critical for keeping
the network throughput, given that miners usually have state-of-the-technology
computational power. However, considering the current maximum block size of
Bitcoin, the size of public keys and signatures negatively affects the number of
transactions per block. As a result, the number of transactions per second in the
network will diminish, or the space required for storing public keys and signatures
in the blockchain will grow. In this regard, the lattice-based candidates appear to
be the most suitable candidates for deployment with cryptocurrencies. In addition,
alternatives that further optimize space in the blockchain, i.e., multi-signatures
or signature and key aggregation, are still an open problem in the post-quantum
scenario.
Meanwhile, NIST recently announced a new call for post-quantum signatures
considering unstructured lattices and targeting specific applications. In conclusion,
the next NIST call for post-quantum signature schemes should consider such
properties, in addition to the running time performance, such that applications
like Bitcoin can take advantage of features that reduce space requirements. Also,
new alternatives for storing public keys and signature scripts in the blockchain
that minimize the inevitable impact of larger post-quantum signatures should be
considered.

2 https://falcon-sign.info/falcon.pdf.
268 M. Á. León-Chávez et al.

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Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering
from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency

Michael W. Calafos and George Dimitoglou

1 Introduction

The conversion of illicit currency into legitimate assets to conceal unlawful activities
is not new. The term “money laundering” was first introduced in the 1920s with the
rise of organized crime syndicates in the United States (USA). The term originated
from the use of local, predominantly cash-only laundromat businesses established
with the sole purpose of concealing the proceeds from the activities of the notorious
Al Capone. Under the direction of Capone’s accountant, Meyer Lansky, several
cash-type businesses, including casinos and nightclubs, were established to be used
as cash fronts. Having a hard-to-trace cash business, it became possible to deposit
the proceeds of illegal activities in banks, fund other businesses, and overall, avoid
detection, seizure, and prosecution. By the time of his arrest in 1931 for tax evasion,
Capone had laundered approximately $100 million (approximately $1.6 billion in
2021 money) and had created what would become the blueprint to conceal, convert,
transfer, and legitimize illegally obtained funds [1–3].
Money laundering can range from simple courier-based cash transportation and
conversion to portable high-value commodities to investments made using sophis-
ticated financial transactions. Such transactions may involve financial institutions
and, typically, cash-intensive legitimate businesses, including religious institutions
and charitable organizations [1, 4, 5] along with purposefully established shell
corporate entities and sham trusts. Although money laundering can conceal the
proceeds of any criminal activity, it is a common predicate offense in drug
distribution, white-collar crimes, bribery, corruption, and terrorism. The process can
engage multiple knowing and oblivious individuals and organizations, ranging from

M. W. Calafos · G. Dimitoglou ()

Hood College, Frederick, MD, USA
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 271
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_12
272 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

reputable financial firms and institutions, compromised or coerced employees and

professional money laundering agents to shady money transfer companies, lawyers,
accountants, insurance and real estate agents, commodity brokers, and dealers of
high-valued goods and assets [1, 5].
The money laundering process can be a complicated, multi-stage activity, but it
is generally identified by three distinct, sequential phases: placement, layering, and
integration [1, 4, 6–12]. Placement introduces illicit funds into the financial system
through simple cash deposits or more complex techniques. Layering creates layers
of complicated financial transactions, such as opening multiple accounts in different
financial institutions, transferring funds into offshore accounts with preference to
institutions in jurisdictions with lax anti-money laundering laws and regulations [8–
10]. Ultimately, the objective behind layering is to distance the illicit profits from
their unlawful point of origin and obfuscate or, ideally, break the audit trail [1, 5, 7–
12]. Placement and layering allow “dirty” money to be “washed,” and be used in
the integration stage [1, 5–12]. Integration uses the “cleaned” funds to purchase
lawful assets and make legitimate investments via the purchase of legal, commercial
enterprises and the acquisition of financial instruments that can produce capital
gains and dividend income [1, 5, 6, 8–10]. Due to the inherently clandestine nature
of money laundering transactions, it has been nearly impossible for authorities and
law enforcement to reliably estimate the size and value of the international money
laundering market.
Money laundering methods continue to evolve, the scope of operations expand-
ing to a global scale, allowing technologically capable criminal enterprises to
find new and “innovative” ways to exploit gaps in regulations and legal statutes.
The sophistication of operations has also increased to include complex financial
instruments, offshore accounts, credit cards, and wire transfers, along with engaging
in diverse market and product areas such as real estate, charitable enterprises,
antiquities, art, precious metals, aircraft, luxury goods, and natural resources [13].
The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) attempted
such a study in the late 1990s only to abandon the effort after 2 years due to too
many unknown variables [14]. Similarly, between 1996 and 2000, the international
Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on money laundering attempted a similar study,
and it was also unsuccessful [1, 15, 16]. In 2011, the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime (UNODC) estimated the annual global market value of laundered money
between 1 and 5% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) [1, 10, 11, 15, 17, 18]
with less than 1% of all illicit financial flows ever seized by authorities [19]. In
2018, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated similar figures, with money
laundering representing approximately 2–5% of global GDP or around $4 trillion
[2, 5, 6, 15]. Some researchers suggest that these estimates may suffer from a ±20
percent estimation error, while others rank money laundering as the world’s third
largest industry behind oil and agriculture [2, 5].
The global acceptance of the Internet as a borderless, worldwide platform
supporting business transactions, along with the development of virtual currency
(cryptocurrency) [20, 21], has also contributed to changing the landscape of financial
transactions and, subsequently, money laundering.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 273

From an economic perspective, cryptocurrencies challenge how the value of

a currency is determined and augment the strict classification of money as a
commodity, credit, or fiat currency for storing value, functioning as a medium of
exchange and serving as a unit of account [22]. Gold and silver are examples of
commodity money with their value determined based on market supply and demand
[23]. They have been used as mediums of exchange and, during the last century,
as economic units backing physical fiat currencies. Credit money is non-interest-
bearing receivables that cannot be redeemed on demand, a commonly recognized
means of exchange with its value retained over the years. Fiat currency is a legal
tender issued by a government or central banking authority in coins and paper.
Its value is no longer backed by a gold or silver standard. The money itself has
no intrinsic value, but its value is determined by a government or central banking
decree, backing, and monetary policy [11, 22–24]. Unlike physical fiat currencies, a
cryptocurrency’s value is bound by the acceptance of individual market participants
for that specific cryptocurrency [20, 21], supply and demand, and trust in the system
[10, 11]. In addition, while fiat money can be printed continuously, potentially
leading to high supply, resulting in inflation [23], cryptocurrencies have a fixed
maximum supply limit, reached on a predetermined date, practically eliminating
the risk of any inflationary pressure [11, 22, 25].
Technologically, cryptocurrencies are a decentralized electronic or digital means
of exchange conducted over a borderless peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction network
and anonymously recorded within a blockchain, a public, distributed transaction
ledger [5, 10, 23, 24]. Cryptocurrency is a string of code generated by sophisticated
encryption techniques and a complex cryptographic algorithm [10]. Cryptocurrency
systems are decentralized and not controlled by an entity, government, or authority.
Instead, transaction processing and validation are performed by a public community
of cryptocurrency miners, who have agreed based on an a priori consensus
mechanism on the particulars of the specific cryptocurrency process [21, 24, 26, 27].
The system provides anonymity as users are not required to disclose personally
identifiable information (PII) to participate in financial transactions [8, 28].
This new economic and technology landscape has expanded money laundering
capabilities by providing safe virtual environments to convert illegal, physical
fiat currency into practically untraceable “cleansed” virtual assets. This type of
laundering also follows the placement, layering, and integration phases, taking place
on the Internet and the Dark Web [5, 9], at online auctions and gambling sites,
on massively multiplayer online role-playing games, using unregulated financial
intermediaries and exchanging value with various instruments, such as credit cards,
prepaid cards, stored value cards (“smart cards”), mobile payments, and digital
precious metals [9, 12, 13, 21, 28, 29]. Cyber laundering is effective, low cost,
and hard to track and allows to engage in laundering transactions at a global scale
quickly, efficiently, and anonymously [8, 10, 20]. It enables individuals and criminal
organizations to launder large amounts of “dirty money” and operate at scale [7, 17]
in multiple crime verticals. Traditional, physical criminal acts such as drug, weapon,
and stolen goods smuggling, human trafficking, fraud, and extortion have been
augmented with technologically savvy cyberspace crimes, such as cyberattacks,
cyberwarfare, and cyberterrorism.
274 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

This chapter examines and compares traditional money laundering techniques

with modern cyber laundering methods based on cryptocurrencies. We examine
these methods and how they are used and discuss different practices, tools, and
techniques. The work is structured to provide context and describe the evolution
and transition of traditional money laundering into cyberspace and the related legal
and regulatory challenges.
The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. The following section
provides an overview of money laundering, describing the different phases and the
roles of participants. Section 3 introduces cyber laundering, including methods and
tools. Section 4 compares traditional money laundering techniques with modern
cyber laundering methods based on cryptocurrencies. In Sect. 5, there is an overview
of both technical and nontechnical regimes and existing legal and regulatory
frameworks to detect, investigate, and prosecute traditional and cyber laundering.
Finally, the Conclusion section summarizes the topic and highlights technology and
regulatory challenges as potential directions for future work.

2 Money Laundering

Possessing or spending higher amounts of money by individuals or organizations

over what is expected to be obtained via legitimate means can trigger investigative
and auditing actions by financial, regulatory, and law enforcement authorities.
Money laundering transforms illegally obtained funds to various financial assets,
concealing their source of origin and making it appear legitimate while introducing
it into the financial system [14, 30]. The following sections describe the roles
assumed by participants and the money laundering phases.

2.1 Roles and Participants

Money laundering begins with the launderer, playing the initial and coordinating
role. Launderers can be classified under two broad types [3]: the standard vertical
with three subcategories and the professional launderer.
The first type refers to either an individual acting alone or operating within a
vertically integrated illicit organization engaged in the generation and subsequently
laundering of illegal funds. Such launderers can be further classified into three
organizational categories: standard criminal, organized crime, and terrorist orga-
nizations.
The second type refers to professional launderers that are one degree removed
from the original activity which generated the illegal funds and they only participate
in money laundering. They are considered a “weak link” because they can be easily
deterred from participating as they are not career criminals but often have legitimate
reputations, jobs, and careers or hold responsible roles in key institutions.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 275

Traditionally, criminal organizations use money brokers or controllers recruited

from within the organization’s ranks for explicit purpose of trafficking and laun-
dering money. However, as criminal enterprises become more sophisticated, it is
common to recruit experts such as stockbrokers, money managers, commodity
traders, lawyers, and accountants, to assist in their money laundering efforts. Their
expertise increases the laundering effectiveness to benefit the criminal organization
and, for the experts, the quick and substantial compensation if often enticing. Yet
it comes at a high price of full responsibility, risk, and accountability if they get
caught as it would be unlikely they would inform the authorities of who hired them
and they would be subject to a wide range of possible punishment including fines,
loss of professional licenses, and imprisonment.
In all cases, launderers often recruit and use couriers to distribute the money
laundering tasks mostly to reduce the risk of or the impact of getting caught by the
authorities with the entire amount to be laundered. Couriers typically convert large
cash amounts to smaller amounts and make bank deposits in different accounts [8].
The roles of the launderers and the couriers vary within each of the different phases
of the money laundering process.

2.2 Phases and Common Techniques

The motivation behind money laundering is to avoid detection of the predicate

offenses by tracing the money trail, protecting the illicit proceeds from seizure,
and using them without triggering suspicion of their origins [1, 5]. Therefore, the
primary concerns for a money launderer are the speed, distance, and anonymity of
each transaction [9]. A progressive three-step money laundering process transforms
any “dirty” money into legitimate and usable “clean” assets (Fig. 1).
Money laundering begins with collecting and smuggling the proceeds (“dirty
money”) of domestic or international illicit activities. For example, for crimes
committed in the USA, there is a strong incentive to smuggle and launder currency
out of the country to protect it from detection and seizure enforced by bank-
reporting laws.
It is, therefore, common to attempt smuggling funds into offshore banking havens
in countries with either strong bank secrecy or lax bank-reporting laws. Once out of
the USA, the funds can smuggle or repatriate back to the country using non-cash
financial instruments, such as checks and debit cards. Over $50 billion is smuggled

Fig. 1 The three phases (placement, layering, and staging) and their underlying objectives
(conversion, concealment, and creation) during money laundering
276 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

out of the USA annually, with most funds crossing the US–Mexico border [31]. The
smugglers use bulk shipping methods similar to transporting drugs, such as ships,
containers, airplanes, and automobiles. Other ways to smuggle cash are individual
couriers or currency mules or postal mail to change cash into negotiable instruments,
such as traveler’s checks and money orders.

2.2.1 Placement

Placement is the first phase in the money laundering process and involves converting
illicit funds into smaller, more manageable, transportable, and less suspicious
amounts by directly placing the proceeds into the mainstream financial system [1,
4, 6–11, 18, 31, 32]. This conversion makes the illicit funds more liquid and appears
legitimate. While placement can be accomplished in various ways, the launderer’s
sophistication, access to resources, and geographical location play a significant
role in selecting the most suitable methods. In general, after breaking down the
funds into smaller amounts, numerous couriers, also known as smurfs, under the
direction of a money launderer deposit the amounts into several financial accounts
at different locations on various days. This method aims to avoid triggering any anti-
money laundering (AML) reporting requirements and is referred to as structuring or
smurfing [8]. Alternatively, exchanging funds for traveler’s checks, money orders,
or debit cards [6, 8] is less likely to trigger detection. Similarly, channeling funds
through casinos is also common as long as they are in jurisdictions—unlike casinos
under US jurisdiction—that have no reporting requirements when converting cash
to chips and vice versa [33].
Funds can also be channeled through “front” operations, such as restaurants,
nightclubs, or via informal, shadow, and nontraditional financial systems, such as
unregistered exchanges or hawalas [5, 6, 8]. A hawala is a trust-based alternate
payment system in Southeast Asian countries, which involves an agent known as
a hawaladar and does not leave a money trail. An individual wanting to transmit
funds to another country deposits money with a hawaladar. For a fee, the hawaladar
arranges with a hawaladar in the destination country for the funds to become
available. A code is used between the parties to receive the funds, and the two
hawaladars reconcile the accounts using regular trading practices or couriering
precious metals or gems across borders [5, 34].

2.2.2 Layering

Layering is the next step in the money laundering process to create complicated
financial transaction layers. Practically, multiple complex transactions are initiated
through various institutions and jurisdictions. The main objective is to further
distance illicit profits from their unlawful and suspicious point of origin and break
the audit trail [1, 5, 7–12, 18, 31, 32]. Frequently shifting funds throughout the
financial markets obfuscates the money trail and generates confusion, so the funds
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 277

become untraceable, making each transaction viewed in isolation resemble legal,

financial activity [5, 31].
Another factor to any layering operation’s success is to ensure that transactions,
whether performed physically or electronically, cross through multiple national
borders and corporate structures. As more layers are introduced, the more complex
the scheme becomes and the more difficult it becomes for authorities to trace and
investigate. Similar to the placement stage, layering includes opening numerous
physical or online accounts at different financial institutions [9] and transferring
funds into offshore accounts [8, 31]. The target financial institutions are carefully
selected under weak financial monitoring or banking secrecy laws. The most
straightforward yet effective layering technique is to electronically wire transfer
funds to such offshore banking heaven jurisdictions before rerouting the funds to
another location or business entity. An alternative to using financial institutions
is layering by establishing multiple cross-border shell companies, such as import-
export businesses, travel agencies, and money-service businesses, and routing funds
to these companies [6, 31].
Overall, the more methods, financial instruments, and shell companies engaged
in the process, the more complex and challenging the laundering trace becomes.
Some of the standard techniques to transfer and justify funds are wire transfers, bank
drafts, false invoices, over-invoicing, dollar discounting through money orders, or
counterbalancing loan structures [31]. Counterbalancing loan schemes, in particular,
tend to launder more significant amounts as they involve depositing illicit funds into
an offshore account and then using the account as collateral to obtain a bank loan
in another country. Finally, layering may also include converting cash deposits into
other forms of financial instruments, such as checks, commodities, futures, bonds,
stocks, and cryptocurrencies [6, 8–10].

2.2.3 Integration

The third and final step in the money laundering process is integration. In this
step, the “washed” money is reintroduced and integrated into the legitimate
financial system and economy [1, 5–12, 18, 31, 32]. Once this conversion occurs,
the “washed” money is considered fully laundered [8, 10]. Its illicit origins are
untraceable, and the funds can be used to purchase lawful assets and make legitimate
investments while creating an appearance of legitimacy [5, 6, 8]. These acquired
assets and investments may include equipment to support future criminal pursuits,
income-generating commercial enterprises, such as real estate and cash-intensive
businesses, or profits from financial instruments that can produce capital gains or
dividend income [1, 6, 8, 10, 18, 31].
This last step is often the more visible and most dangerous for the launderers
as the “owners” of the laundered funds become active, open participants in the
legitimate market. It is often at this stage that extravagant, out-of-the-ordinary
purchases or investments by those suspected of criminal activity get the attention of
the authorities and can trigger investigations to determine the origins of the funds.
278 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

Fig. 2 The full flow of traditional money laundering activities, including at each stage, multiple
couriers, financial intermediaries, and techniques

Integration failures on the part of money launderers can cause prosecution along
with asset and account seizures by authorities and may lead to additional findings
related to predicate criminal organization activities.
After this phase, the original funds are practically entirely diluted. While
the money laundering process looks linear (Fig. 2), the number and variety of
transactions, currencies, assets, and financial instruments make it too complex to
be detected, let alone to successfully trace back the origins of the laundered funds
or the predicate crime.

3 Cyber Laundering

The widespread use and availability of online services offer criminal organizations
new ways to improve their money laundering operations. Cryptocurrencies have
provided an additional way to avoid detection, maintain anonymity, and have
a global reach, moving traditional money laundering into the realm of cyber
laundering [8–10, 20, 27]. Cyber laundering may be conducted partially or fully
online, with the cross-border and cross-jurisdiction transfer and laundering of
cryptocurrencies performed covertly, seamlessly, and practically instantaneously
[8–10, 23]. As it is relatively straightforward to establish an online identity using
a digital front or shell company in many parts of the world [8, 12], moving funds
domestically and internationally becomes effortless. Multiple online accounts or
shell companies can be established during layering to spread funds across locations
and jurisdictions before integrating them into legitimate financial systems. These
online accounts and shell companies can also be used to integrate fiat currency into
the financial system by making the shell company’s accounts, income, payments,
profits, services, and products seem legitimate [9].
A simple way to obfuscate and make cryptocurrency transfer into the financial
system look less suspicious is through the practice of micro laundering, breaking
up significant cryptocurrency amounts into smaller amounts, then exchanging them
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 279

for fiat currency, and depositing them into legitimate accounts [35]. Combining
micro laundering with readily available cryptocurrency mixing/tumbler services and
privacy-preserving tools [5, 13, 20, 21, 28, 29, 36], launderers are able to further
anonymize transactions, preserve privacy, and avoid detection by the authorities.
Interestingly, unlike fiat currency, cryptocurrency can be used both as an input
and as an output asset and can enter or exit the laundering process at any
stage. Cryptocurrency holders can use unregistered exchanges or other financial
intermediaries, bypassing the established financial and banking system, along with
any other regulatory authorities, and any know your customer (KYC) verification
requirements [8, 12]. Similarly, cyber launderers use unregistered exchanges to
convert fiat currency and even precious metals and gems into cryptocurrencies
avoiding regulatory scrutiny.
While these methods bypass detection, the underlying online and network
infrastructures generate copious amounts of Internet-based transaction activity logs.
Even an ordinary website visit automatically generates activity log entries on the
user’s computer, the Internet service provider’s (ISP) network, and the website
server. The entries vary in detail, but at minimum, they include Internet Protocol (IP)
address information and the protocol types used. To address this, launderers deploy
a number of methods as logged activities present an unwanted trail of electronic
evidence.

3.1 Cyber Laundering Methods

Launderers use an arsenal of tools and techniques to hide their transactions and
thwart the generation of dependable and traceable logs that could be used by law
enforcement and regulatory agencies. Software like The Onion Router (TOR) is an
example of an easily accessible, free, anonymization application that uses multiple
TOR nodes to route traffic through the Internet while encrypting traffic between the
nodes. Since the IP address of only the previous node is detectable to a connecting
computer, the software conceals the originating IP address and the subsequent trail
[13, 28, 37].
Besides the use of anonymization software, other standard methods include the
use of mixing/tumbler services, encryption, proxy servers, virtual private networks
(VPNs), IP spoofing techniques, unauthenticated Wi-Fi “hot spots,” and prepaid
phones as modems to connect to the Internet [9, 38, 38]. A unique and very effective
approach is using mixing/tumbler services.

3.1.1 Mixing/Tumbling Services

Mixing/tumbling services mix legitimate with illicit cryptocurrency, converting

“dirty” into “clean” cryptocurrency and concealing the transaction history on the
blockchain. The “clean” cryptocurrency is obtained from other legitimate users
280 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

of the service. Therefore, the higher numbers of legitimate subscribers increase

the efficacy of the mixing/tumbling. The mixer gives cleansed cryptocurrencies a
new public address from one of the mixer’s “clean” public addresses unrelated to
the mixing/tumbling process. The mixing service deducts its transaction fee from
the clients newly “cleansed” funds and refills its cryptocurrency reserves from
cryptocurrencies in public addresses, contributing to the mixing process.
For returning customers, including serial launderers, the mixing service issues
the customer a returning customer number after each mix. Tracking the customers
prevents the mixing service from paying out the customer with tainted cryptocur-
rency deposited in its reserve when the same customer reuses the mixing service.
Users of the mixing service can check the taint of their received cryptocurrency at
the blockchain, but if the mixing/tumbling is executed correctly, there should be
no linkage or zero percent taint [13, 37]. In addition, mixing service providers often
clean their cryptocurrency through their service and then convert it into fiat currency,
benefiting from their proceeds without revealing their identity or ownership status.
Practically, once illicit cryptocurrency has been mixed/tumbled and commingled
with legitimate cryptocurrency, it becomes disassociated from its transaction history.
Legitimate mixing services can be licensed and regulated by financial authorities
for businesses to exchange different virtual currencies [37]. However, while it might
be technically complex, it is easy to set up such a service and operate without
registration and license. While both the operators and those using unlicensed
mixing services are subject to severe penalties that include fines, imprisonment,
and confiscation of assets [37, 39], their detection and prosecution are challenging
as most such services also use anonymization tools to conceal their activities.

3.1.2 Cards

Credit and prepaid cards, also known as “smart” cards, are stored value instruments.
Due to their prevalence in use for e-commerce, the use of stolen or forged cards
to buy products and services purchased online is very common [40, 41]. Although
cyber launderers can use credit cards, the preferred payment method is using prepaid
cards. Prepaid cards use either an open or a closed system.
An example of open system cards is debit cards, which are backed by fiat
currency and can be used almost anywhere, including conventional automated teller
machines (ATMs), convertible virtual currency (CVC) kiosks, or crypto ATMs.
These crypto ATMs allow exchanging fiat currency or e-money for cryptocurrency
[9, 39].
On the other hand, an example of closed system cards is prepaid telephone cards
which can be bought and resold. No matter the system used, prepaid cards can be
used during every money laundering stage, and they are highly valued for their ease
of use in transferring funds across borders.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 281

3.1.3 Online Auctions

Online auctions are commonly used to place and layer illicit proceeds into the bank
accounts of legitimate, typically shell companies. A shell company representative
serves as the item in the auction, and smurfs act as buyers, driving the item’s price for
sale as high as possible. As auctions do not have price limits, the smurfs make bids
of exorbitant amounts compared to the value of the auctioned item. Then the smurf
with the highest winning bid sends the “dirty” money to the seller’s bank account.
Next, the seller ships the item once the funds have cleared the bank, completing the
transaction. Since a reputable, albeit a shell, company is involved in the process, it
gives the transaction the appearance of legitimacy [9].

3.1.4 Online Services

Online services refer to services provided by online banks and other virtual financial
intermediaries, such as PayPal. These are attractive laundering instruments as it is
easy to exploit regulatory differences and bypass requirements, such as opening
Internet bank accounts in different jurisdictions. Accounts may be opened under the
name of a shell company providing fake or real services and products to conceal
identity and give an additional appearance of legitimacy. By providing real services
or products, legitimate customers unknowingly provide lawful proceeds which are
blended with unlawful proceeds, making the distinction and tracking of the latter,
harder to detect. It is not uncommon for online services to cover unregistered peer-
to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency exchanges where cryptocurrencies or fiat currency can
be exchanged. These exchanges frequently use mixing/tumbler techniques and even
money couriers, known as money mules, to infuse more anonymity and transaction
concealment. Transactions between a client and an exchange are possible using
crypto ATMs, although a crypto ATM can also be used directly as an exchange
by itself [39].

3.1.5 Online Gambling

As with real-world gambling, online gambling is another quick and efficient way
of legitimizing illicit funds and tax evasion. Typically, offshore casinos in locations
with lax regulations are chosen, and they can be used to launder and distribute large
amounts of money. A typical method is by exploiting legal Internet-based gambling
services or setting up illegal gambling businesses. Either way, online gambling is
an effective cyber laundering method since most transactions use credit or prepaid
cards [9, 42].
282 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

3.1.6 Virtual Money Laundering

Virtual money laundering is a comparatively new technique using Internet-based

charities and massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). Cyber
launderers donate dirty money to seemingly legitimate shell companies, established
as Internet-based charities doing minimal or no charitable work. With MMORPGs,
on the other hand, a money laundering player can virtually purchase cryptocurren-
cies using fiat currency at a fixed exchange rate before playing and then earn more
cryptocurrency while playing the game. The player can then virtually exchange the
cryptocurrency with others or buy or sell virtual items. The player can also convert
the cryptocurrency for fiat currency and then deposit the fiat currency into one or
multiple accounts. Once the fiat currency is deposited, the player can withdraw it
from any ATM. Occasionally, players get reloadable debit cards to play a particular
game, which also allows a player to withdraw fiat currency from ATMs [9].

3.1.7 Mobile Payment Services

Mobile payment services (MPSs) are offered by non-banks and do not require
a user to have a bank or credit card account. Mobile payments, also known as
m-payments [14], are transacted over a mobile phone or other communications
device, connecting to the Internet through voice access, text messaging, or wireless
application protocols to make payments [9]. MPSs can operate under two business
models [9, 41].
In the first business model, a telecommunication operator is the financial
intermediary to authorize, clear, and settle payments between the mobile service
provider and the uses. Doing so allows users to use their mobile phones at a
merchant’s point of sale (POS).
In the second business model, a cryptocurrency, as an electronic currency, can be
stored on a mobile phone or a mobile phone account. It can then be transferred to
other users or converted into or from fiat currency [41]. Prepaid mobile phones can
also be used for mobile payments like prepaid cards and provide an extra layer of
anonymity as single in-line memory module (SIMM) cards used in prepaid mobile
phones do not require registration or reveal of the buyer’s identity [9]. Mobile phone
payments have replaced bank accounts in numerous countries and payments through
banking instruments (e.g., cash, checks, money transfers). Especially in countries
with underdeveloped or poorly functioning banking systems, MPSs are the fastest
way to conduct business [41]. Cyber launderers use mobile phones for the layering
and staging phases, also known as digital smurfing [14]. They direct multiple
runners with mobile phones and illicit fiat currency to m-payment establishments
to exchange the fiat currency for electronic currency. Runners first download the
electronic currency to their mobile phones. Then, they follow specific instructions
by the launderer to forward the credited electronic currency to master accounts or to
transfer the funds to some other directed location.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 283

3.1.8 Digital Precious Metals

Using digital precious metals (DPMs) allows cyber launderers to perform online
transactions without using foreign exchanges or worrying about the underlying
currency. DPMs rely on exchanging derivatives options, giving a cyber launderer
the right to purchase an amount of virtual precious metal holdings at a specific price
based on the current price of the precious metal on the global commodity exchanges.
Since a DPM is an option, it can be exchanged like any other traditional commodity
or derivative security. Once the cyber launderer has obtained an amount of DPMs,
they in whole or in part can be transferred to other individuals or exchanged for
goods and services. Performing these transactions over the Internet makes it difficult
for a DPM dealer to verify a customer’s real identity [9].

3.1.9 Ransomware Campaigns

A ransomware campaign against select targets is another standard method of cyber

laundering. This type of hacking attack is based on ransomware, a type of malicious
software or malware that infects a computer system to obtain or remove data and
hold the data hostage. Once the system is compromised, the ransomware blocks
access to the data. The attacker then contacts the target and demands a ransom
payment to release the data, usually in the form of a cryptocurrency. It is also
common for the attacker to threaten the target to release or publish the data for
non-payment. The attacker can be an individual hacker or a hacker group working
alone or with a criminal organization or even a rogue state. It is not uncommon
for criminal organizations to purchase the necessary ransomware and hacking tools,
hire hacking talent, hardware, software, and even already compromised personally
identifiable information (PII) with illicit funds before the attack [21, 22, 36]. Upon
payment of the ransom from the target, they hold “clean” cryptocurrency.

4 Traditional vs. Cyber Money Laundering

Traditional, physical, in-person laundering practices have evolved, moved, or

expanded partially or fully in cyberspace. The multitude and complexity of online
tools make cyber laundering seem entirely different from the operational methods
of its pre-Internet predecessor, although it is interesting to compare and analyze the
differences.
The analysis assumes that any financial intermediaries can be operating in any
type of jurisdiction, neutralizing for the sake of the comparison the impact of strict,
strong privacy, lax, or non-existent anti-money laundering regimes. Although not
always feasible, it is clear from the perspective of the launderers that non-strict
or strong privacy regimes are the preferred localities to execute money laundering
transactions.
284 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

This comparison intends to identify similarities and differences from both the
launderers’ and authorities’ perspectives. The structure of the comparison is framed
on the three phases of money laundering (placement, layering, and integration)
since these phases seem to be common.

4.1 Placement

In the traditional, physical money laundering environment (Fig. 2), the money
launderer uses numerous couriers to fulfill the initial structuring of the “dirty”
money within the placement stage by physically giving each courier bulk amounts of
“dirty” money. Each courier breaks up their amount into multiple smaller amounts1
and then deposits (places) them into various regulated (e.g., banks, currency
exchanges) and unregulated financial intermediaries (e.g., hawalas, shadow banks,
unregistered exchanges) for the “dirty” money to be converted and appears as
“clean” money deposits. With cyber laundering, the launderer does not rely on
couriers to fulfill the initial structuring within the placement stage (Fig. 3). Instead,
the launderer purchases cryptocurrency directly over the Internet (e.g., in the Dark
Web) or through illicit cryptocurrency exchanges. The “dirty” cryptocurrency is
then virtually converted (“cleansed”) using special mixing/tumbler software or
unregistered mixing/tumbler service providers. Various amounts of the “clean”
cryptocurrency are deposited (placed) into multiple cryptocurrency blockchains and
virtual wallets, avoiding regulated financial intermediaries and reporting require-
ments.

Fig. 3 The full flow of cyber laundering activities at each stage of money laundering. Leveraging
cryptocurrency exchanges and virtual wallets, The Placement & Structuring and Layering phases
are simplified and can be carried out even by a single person

1 In the USA, this amount is under the $10,000 reporting requirement threshold.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 285

4.2 Layering

Layering aims to further distance already structured, “cleaned” funds from their
illicit origin to hinder detection. With traditional money laundering, the launderer
attempts to use the funds for legal purchases, electronically transfer funds to other
locations, and make investments using legal financial instruments. Purchases and
transfers are carried out using legitimate wire transfer services, currency exchanges,
smart cards, and mobile payments (m-payments). Investments are made in stocks,
bonds, commodities, derivative securities (forward, futures contracts, options, and
swaps), other fiat currencies, and cryptocurrency.
Similarly, cyber laundering attempts to use structured funds for layering,
although there are operational differences. The money launderer can either directly
use “clean” cryptocurrency from a blockchain or virtual wallet or convert the
“clean” cryptocurrency to “clean” fiat currency for purchases, transfers, and
investments. This is a significantly simpler and less labor-intensive aspect of this
phase compared to traditional laundering.

4.3 Integration

After the additional concealment and complexity layering stage, the further cleansed
funds are available for use and incorporation into the legitimate financial market.
The modus operandi for using the cleansed funds at the integration stage matches
the available methods and options during the layering stage. Again, the funds are
used to purchase assets and make legitimate investments using legal, financial
instruments. Although integration provides another layer of concealment, the sole
intention is not to hide the money but to engage in for-profit activities or support
future criminal actions. Typically, purchased assets favor real estate and luxury
items, such as art, antiquities, jewelry, automobiles, watercraft, and aircraft. At the
same time, investments besides typical financial instruments may also include cash-
intensive business ventures.
Overall, the process does not seem dramatically different than traditional money
laundering (Fig. 3). However, it is clear that the use of cryptocurrency offers cyber
launderers significant operational advantages in terms of profit, speed, and reducing
the risk of detection (Table 1). The use of cryptocurrency has at least two inherent
factors that make it more effective in every stage of the money laundering process
(Table 2). First, it is the quasi-anonymity afforded by cryptocurrencies, which plays
a significant role in minimizing the ability to track and follow the money trail both
during and after the transactions are complete. Second, the high-speed, real-time
transactions make detection difficult during the fund transfers, while jurisdictional
conflicts make regulatory enforcement and prosecution difficult.
From a process perspective, the use of exchanges at the placement phase and
subsequently the use of cryptocurrency and virtual wallets at the layering phase have
 286 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

Table 1 Comparing traditional money laundering with cyber laundering activities at each stage of
the process
Comparison of Traditional Money Laundering vs. Cyber Laundering
Placement Layering Integration
Traditional Structuring Concealment Creation
activity
• Multiple couriers • Use fiat currency • Use fiat currency and
(“smurfs”). to buy/sell financial crypto currency to
instruments, fiat and buy legitimate assets,
Conversion crypto currency. make investments.
• Multiple financial • Wire transfer fiat cur-
intermediaries. rency.

Cyber activity Structuring Concealment Creation

• Unregistered • Use crypto currency • Use crypto currency to
exchange. to buy/sell financial buy legitimate assets,
• Mixing/tumbler instruments, fiat and make investments.
service or software. crypto currency.
• Wire transfer of crypto
Conversion currency.
• Multiple blockchains,
virtual wallets (“digi-
tal smurfing”).

Table 2 During the money laundering process, the use of cryptocurrency offers certain advantages
over fiat currency based on two general factors: quasi-anonymity and real-time transactions
Advantages of Cryptocurrency During Money laundering Stages
General factors Placement Layering Integration
Quasi- Used by Illicit Difficulty in matching Anonymous and
anonymity organizations and their names with transactions untraceable cashing out
associates of proceeds
Real-time Cross-border transference Limited lead time to stop Quick cross-border
transactions to another cryptocurrency suspicious transactions movement and
withdrawal of illicit
proceeds

the most significant impact. Compared to the same traditional money laundering
phases, laundering activities can be carried out by a single actor, who is able to mix
funds and then distribute them to virtual wallets without having to engage multiple
couriers or interact with financial intermediaries.
The effectiveness of cyber laundering techniques creates significant challenges
in the detection, investigation, and prosecution of launderers.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 287

5 Investigating, Regulating, and Prosecuting Cyber

Laundering

Cyber laundering investigations are complex and time-consuming that typically

only the largest investigative agencies with the most skilled and technical savvy
personnel have the resources to pursue with any degree of success. Investigators
must thoroughly understand cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies and the
complex transaction methods and algorithms they support. They must also keep
pace with an accelerated rate of innovation within the cryptocurrency market that
constantly introduces different currencies with varying anonymity and payment
systems [5, 6, 10, 22].
The heavy use of encryption to support anonymity and its application with digital
wallets notably increases the challenge for investigators to identify those involved
in transactions [21, 43, 44]. While a user’s public keys may be traceable through
transaction histories, the existence of potentially numerous public keys associated
with an individual makes the investigative tasks only more complicated. Even when
identifying information, such as PII, is required to confirm a user’s identity and
open an account, the users can still provide fraudulent information [20]. The users
can also conceal their identities using multiple public addresses from different
cryptocurrency wallets or connecting to other computers within an open wireless
network [37]. The latter technique is particularly concerning since unsuspecting,
unaware, innocent individuals can be hijacked and become part or inadvertently
support illicit communications and activities.
Overall, these investigative challenges are inherent in the cryptocurrency and
blockchain environment. As the popularity of blockchain usage increases and
sophisticated analytical techniques, strategies, and tools are developed, novel
investigation techniques into blockchain transactions may become more accessible
for the anti-money laundering, regulatory, and enforcement communities [37]. At
this time, this is not the case, positioning law enforcement and regulatory authorities
at a significant disadvantage.
Two other challenges to investigation and enforcement are the lack of clear
regulations about cryptocurrency and standard international enforcement or a
uniform legal framework relating to cyber laundering. The opinions and rulings of
legal authorities vary on the definition and classification of cryptocurrencies, making
enforcement and especially prosecution difficult [17, 21, 26]. Unlike traditional
money laundering, some standardized anti-money laundering frameworks tend to
exist [1]. While they typically rely on a flexible risk-based approach instead of
a rigid rule-based approach to counter money laundering [10], this is not the
case with cyber laundering. This lack of a standardized, anti-cyber laundering
framework hinders the cooperation, investigation, and prosecution efforts between
law enforcement authorities and lawful stakeholders, especially in cases involving
cross-border, cross-jurisdiction activities [5].
288 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

5.1 Money Laundering Legislation and Regulations

The lack of a comprehensive, international regulatory framework imposes several

challenges to law enforcement. In this section, we focus on the US anti-money
laundering (AML) regime, which seems to be one of the earliest and more mature
regimes.
The first instance of AML legislation in the USA originated in the 1970s.
Although tax evasion and dealing in stolen goods are closely linked with money
laundering and were always considered illegal, it was not until the US Bank Secrecy
Act (BSA) was passed as a component of the war on drugs [1, 6, 11, 26, 37]
that made money laundering per se to be considered unlawful. In the USA, the
Department of the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) is
charged with combating money laundering. At the same time, the Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network (FinCEN) bureau, established in 1990, has an active role
in gathering financial intelligence, enforcing regulations, providing guidance on
compliance issues, and assisting other agencies to prevent money laundering and
other financial crimes domestically and internationally [6, 11, 37, 45].
Existing federal anti-money laundering laws criminalize money laundering and
other associated acts. The foundation for such laws was the passing of the BSA
and later, the Money Laundering Control Act (MLCA) of 1986 [1, 6, 7, 17]. The
passing of these Acts influenced the creation of similar legislation in other countries
as most countries lacked regulations addressing AML controls. It also helped guide
the formation during the 1989 G-7 Summit in Paris of the Financial Action Task
Force (FATF), an international AML policy-making association of member nations
charged with developing international AML standards [1, 6, 46].
Later, the scope of these two Acts, along with the Treasury Department’s
enforcement powers, was greatly expanded with the passage of the USA PATRIOT
ACT (Patriot Act) after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks [1, 6, 7, 11, 37].2
These laws depend on the reporting, record-keeping, and enforcement of various
financial and certain non-financial institutions [1, 17]. Two such standards that
institutions must follow are the completion and transmittal to the US Department
of the Treasury of Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) for any domestic over
$10,000 or any international over $5000 cash transaction and Suspicious Activity
Reports (SARs) for suspicious transactions [1, 6, 7, 11, 17, 26, 37]. Additionally,
institutions must have and maintain an anti-money laundering compliance program.
The above legal and regulatory elements compose the US anti-money laundering
(AML) regime based on prevention and enforcement (Table 3). The prevention

2 There is a standing disagreement between legal scholars on the coverage of section 359(a) of the

Patriot Act. Some argue that it extends the MLCA’s reach to include the Internet and emerging
technologies, therefore equating cyber laundering to traditional money laundering in terms of civil
and criminal sanctions. Others argue that the section does not specify Internet-based technologies
but amends the BSA definition of a “money transmitter” so that informal or underground banking
systems are treated as financial institutions subject to BSA regulations and sanctions.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 289

Table 3 The US anti-money laundering (AML) regime is based on, prevention and enforcement,
each with its key activities and respective actions
Regulatory agencies Criminal investigative agencies
Prevention Enforcement
Activities Action(s) Activities Action(s)
Sanctions • Administrative/regulatory Confiscation or • Asset seizure
• Civil/criminal penalties Forfeiture

Regulation • External compliance audits Prosecution and • Civil/criminal

& Punishment penalties
Supervision
Reporting • Reports/info to authorities Investigation • Based on reports,
info to authorities

Customer • Account holder’s name Underlying Offenses • List of predicate

Due • Proof of identity. or Predicate Crimes crimes.
Diligence • Ongoing account monitor- • Legal basis for
(CDD) ing money laundering
criminalization.
• Only funds associ-
ated with predicate
crimes subject to
AML laws.

aspect is designed to discourage illicit actors from using lawful institutions to

launder “dirty” money and legitimate institutions from collaborating with illicit
actors by requiring transparency in transactions. The enforcement aspect acts as
a punishment mechanism against illicit actors and their accomplices [1, 11].
From the perspective of cyber launderers, these legislative actions present
potentially increased risks of fines, seizure of assets, arrest, and prosecution. To
mitigate these risks, they can often devise costly schemes to bypass regulatory
controls and avoid detection, which becomes a challenge of balancing economic
incentives. So for them, one option is to continue with “business as usual’ as the
current risks are low. A second option is to attempt to devise and engage in complex
laundering methods at a very high cost to reduce risk as much as possible. A third
option is to use a different, less risky money laundering techniques that may be
slower to carry out or much harder for them to access the laundered proceeds.
Finally, the fourth option, which meets the deterrence aspect of controls set by the
authorities, is to abstain from money laundering altogether by recognizing that the
economic benefit may not be worth the cost and risk of detection and inevitably
prosecution [11].
Unfortunately, at this time, the first option seems to be dominant choice as cyber
laundering offers scale, low operational costs, and realistically, it is low risk given
that is easy to evade the few anti-money laundering controls currently in place or
the understaffed and under-resourced authorities.
290 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

5.2 Cyber Laundering Legislation and Regulations

Most regulatory schemes and legislative policies regarding cryptocurrency and

cyber laundering, particularly at the international level, are fragmented and do not
adequately address the cryptocurrency market [17, 21]. This fragmentation ranges
from some jurisdictions altogether banning the use of cryptocurrency due to its
perceived threat to other jurisdictions not having any laws because they do not con-
sider cryptocurrency as currency and therefore not subject to anti-money laundering
regulations. Even cryptocurrency’s monetary and legal definition varies between
jurisdictions and sometimes even among agencies within the same jurisdiction [13].
These variations in defining, recognizing, and regulating cryptocurrency within a
legal context allow illicit cryptocurrency activities to thrive and impede the effective
international regulation and enforcement of cyber laundering [5, 21].
The USA has been more deliberate in regulating cryptocurrencies and enforcing
violations than many other countries, but even within the USA, policies concerning
cryptocurrency vary on an individual state level [6, 11, 45, 46]. The US Treasury
Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) bureau is one of
the few agencies within the federal government that has an active role in issuing
guidance relating to cryptocurrency and has most likely enough authority to regulate
cryptocurrency. FinCEN is charged with gathering financial intelligence, enforcing
regulations, providing guidance on compliance issues, and assisting other agencies
domestically and internationally in its anti-money laundering mandate. Based on
the bureau’s analysis of cryptocurrencies and the US Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) of
1970, in 2013, the bureau determined that the act also applies to cryptocurrencies
[6, 11, 23, 37, 45, 46]. According to FinCEN guidelines, entities operating within
the cryptocurrency market can fall into three categories: users, exchanges, and
administrators.
• Users are individuals that mine (create) or use cryptocurrency to buy real or
virtual goods or services. Because these individuals are not normally engaged
in a money transmission service, even if they created the cryptocurrency, the
federal statute regarding money service businesses (MSBs) does not apply in
most situations [11, 37, 47]. Conversely, the users may become exchangers under
BSA and subject to MSB regulations if they act as an intermediary accepting
and transmitting cryptocurrency between two parties. Additionally, the users
may become money transmitters if they sell cryptocurrency to buy fiat currency,
equivalent, or another cryptocurrency.
• Exchanges are firms that are in the business of accepting, buying, and selling
cryptocurrencies to exchange such funds for fiat currency, other funds, other cryp-
tocurrencies, and, therefore, providing money transmission services. These firms
meet the definition of a money exchanger under BSA; they are subject to MSB
regulations, including registration, reporting, and record-keeping requirements
[6, 11, 37, 48]. The vast majority of states require any firm transmitting funds
between two parties to acquire an operating license. This license is required for
consumer protection and to reduce default risk since most money transmission
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 291

businesses are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC),
as are commercial and savings banks.
• Administrators refer to individuals in the business of placing into circulation
or issuing cryptocurrency and by authority can withdraw from circulation or
redeem cryptocurrency [11, 48]. The cryptocurrencies, in this case, are generally
centralized ones [11], such as Ripple. Since administrators are transmitting
cryptocurrency, they are also included under the BSA definition of a money
exchanger or transmitter and subject to MSB regulations.
While these categories provide a systematic classification of the actors in the
cryptocurrency space, they are not comprehensive. There is often confusion when
attempting to enforce relevant guidelines as statutes are unclear to the definition of
“acting as a business,” leaving the definition open to interpretation. In the situation
of miners, for example, they can sell or trade a large portion of a Bitcoin portfolio
for a good or service and not be subject to MSB regulations, but if they sell a fraction
of bitcoins to a friend from their portfolio, they may be subject to MSB regulations
[11].
While the overarching legislative and enforcement frameworks evolve and
mature, specific nontechnical and technical controls can interfere with and disrupt
or discourage cyber laundering activities.

5.3 Nontechnical Regimes Against Cyber Laundering

There are several principles and practices that implement controls toward strength-
ening money laundering prevention efforts.

5.3.1 Know Your Customer and Customer Due Diligence

A set of fundamental concepts within any anti-money laundering regime are the
principles of Know Your Customer (KYC), and Customer Due Diligence (CDD)
[7, 10, 21, 38]. KYC and CDD controls are in place to prevent both money
laundering and terrorist financing. Their controls are mandated by law for firms
within the financial service industry, requiring firms to substantiate any person
holding or listed on an account. These controls appear at various phases of the
customer relationship, with each phase requiring a different control [10]. Once
identities have been confirmed and established, constant risk assessments and
monitoring of accounts are required. If any transaction meets the requirements
for issuance of a CTR or SAR, notification and the report are forwarded to the
appropriate authorities for possible investigation [37, 38]. The more effective an
anti-money laundering control is, the more challenging and riskier it is for illicit
actors to successfully launder their money [21].
292 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

When considering cryptocurrency exchanges, KYC/CDD can be a useful cyber

laundering detection tool, particularly within jurisdictions with strict regulations.
Additionally, the mandatory use of CTRs and SARs is a serious first step in
removing anonymity from cryptocurrency networks [21, 37].

5.3.2 Reducing Anonymity of Exchanges

Anonymity is a beneficial feature of online cryptocurrency exchanges that conceal

the identities of their users, but it comes with a cost for exchange owners, especially
as the lawful use of cryptocurrencies becomes increasingly more acceptable. Legit-
imate users may be hesitant to transfer funds or do business with an unregistered or
untraceable and therefore unaccountable exchange.
In addition, anonymity limits an exchange’s ability to increase and maintain its
client base. It may also cause civil and criminal liability issues for the exchange and
its owner if the exchange is required to be registered and transparent with its users.
Therefore, exchanges and users may insist on KYC before conducting transactions.
Some cryptocurrency exchanges have taken it upon themselves to register as
MSBs, while others have been lobbying for legislative action on regulating the
cryptocurrency market [11, 13].

5.3.3 Tracking Activities of Registered Exchanges

Even if a registered exchange frequently uses multiple public addresses or privacy

browsers for concealment and can successfully communicate these addresses to
its clients, authorities could track transaction histories to ascertain cryptocurrency
amounts and suspicious activity since the addresses are public. Although the
identities of the exchange owner or users may not be discoverable, authorities
could use technology and still seize or suspend any suspicious accounts within
the exchange or close the exchange entirely [37]. Furthermore, exchange owners
and users eventually use more traditional routes to launder their funds, thereby
converting cryptocurrency for fiat currency at a traditional exchange or with another
entity not connected to a computer network. If this cash-out strategy occurs,
identifying information will have to be provided to the financial intermediary, and
any suspicious activity or money laundering red flags during such a transaction will
have to be documented and reported.
While using an unregistered exchange, owner or user mistakes or inexperience
during the cashing out process may lead to data leakage and providing authorities
with trace evidence [13, 21]. Such mistakes can be as simple as using the same
address or password for multiple purposes or accounts, not using privacy-preserving
tools, providing a valid email address, or other security lapses. Some of these
mistakes can happen while using a mixer/tumbler service provider or a TOR-
enabled Dark Web site, as was the situation with the Silk Road case [37].
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 293

Thus, instead of increasing regulations or targeting cryptocurrency senders,

receivers, processors (miners), or underground exchanges, the more effective
regulatory approach regarding cyber laundering may be the targeting of:
1. Legitimate exchanges that swap cryptocurrencies for fiat currency [11, 37]
2. The physical locations of legitimate exchanges where human contact is most
likely to occur
3. Classifying such businesses as money transmitters subject to the appropriate
regulations required of money transmitters, such as filing CTRs and SARs [26,
37]
All these approaches have merit as legal exchanges are easier to regulate.
Focusing regulatory efforts on them may also serve as a deterrent for money
launderers to use shadow exchanges as the cost and risk could be significantly
higher than the benefit. In 2015, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which
is an international body focused on anti-money laundering, provided guidance to
that effect and stated that countries should closely monitor exchanges that “send,
receive, and store” cryptocurrency since such exchanges can be prime targets for
cyber laundering. The FATF also stated that exchanges on their own should perform
KYC and CDD to avoid anti-money laundering conflicts. The FATF further advised
that exchanges found in violation of anti-money laundering regulations should be
met with enhanced criminal, civil, and/or administrative punishments and ultimately
prohibition of exchange activity [46].
However, none of these approaches constitute a robust regulatory solution against
cyber laundering. Launderers may just be forced to avoid using cryptocurrency early
in the laundering process or use more traditional exchange approaches to obtain fiat
currency for cryptocurrency.

5.3.4 Regulating Cryptocurrencies

Another nontechnical solution would be to regulate cryptocurrencies. The regulation

could range from a complete ban on cryptocurrency [26, 48, 49] to the legal
recognition of cryptocurrency. Approximately one hundred and eleven countries
take the latter approach, while some countries take the former. Other countries take
a restrictive approach and prohibit the trading or use for cryptocurrency payment,
while China, for example, completely bans cryptocurrency exchanges. Numerous
other countries have been “undecided” because cryptocurrency is neither illegal nor
legal, meaning that although owning cryptocurrency is legal per se, there are no legal
protections or rules concerning its status or use. In general, countries seem to fall
under two categories, either currently developing legal cryptocurrency frameworks
or waiting to see its evolution.
At the same time, not all countries that legally recognize cryptocurrency
have strict anti-money laundering laws against using cryptocurrencies in money
laundering. The USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and the member nations of the
European Union (EU) have anti-money laundering laws applied to cryptocurrency.
294 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

The EU prohibits member countries from creating and introducing their own
cryptocurrency, while cryptocurrency exchanges are urged to remain legal by
complying with regulations [48]. Within the USA, the federal government could
invoke the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) of the Constitution to
regulate the cryptocurrency market [11] explicitly.
The specific clause gives the US Congress the enumerated power of regulating
commerce with foreign nations, among states, and with Indian tribes. Since
cryptocurrency is frequently used to buy and sell goods and services and to exchange
fiat currency through interstate trade, it may be possible for Congress to legislate the
use of cryptocurrency directly. Some countries, such as Canada, China, Russia, Sin-
gapore, South Korea, and the UK and their central banks are considering developing
and implementing their government-backed state cryptocurrencies to compete or
replace existing cryptocurrencies by decree. Another reason for developing a state-
sponsored cryptocurrency is the eventual abolition of cash so that transactions are
better monitored for improved security and the elimination of tax evasion [46].

5.4 Technical Regimes Against Cyber Laundering

The main advantage for cyber launderers of using cryptocurrency is anonymity

and decentralization. These two inherent characteristics of cryptocurrency make it
difficult for authorities to trace and regulate its use and identify launderers. Some
technical controls can be implemented to serve as deterrents for money launderers,
but realistically, they are both technically and practically challenging to implement
at scale.

5.4.1 Tracking IP Addresses

Even when an illicit actor uses a privacy-preserving application, such as the Tor
browser, authorities may still be able to partially track IP addresses. Tolls exist, like
the Exonera TOR tool that retains a database of past and current TOR network-
linked IP addresses. It allows discovering if a TOR relay had been used by a
particular IP address on a specific date. Even though the originating IP address
will still not be discoverable, authorities can see if a suspect IP address under
investigation matches any IP address listed on the tool’s exit relay list.
Generally, tracking IP addresses may be helpful for cases that illicit actors may be
inexperienced using privacy preservation tools and make mistakes during their use.
An example would be using applications or generating not concealed or unreported
network traffic due to the improper installation of browser plugins, the use of clear
text over HTTP, allowing cookies, or running certain types of applications. These
are possible technical mishaps that could be subject to computer forensic methods
to discover an individual’s identity.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 295

5.4.2 Tracking the Blockchain

Because various cryptocurrencies utilize blockchain technology as a public ledger

of transactions, public keys are used to represent users pseudonymously [10, 21].
Although public keys are changed frequently from transaction to transaction,
blockchain’s public nature allows for a more effective and more straightforward
analysis process and recognition of patterns. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to
manipulate the data contained within a blockchain without incurring high costs due
to its distributed nature. Therefore, there is a high degree of confidence that the data
stored within a blockchain have been unchanged [22].
Since blockchain is a chain of transaction ownership where each transaction
is dependent on the prior transaction, examination of the blockchain with a tool
such as blockchain.info is possible and permits the verification that specific public
keys sanctioned certain transactions or IP addresses [28]. Blockchain transactions
are traceable, immutable, and irreversible [35, 50], allowing authorities to use
the blockchain and its transaction histories for investigative purposes, rove illicit
activity, or infer social ties between users [5]. To do so, blockchain transaction
examination using extensive data mining and qualitative and quantitative analysis is
necessary [10, 46]. An immutable audit trail can be established by carefully exam-
ining a blockchain’s past and present transaction data, and essential information and
significant patterns may be deduced, leading to user IP addresses or transactions
being deanonymized [22, 46, 50].
Additionally, behavior analysis and heuristics can be performed on public keys
frequently during payment [20, 21, 28]. By associating specific public keys to
transactions, public key/transaction pairs can be developed across datasets and
the network allowing the cluster mapping of behavior patterns and leading to the
possible discovery of specific network users. These patterns can formulate a picture
about a user’s shopping and spending habits and frequency of transactions and go as
far as identifying geographical locations. These patterns may potentially connect to
third-party transactions, which may be associated with PII that authorities can use.
An interesting example of performing a trace that leads to an IP address was
conducted using Bitcoin’s [51] P2P network. Researchers could map public keys
to IP addresses and eventually identify a Bitcoins user’s IP address by analyzing
Bitcoin’s handshake protocol by exploiting the TPC/IP network-level protocol.
Since each node within the Bitcoin system executes network routing to propagate
addresses and must discover at least one other peer node established on the network
to operate and distribute information, the nodes through port 8333 perform the
handshake protocol over TCP. The handshake is initiated by the nodes exchanging
messages and transmitting their presence via a simple message. This message
contains the software version and block count. If a peer node can connect another
node to the network, the peer node transmits a verack message back to the
connecting node. Further research conducted by the researchers showed that the
use of a Tor proxy prohibited their mapping of public keys and IP addresses and
that use of a firewall or VPN to shield an IP address allowed them only to discover
the Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the originating transaction [28].
296 M. W. Calafos and G. Dimitoglou

6 Conclusion and Future Work

Traditional money launderers that engage in the cleansing of physical currency

face a high degree of exposure risk and multiple possible points of failure. To
avoid detection, they engage numerous associates as participants to repeatedly
distribute, reroute, invest, and deposit illicit physical funds across multiple financial
intermediaries or “invest” them in different assets and financial instruments. Even
one failure during any of the multitude of these transactions may lead to detection
by regulatory or law enforcement authorities and tracing of both the illicit funds and
the original criminal activity that made them available.
The ease by which the Internet allows for the quick and easy transmission of data
across jurisdictions, combined with the anonymity provided by cryptocurrency and
blockchain technologies, has enabled traditional money laundering to transition into
cyberspace. These risk and failure points are also present during cyber laundering,
but significantly fewer. With cyber laundering, exposure risk and multiple points
of failure are significantly reduced since most transactions can be completed
anonymously online using commonly available privacy applications. Furthermore,
money launderers in cyberspace do not have to rely on multiple associates that could
make mistakes or get apprehended during the commission of their money cleansing
tasks. Instead, cyber launderers can directly use an unregistered cryptocurrency
exchange, transform fiat currency into cryptocurrency, and then use mixing/tumbler
services to “clean” the cryptocurrency and further anonymize the transaction.
As law-abiding entities and organizations recognize and accept cryptocurrency
for goods and services, the use of cryptocurrency by illicit actors will likely increase.
Aside from those that fall victim to fraud, such an increase will pose additional
security challenges to those responsible for anti-money laundering enforcement
and regulation. Since cryptocurrency is a relatively new phenomenon within the
money laundering scheme, most law enforcement, judicial, legislative, and private
entities are inadequately prepared and equipped to handle cyber laundering cases.
Furthermore, the legal definition and interpretation of cyber laundering and what
it entails vary across jurisdictions resulting in confusion and ineffectiveness during
cross-border cooperation and inconsistency in enforcement and regulatory efforts.
These legal and financial systems shortcomings enable criminal organizations and
cyber launderers to continue their money laundering practices.
It is perhaps typical that the legal and regulatory frameworks relating to
cryptocurrency and blockchain are lacking globally. When the first cryptocurrencies
entered the financial market, government entities worldwide ignored or refused to
consider classifying cryptocurrency as a form of money or currency for legislative
and legal purposes. The challenge and resulting confusion were due to the failure
of these entities to recognize that instruments such as “digital coins” could have
any value in the traditional sense of a currency. Most of these entities viewed
the creation and issuance of legal tender as the exclusive right of governments
[26, 45]. Before cryptocurrencies, the right of governments to control and issue legal
tender, thereby protecting trade, was centuries old and practically unquestionable.
Cyber Laundering: Money Laundering from Fiat Money to Cryptocurrency 297

Case in point, the right of the British Crown to issue legal tender was affirmed
by the English courts in 1605 and was so vital that it was also expressly given
to the US government during the ratification of the US Constitution [40, 45].
Having a decentralized, autonomous, and unregulated currency would have been
unfathomable. This mindset by governments worldwide has delayed long enough to
engage, understand, and deliberately address cryptocurrency rather than letting the
technology spread and grow uncontrollably. As of 2021, there are approximately
4737 cryptocurrencies within the cryptocurrency market, with a total global cryp-
tocurrency market capitalization for the total circulating supply of cryptocurrencies
at approximately $2.07 trillion [25].
This work examined the evolution and transition of traditional money laundering
into cyberspace to become cyber laundering. We identified the technology and the
regulatory challenges of detecting and enforcing the law under these new money
laundering conditions. There is much work to be done on every front to fight cyber
laundering, but demonizing anyone besides those that engage in cyber laundering
would be a mistake.
It would also be a mistake to demonize these new algorithms and technologies
that support the mining, storage, and exchange of cryptocurrencies. As with any
evolving technology, cryptocurrency and blockchain are beneficial and innovative
technologies for lawful and nefarious purposes. They can revolutionize how busi-
ness is conducted and positively impact and transform national and international
economies if regulated and appropriately used. Governments and enforcement agen-
cies will ultimately decide upon a regulatory approach to the use of cryptocurrency.
Hopefully, their legislative approach will be balanced, precise, and targeted but not
overly burdensome to lawful consumers of such a product. It also should be an
international collaborative effort to implement regulatory uniformity among varying
jurisdictions. Furthermore, it should be flexible enough to foster future technological
innovation and growth of payment systems and the global market.

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 Part V
Blockchains in Education, Governance,
Supply Chain, and Security
A Blockchain-Based Fair
and Transparent Homework Grading
System for Online Education

Cheng Ting Tsai and Ja Ling Wu

1 Introduction

Blockchain is a chronologically ordered data structure with decentralization, trust-

worthiness, and group sharing as its most attractive features. The popularity
of Bitcoin [1] proved that blockchain techniques contribute to the stability and
liveliness of a massively distributed system, where data and executive activities are
decentralized, supervised, and maintained by all chain members, which, in turn,
makes the interaction between each other fair, secure, and transparent. The above
facts explain why blockchain has been successfully applied to various fields, such as
medicine, profit sharing, finance, etc., where all involved members should be treated
equally, or the legitimacy of information transfer must be considered seriously.
Among those applications, education is the one which impacts everyone for life
and is one of the crucial keys for leading to today’s rapid technology development.
Although the spread of the epidemic has put the discussion and debate about virtual
education in the spotlight, this topic is not new; teaching and learning have been in
various virtual formats for years. COVID-19 pandemic turbocharged the move from
physical education and learning to online forms; instead of creating a new trend, it
has merely accelerated something already underway.

C. T. Tsai
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei City, Taiwan
J. L. Wu ()
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University,
Taipei City, Taiwan
Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, Taipei City,
Taiwan
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 303
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_13
304 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

For example, massive open online courses (MOOCs) [2] have been brought
to public notice recently. Originated from the USA, MOOCs are developed by
leading content providers like Coursera, Udacity, and edX [3]. Since 2012, top
American universities have been setting up online learning platforms and offering
free online courses. Targeting higher education, MOOCs are featured by quality
teaching programs and independent management systems. National Taiwan Uni-
versity (NTU) is especially delighted to join other world-class universities on
Coursera and offer quality university courses to the Chinese-speaking population
[4]. Despite the worldwide popularity, the current online education systems have
many shortcomings in the face of the untrustworthy Internet. Most often given
criticisms of MOOCs include [5]:
1. The learning process and results of MOOCs are short of public recognition and
official certification.
2. The students’ privacy is at risk, for the courses and data security solely depend
on the centralized online education platform.
3. The educators’ and students’ intellectual properties are hard to be maintained
effectively due to the openness of the Internet and the vulnerability of data.
4. There is no mature cross-platform to share the teaching resources fully.
5. To make the learning process and results trustable, it is necessary to develop
a distributed and trustable data storage method to record the students’ learning
process, disclose all learning data to the public, and ensure the security and non-
vulnerability of data.
Blockchain seems almost tailor-made to help secure and protect this new
education model with a combination of information security and the ability to share
this data among an open network of counterparties and do so in a completely online
manner [6].
Nowadays, many problems exist in online educational platforms since the
correlation and interaction between students and teachers are not reciprocally equal;
additionally, only a few administrative members possess the right to supervise the
on-platform activities. This often results in misunderstanding, unnecessary conflicts,
and, the worst, various forms of misbehavior among students and teachers, such
as post-grade cheating and discriminative grading, for their benefit. Discriminative
grading means a teacher is retreating course-related announcements which are cur-
rently guiding their decision and grading different students with different standards.
Post-grade cheating says a student changes their answer after the assignment’s
correct solution has been released to ask for more scores. Clearly, if the on-platform
activities are not trackable, the system may not be confident enough in ensuring
fair and trustworthy teacher–student interactions. Another common challenge in
homework grading is grading an open-ended question, which allows different kinds
of opinions as to the answers, such as essay questions or calculation problems.
Students usually argue that the teacher did not understand what they were trying
to express, which is reasonable since none can consider or accept all possible views
to a question. Thus, grading this kind of answer by just one person is not convincing,
and controversies often occur, especially when the score is very crucial, for example,
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 305

the score of essay exam in English proficiency test. Usually, fairness can be achieved
only when it is a large-scale examination and multiple judges are recruited to do the
grading. Even so, judges are more or less affected by others’ opinions, especially
when they are familiar with each other (which is, in fact, an often case).
In facing this issue, we proposed a blockchain-based homework grading system
to establish a fair and transparent teacher–student interaction platform. On-chain
members are anonymous, and their interactive activities are immutably trackable.
Our work was built based on the Ethereum architecture, with the aid of multiple
Cryptographic algorithms, to prove its feasibility and applicability. When all on-
chain members are treated equally, we believe the proposed approach will somewhat
release the following downsides in gradings, such as discriminative grading by
teachers, post-grade cheating between students and teachers (or teaching assistances
[TAs]), and the divergence grading for open-ended questions. A mechanism to allow
teachers to uncover the identities of anonymous students, which will be activated
only at the end of the course, is also introduced to correctly give the final scores
to the corresponding students. Moreover, three autonomous smart contracts are
designed to guarantee fairness and efficiency in homework correction work, which
helps reduce teachers’ loads essentially. Finally, this work also focused on the
system implementation issues; therefore, some applications constructed based on
our system will be presented, and the corresponding operational experiments are
also provided.
In short, by combining blockchain, smart contract, and some cryptographic algo-
rithms, this work tries to build a trustworthy teacher–student interaction platform.
The platform is suitable for many kinds of correction works, such as homework
assignments and exam papers. Our goal is to encourage students to learn the right
attitudes and correct approaches during their study phase by providing an equal
opportunity guarantee in their score grading process.

2 Related Work

2.1 Blockchain

Blockchain can be viewed as a combination of multiple technologies, such as

network security, information transmission, distributed database, cryptography, etc.
As a distributed system, nodes on a blockchain network reach a consensus by a
designed protocol. Proof of work (PoW) [7] is the most well-known one among
many different consensus protocols. A miner verifies every transaction before being
put into a block; every node that receives the block will prove the existence
and legality of the associated transactions again. Blockchain uses a specific data
structure, aka Link List or Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) [8], to store and to chain
verified transactions. This implies every transaction is immutably trackable in a
blockchain. Each block contains a block header that records the block’s information,
306 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

such as timestamp, the difficulty of PoW, etc. Additionally, a previous-block-header

hash, which is the hash of the previous block header, is also included. Therefore,
changing any information within a block will result in a different previous-block-
header hash from the one recorded in the next block. Suppose one wants to alter a
piece of on-chain details, such as the contents of transactions in a block. In that case,
they have to change all connected blocks behind the target block, which is a highly
time-consuming task and is almost impossible to achieve under a well-designed
consensus algorithm. Every active account can watch and supervise the activities of
every other account and will have a backup of its data in the blockchain. A part of
on-chain nodes that failed or lost their data will not cause the system to malfunction;
instead, failed nodes can repair their losses through data synchronizing mechanism
with the other nodes.
Activities in a blockchain are trackable, but it doesn’t mean that there is no
privacy for users. A user joined in a blockchain is represented as an on-chain
account. Others can see the account’s activity and verify its transactions but
will never know who actually owns the account. Finally, a set of cryptographic
algorithms, an indispensable part of a blockchain, is used to realize most blockchain
properties, such as verifying the legality of transactions, generating valid pub-
lic and private keys, and encrypting sensitive information. Commonly adopted
cryptographic algorithms for supporting these purposes include SHA256 secure
hash, Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) [9–11], and keccak256.
Cryptographic mechanisms can also help on-chain nodes prove the existence of
transactions efficiently without requiring storing the raw data of all the related
transactions. This makes devices with limited storage workable as a lightweight
node of a blockchain, for example, the Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) node
in Bitcoin.

2.2 Blockchain in Educations

Blockchain can be used to carry and transfer any valuable assets, such as cur-
rency, copyright, knowledge, and records. There is much helpful information in
education, including research data, experimental documents, scores, credits, and
certificates of degrees that are extremely important for both students and educators,
where management, security, and fairness are necessary and of importance. Thus,
blockchain is a suitable vehicle to bring benefits to educations [12–15] and makes
management of all the students’ and educators’ information reasonably, especially
for online education platforms. As pre-described, in the well-known and widely
adopted MOOC platform, students and educators have come from different places
of the world to achieve their own goals in education. Clearly, establishing trust
between each member in such an assortment and diverse education environment
becomes very challenging.
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 307

In recent years, there have been researching works focused on using blockchain
to manage, share, and verify degrees [16, 17], research results, and data [18].
However, most of the works focused on managing a higher layer of information
in education, for example, recording and sharing students’ certificates and degrees
between colleges. Some of them only explained concepts or discussed potentials for
the future. In contrast, our work realized a design that aims to manage some lower-
layer information of education, that is, teacher–student interactions, homework
assignments, and grading in courses to ensure that a student gets his credits and
completes his degrees transparently and fairly.
Blockchain provides students an easy way to store and manage their credits
and degrees while allowing educators, universities, and institutions to manage
student-related affairs, share their information with other universities, and track their
learning histories and outcomes. It can also prevent improper activities, such as
cheating or forgeries. With the aid of blockchain, every move can be verified and
supervised by all involved members. With blockchain, a student can apply for the
entrances to colleges without printing a mass of diplomas or certificates of programs
learned; instead, colleges can find the student’s information, including records and
degrees, or even comments to this applicant from responsible teachers, directly. This
will save resources and time and establish fairness, transparency, and security of
information flow.

2.3 The Ethereum

Ethereum [19, 20] is one of the blockchain architectures introduced between

2013 and 2014, devoting to establish a global and most completed blockchain
system. Ethereum is very popular and considered to be a considerable breakthrough
in blockchain development. One of the crucial contributions of Ethereum is its
involvement of smart contract, a computerized transaction protocol executing the
terms of a contract, which is written by a specific programming language, such
as Solidity [21]. Smart contracts can be independently and autonomously executed
by nodes on an Ethereum network using virtual machines, the Ethereum virtual
machines (EVMs) [19]. The Turing completeness of smart contract allows Ethereum
blockchain to be applied to many complex tasks, such as funding, supply chaining,
bidding, and even signing another contract. This makes blockchain no longer be
a purely distributed system that can only send transactions, instead a completed
decentralized architecture for transferring virtual currencies. Ethereum is also open
sourced so that everyone can join and research on it or build their own designed
private Ethereum-based chains. Therefore, if one wants to develop a blockchain
system to fulfill some complex use cases in which smart contract may be necessary,
Ethereum is one of the best platforms for development. In light of this fact, our work
is also realized based on the Ethereum architecture.
308 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

3 Preliminary and Basic Definitions

3.1 Computational Power

In the proposed work, the computational power is assumed to be uniformly

distributed to all involved members. Each member joins the consensus mechanism
and has an equal chance and responsibility to create a new block and maintain
the liveness of the system. Some members may have better computational power
than others, and we assumed they would not gather enough computational power to
conspire against or even sabotage the system.

3.2 Regulations and Accounts

Our design focuses on the most fundamental aspect of education: the teacher–
student interactions in a course to establish a fair, open, and secure assign-
ment/grading system. Therefore, this work is expected to operate correctly under
the supervision of an educational institution or online platform, where regulations
are made to restrict both students and teachers from sabotaging the system. This may
seem to centralize the system; however, the system’s operations are designed not to
interfere with the administrator. This means the system is decentralized execution
by the students and teachers, and of course, they have to follow the regulations
supervised by the administrator. On the other hand, the administrator has to verify
the validity of statuses of students and teachers after they signed in the system and
intervenes between students and teachers only when some disputes against the preset
rules occur.
In each quarter or semester, every qualified member, such as teacher, student,
and teaching assistance, will respectively receive an address, which points to the
corresponding account used in the assignment/grading system, from the adminis-
trator. After registration, the administrator gives teachers their student lists. The
list contains the student accounts associated with the enrolled members of the
corresponding classes (to prevent non-registered students from joining the courses
without permission) and the students’ IDs to identify the students who did take
the courses at the end of the quarter/semester (c.f. Sect. 4.4 for details). Notice
that the correspondence between accounts and students’ ID has remained in secret
(c.f. Fig. 1). That is, the teacher will never know which student owns the specific
account until the course is finished. The administrator uses the accounts to track
and supervise members’ behaviors to enhance the stability and liveliness of the
system. Offenders are suspended or punished according to the regulations or even
laws depending on the severity of disobedience.
Supervisions and regulations are a must to make the system highly reliable and
functional. However, the system will still operate in a decentralized manner due
to the nature of blockchain. Once the system starts, it will be maintained and
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 309

Fig. 1 Basic architecture and definition of the proposed system

verified by every on-chain member. It will be almost impossible to interfere with

its operation or temper the data stored on it, even by the administrator.

4 The Proposed System

4.1 Basic Member Interaction Models

In every scenario of education, there is an interaction between students and

teacher(s). Our simplest model aims at the interaction between students and
teacher(s) through a blockchain architecture. The following three functional mod-
ules must be defined: homework assignment and submission, send grading results
to students, and class information announcement. A teacher can assign homework
or deliver announcement information to students by simply sending transactions
with messages. On the other hand, by following the same principle, students can
submit their homework; however, it does not make sense to put all messages (e.g.,
homework answers) directly on a transaction since blockchain is a transparent
system. This is because every on-chain member can see the content of any validated
transaction. In short, submitting homework in its plaintext form equals letting
students share their answers with others. Therefore, messages that are not suitable
to be publicized must be encrypted before sending them out. There are various ways
to encrypt messages for securing transmitted data. In this work, the Rivest–Shamir–
Adleman (RSA) algorithm [10, 22], one of the widely used encryption methods that
is pretty easy to implement while very hard to be cracked, is applied. Thus, in our
model (c.f. Fig. 2), the teacher needs to generate a key pair and send the public key
to the students and the assigned homework. Students then encrypt their submission
messages by RSA with the public key and send the ciphertexts of their respondent
messages to the teacher. The messages include answers to the homework and the
identity information of the student (c.f. Sect. 4.4) so that every student will generate
a very different ciphertext even if their answers are the same and, thus, won’t make
plagiarism without being discovered. Finally, the teacher can restore the students’
homework answers by decrypting the ciphertexts with the private key.
310 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

Fig. 2 The interactions between teachers and students

Fig. 3 The interactions among teachers, TAs, and students

By this approach, our system not only keeps the message secret but also prevents
post-grade cheating. The process of this model is similar to that of the traditional
online course platform; however, all students and teachers put their trust in this
model, and every system player has fair rights and legal duties to maintain and
interact with the model. All system activities are easy to be tracked and supervised;
therefore, deleting or modifying any content of the announcement, assignment, and
hand-in message in the working path is nearly impossible. In summary, this model
uses blockchain to build a secure and fair online course platform, by which all
members are encouraged to be responsible to themselves and to learn and to teach
with the right attitudes.

4.2 The Role of Teaching Assistant

In every quarter/semester, teaching assistants (TAs) are often recruited to help

distribute tasks and run a large-scale course. A TA’s most often tasks are correcting
term-in homework and examination papers. Thus, our model is extended to consider
the interactions among students, TAs, and teachers. As shown in Fig. 3, the bottom
half of the new model is similar to that of Fig. 2, where the only difference is that
TAs now do the submissions’ correcting task. In this case, a teacher still needs to
assign homework to students, announce the responsible TA for each student, and
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 311

give proof that the teacher genuinely released the assignment. On receiving the
proven assignment or announcement, TAs and students interact with each other
accordingly.

4.3 Collective Grading

In education, answers to the questions are not permanently fixed; in contrast,

solutions are often opened to various opinions, such as essay questions. However,
judging those kinds of answers by only one person is unfair because a person can’t
have all possible perspectives to a question. Even a teacher thinks the answers are
very wrong; it does not mean that they are invaluable opinions. This is why there
are often disagreements and conflicts with the grading of essay questions. Thus, to
achieve better fairness in grading, scores should be given through various judges.
This kind of multiple-person grading is called collective grading in this work.
Collective grading is done by extending the two models mentioned above.
Students, the responsible teacher, and multiple judges (qualified professionals in
the related fields) can join the correction process. The assignment (homework or
exam paper) still needs to be given by the responsible teacher to prove its legality;
however, students have to submit the ciphertexts of their answers to all judges, of
course, including the responsible teacher. After the deadline, the responsible teacher
shares the plaintexts of assignments, students’ answers, and sometimes the teacher’s
remarks (optional) to other judges. In contrast, judges use the ciphertexts and the
public key received from the responsible teacher to verify the plaintexts to ensure
the plaintexts have not been tempered. Finally, judges will send their scores to the
responsible teacher and corresponding students to calculate the final scores based on
the preset weighting. The responsible teacher sends two scores to each student, one
is the teacher’s own giving score as a judgment, and the other is the final (collected
and weighted) score sent to be recorded and verified. Once again, since messages
are trackable in blockchain, forging scores or making teacher and student receive
different scores becomes very difficult.
The timing for judges to receive the assignment containing homework or exam
paper information is worthy of further discussion. The consideration is that the
sooner the judges see the questions, the higher their chance to discuss with others
and be affected when making judgments to students’ answers. To prevent this
shortage, judges should receive the contents of the assignment only when they
are told to start the grading. However, this means that the responsible teacher
cannot directly upload the plaintexts of assignments to students while announcing
homework or exam papers; instead, the ciphertext of each assignment should be sent
due to the transparency of the blockchain. As pre-described, uploading plaintext
to blockchain equals sharing messages to all on-chain members, and an RSA key
pair is required to avoid such a scenario. However, asking all students to generate
their key pair with the responsible teacher is very inefficient because the teacher
will do the encryption work the same number of times as the number of enrolled
312 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

Fig. 4 Interactions among the responsible teacher, invited judges, and students in collective
grading

students. Moreover, it is easier to make mistakes in facing such a complicated task.

Therefore, our system administrator helps generate an RSA key pair beforehand
for each student, sends the public key to the responsible teacher, and starts the
judgment while giving the private key to the corresponding student. In this way,
the responsible teacher can assign homework and exam papers with ciphertexts, and
only the related student can decrypt them. Finally, the responsible teacher sends the
plaintext of the assignment together with the students’ answers to the invited judges
when the grading work starts. Therefore, the judges can use the public key to verify
and ensure the received plaintexts have not been tempered.
By this approach, homework or exam papers’ grading outcomes with open
answers will be more convincing. Additionally, the invited judges in this model
(c.f. Fig. 4) can be anonymous so that each judge can grade the answers without
being affected by others, which, therefore, can ensure the quality and fairness of
their grading results more. Clearly, for extremely sensitive scores, especially those
scores of crucial exams directly related to the certificates and the qualifications
of the entrance, the method mentioned above is believed to be a reliable way for
establishing credibility in grading.
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 313

4.4 Authentication

In a blockchain, every member’s activity is anonymous by using an account to

hide the user’s true identity. In our words, this property allows students to take
courses without giving up their privacy. It also ensures teachers equally treating their
students by masking sensitive information such as students’ IDs of each account.
However, it brings problems when a teacher wants to give final grades to students
because there is no idea which student owns the account. To deal with this challenge,
Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm [23] and Chaotic Cryptographic algorithms [24,
25]-based authentication schemes are introduced in this subsection.
At the beginning of the course, by using Chaotic Cryptography, each student
generates their secret codes by encrypting their student ID with the chosen password
and segments their secret codes into isolated pieces using Shamir’s Secret Sharing
algorithm (cf. Fig. 5). Students then send each of their private pieces together with
their hand-in homework to the teacher to eventually find their secret codes out (cf.
Fig. 6). The t-out-of-N, (N, t)-, Threshold Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm is
adopted, which initially segments the secret into N pieces. The secret can later be
recovered exactly if at least t out of the N pieces are retrieved.
In our system, the parameter N is set to the total number of homework
assignments in a course, and t is the least number of homework assignments that
a student has to submit for getting the grade, which the teacher preset. Because it
is nearly impossible for every student to submit every homework on time for some
unpredicted reasons such as missing the deadline or not completing the assignment,
the teacher should still recover the secret codes with only a part of hidden pieces.
Additionally, stipulating the least number of must hand-in homework assignments
may encourage students to learn and work harder is also a common practice. If a
student fails to fulfill the minimum requirement, the teacher won’t recover the secret
codes for identifying them and, thus, no final score will be given to the student. In

Fig. 5 Student generates secret codes and segments the codes into some secret pieces
314 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

Fig. 6 Teacher recovers a student’s secret codes by retrieving secret pieces sent together with the
hand-in homework

contrast, if a student can prove their efforts put into the course, the final score should
still be given even some of the submissions are missing or incomplete.
The integration with the Secret Sharing algorithm makes our system closer to the
needs of real application scenarios; however, the adopted (N, t)-Threshold scheme
also implies that the teacher can obtain the students’ information far before the
course is completed. That is why Chaotic Cryptography was applied earlier to
play a crucial role in protecting students’ privacy. A teacher can never find out the
student ID within the secret codes without knowing the password set by the student.
A student’s identity will remain secret before the student sends out the final key
information, that is, the password, to the teacher, at the end of the course (cf. Fig.
7). Additionally, since no student ID will be shared on the blockchain, a student’s
identity behind a given account is safe and remains unknown to the other members.
By combining the above schemes, a teacher can identify the students enrolled in
their course and set some rules (such as the values of N and t) for the course while
privately setting passwords protects the students’ privacy.

5 Smart Contract

As pre-described smart contract is a crucial feature of blockchain, using a designed

protocol to decentralized and autonomously run-on networked nodes for achieving
various complex tasks. Once deployed, a smart contract acts as a fair and transparent
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 315

Fig. 7 Teacher identifies the first student with the password (R_1) and the associated secret codes

arbiter to deal with every request from its users. In educations, of course, there
are many complex situations that smart contracts can be applied to make things
easier. For example, it helps collect group lists or acts as a billboard to announce
information. It is worth mentioning that a well-designed smart contract can also
replace TAs for completing tasks that have clear regulations to follow, such as
correcting homework or grading. Smart contracts guarantee tasks can be done truly
impartially as comparing with TAs that may have specific personal opinions to
certain students, more or less. Considering that scores are often the most critical
basis of all credits, degrees, and certifications, three ways to grade homework or
exams by smart contract are proposed in this section to ensure the grading is fair
and transparent to every student. The first approach is to make students’ grades
by mutually exchanging the students’ submissions. The second one is to grade the
submissions by a smart contract automatically. Finally, the third is to grade students
collectively, that is, using the smart contract version of Sect. 4.3.
Before getting into the details, an important mechanism must be introduced
first. As mentioned in Sect. 4.1, sending answers in plaintext form equals sharing
solutions to everyone in the blockchain before the deadline is reached, which is
certainly not allowed. However, using a smart contract to decrypt a ciphertext is very
difficult and costly due to the complexity of the involved deciphering algorithms.
What’s worse, uploading a private key to the blockchain has to pay the cost for
storing large random numbers and reveals the private key to all on-chain members.
Operationally, it is not easy to avoid making mistakes when embedding such a
massive message into a transaction. Therefore, a better way to protect information
security is to use the smart contract to directly verify the ciphertext with the aid
of various commitment schemes instead of decrypting it back to plaintext and then
doing the correction and grading tasks. When an assignment is announced, students
need to upload their answers in ciphertext form before the deadline. The secure
hash algorithm used to obtain the ciphertext should also be supported by the smart
316 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

Fig. 8 Schematic diagram of smart contract-based grading by using mutual exchanging mecha-
nism

contract to optimize the efficiency truly. The keccak256 hash algorithm, which is a
callable function to Solidity language, is adopted in our work.
The same as in Sect. 4.1, the plaintext mentioned above should contain an extra
message, denoted as R in Fig. 8. We use it to prove the student’s identity at the end of
the course and prevent the occurrences of post-grade cheating or homework-copying
flaws by ensuring every student will get a unique hash value even if their answers
are the same. After the deadline is reached, students upload their solutions together
with message R, in plaintext, to the smart contract. The smart contract can prove
the integrity of answers by checking if the plaintext’s hash matches the ciphertext
uploaded beforehand. Once the above answer is confirmed, then the plaintext of the
solution can be directly graded manually by students or automatically by the smart
contract.

5.1 Contract for Grading by Mutual Exchanging

A simple way to make the grading of each student’s submission fair and efficient
is to let students correct and grade the answers for each other, which is also a
traditional way to correct homework or exam papers in junior and senior high
schools. In the blockchain, no one can know the owner of each address. That is,
a student does not know whose homework they are correcting for, and therefore,
this will reduce the intention for students to cheat in grading. In addition, the smart
contract is designed to make the exchanging order of students randomly. So, even
if a student shares their address with friends, there is no guarantee that they will be
assigned to do homework correction for each other, especially when many students
are enrolled in the course.
The proposed smart contract requires four essential functions to work: (1) submit
ciphertext, (2) start the correction, (3) submit plaintext, and (4) fetch the homework
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 317

Table 1 Statuses of all functions when function (2) is called

Functions (1) (2) (3) (4)
After (2) is called Disabled Disabled Enabled Enabled

that the student needs to correct. As shown in Table 1, initially, only function (1)
is activated for students to submit their ciphertext (with commitment). Functions
(3) and (4) remain disabled until the teacher calls function (2) when the deadline
of the assignment is reached, and the teacher uploads the solutions for grading.
At this time, function (1) is also disabled to prevent students from submitting new
commitments.

5.2 Contract for Autonomous Correction and Grading

Another way to make grading fair to every student is to let the smart contract correct
the submissions by itself. This smart contract also has four essential functions, and
the first three of them are the same as that of V-A. The fourth one is now changed
to function (4) fetch grading results. On calling function (2), the teacher receives
the answers and changes the other functions’ statuses, as shown in Table 1. The
smart contract then corrects and grades a student’s answer once the student calls
function (3) and uploads the plaintext, which is matched with the verified ciphertext,
uploaded by function (1). Finally, function (4) is designed to allow all enrolled
students to see their grading results.
Comparing with Sect. 5.1, this approach simplifies students’ workloads. It
guarantees fairness to all students since the smart contract autonomously corrects
every submission by comparing them to the solutions given by the teacher. However,
to make this method workable, both the solutions of assignments and their forms
in the plaintext domain must be fixed to ensure that the smart contract can match
or extract correct solutions from the plaintexts. For this reason, the teacher has to
upload their fixed solutions rather than rough guidelines to the assignments. Thus,
grading a multiple-opinion essay question is hard to achieve in this case. In other
words, this approach requires both students and teachers to be more devoted to
do the assignment and upload the solutions, but it does help complete the most
exhausting job for everyone and brings true fairness to the grading system.

5.3 Contract for Supporting Collective Correction

Our next goal is to make the grading of open-ended questions more convincing by
letting the answer of each student be judged on the basis of different opinions. In
contrast, it is a general belief that a ridiculous answer to some judge may be a quite
318 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

Table 2 Statuses of all functions when function (2) is called (en = enabled/dis = disabled)
Functions (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)
Deployment Enable Enable Disable Enable Disable Disable Disable
After (2) is called Disable Disable Enable Enable Enable Enable Enable

make sense response or even exactly match the point to other judges. Thus, this
contract is designated to implement a collective grading framework with the same
concept as addressed in Sect. 4.3.
This smart contract consists of seven essential functions: (1) submit ciphertext,
(2) start the correction, (3) submit plaintext, (4) register judge, (5) get homework, (6)
grade, and (7) get the result. Once again, students need to upload their ciphertexts
by function (1) as the commitments, submit the homework answer’s plaintext by
calling function (3), and after the deadline or after the teacher starts the correction
process applying function (2). Notice that function (2) plays only the role of locking
and unlock functions, as listed in Table 2, without asking for standard grading
procedures to ensure judges follow their own opinions. Function (4) allows the
teacher (contract owner) to add judges into the smart contract at any moment, and
the judges can then apply function (5) to see every student’s information (ciphertext,
plaintext, and address) they need for grading the submissions. The judges can upload
their grading results by function (6), and the students and the teacher can find the
grading results by function (7). The grading results of each student include each
score to the student given by different judges and a weighted final score. This smart
contract provides an efficient way for collective grading; it helps manage tasks and
integrate information into a straightforward platform while ensuring all judges’ and
students’ privacy. Each judgment can be made without referencing others’ opinions.
With this smart contract, scores are given trustworthily and faithfully so that the
final grades reflect a much higher correlation to students’ learning outcomes. Thus,
the certificate of the course or the achievements accomplished in the course can be
more convincing. Finally, for ease of referencing, we list all the pseudocodes of the
involved smart contracts in the appendix.

6 Experimental Results

6.1 System Implementation

The proposed work is realized based on the Ethereum architecture with designed
application tools for integrating all the mechanisms introduced in Sect. 4. The
proposed blockchain system is built based on the Ethereum source code, available in
[20], programmed in Go language for simplicity and reproducibility. The application
tools are essential keys to make the realized homework grading system much
more user friendly. They cover all complex procedures for the users (students and
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 319

teachers) so that everyone can use the system with ease by few simple selections
without understanding the principles and theories of blockchain beforehand, which
is a demanded scenario in actual usage.
The application tools include three main modules: the cryptography module, the
blockchain module, and the student identity module. Two versions of the application
tools are designed for students and teachers; both are built on three programming
languages to ensure every function is working properly and stable. That is, Node.js
for blockchain interactions, Go for Chaotic Cryptography [25], and Python for user
interface, RSA [22] and Secret Sharing [26].

6.2 Randomness of the Chaotic Random Number

In our work, a chaotic-map-based random number generating module is applied

to hash the inputted plaintexts to protect students’ privacy. Thus, the security
of the Chaotic Cryptography module is directly correlated to the randomness
of the generated random numbers. This section shows the high randomness of
the generated random numbers by observing their distributions and comparing
the randomness between two generated results with two seeds differed in a tiny
difference. Figure 9 (left) shows the 512 × 512 noise image corresponding to
the generated random numbers, with the given seed 12345678, and the associated
histogram (c.f. Fig. 9 [right]) verifies that their corresponding distribution is very
close to the uniform one. Figure 10 (left) shows another 512 × 512 noise image
created with the seed value of 12345677, and as shown in Fig. 10 (right), the
resultant histogram is once again very close to the uniform distribution. Although
there is only a single-digit difference between the two seeds, the comparison given
in Fig. 11 shows there are a tremendous amount of pixel changes (approximately
99.6%) that occurred in the two images. Therefore, the outcomes of the adopted

Fig. 9 The noisy image generated with the seed value 12345678
320 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

Fig. 10 The noisy image generated with the seed value 12345677

Fig. 11 The two related difference images between the two noisy images given in Figs. 9 and 10
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 321

chaotic random number generating module are highly unpredictable and will bring
significant benefits to students’ privacy security.

6.3 Comparison with Related Work

Comparing our work with the popular online course platform [4] used in our
university, a centralized system called CEIBA, our work gets better advantages
in system transparency and fairness to students (c.f. Table 3). In a centralized
platform, information can be uploaded or deleted without being recorded; those
actions cannot be tracked by involved members (mostly students); thus, students
or teachers may miss some deleted information and often result in dissensions.
Additionally, if students directly use their identities to interact with their teachers,
this may allow teachers to treat each student differently, more or less. Therefore,
using blockchain properties to track every information and activity openly will make
the system much more transparent to avoid unnecessary disputes between students
and teachers by treating every on-chain member equally. Those smart contracts
introduced in Sect. 5 help teachers distribute some heavy works and ensure better
fairness to every student. Moreover, the cryptosystem used in this work can prevent
students from cheating and encourage them to learn with the right attitudes. The
proposed work can also perform with higher stability, longer liveness, and better
data preservation because all the members, including students, teachers, and the
system administrator, are willing to maintain the system’s operations. In contrast, in
the traditional platforms, only the administrator is devoted to system maintenance.
Since many cryptographic algorithms are used in this work, the time spent
uploading homework or announcements is usually higher than that of a traditional
platform. For example, uploading a homework answer to a conventional online
course platform takes just about a few seconds; however, in the proposed work,
students have to encrypt their homework answers before uploading them. In other
words, it may take one or two or more minutes, depending on the size of the
uploaded hand-in answers.

Table 3 Comparison of the proposed work and the traditional online course platform, CEIBA
Traditional educational online
The proposed work Platform (CEIBA)
Decentralized Decentralized Centralized
Transparency Blockchain property Centralized
Fairness Smart contract, blockchain property Depend on teachers
Prevent cheating Cryptography, blockchain property –
Speed Latency due to encryption/decryption –
Data preservation Maintained by all members Centralized
Liveness, stability Depend on all members Depend on administrator
322 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

7 Discussion and Conclusion

The design of the proposed system focuses mainly on the realization of a transparent
and fair homework correction and grading platform based on blockchain technology.
Although it is expected to establish an efficient way for supervising grading-related
activities and ensuring fairness to all members, the latency caused by the involved
encryption processes becomes the major obstacle to its usage in practice. The most
apparent latency is caused by the RSA module, which takes approximately 1 min to
encrypt plaintext with just 100 words. Fortunately, this comes from the considerable
time cost of loop expressions in Python, and it can be much speeded up when
appropriate language, such as C++, is used instead.
The “Grading by Exchanging” smart contract works relying on the submission
order of students’ hand-in homework answers. There was a possible vulnerability
when a group of students conspired to upload their homework assignments (in
ciphertext form) simultaneously. Under this situation, they will have a higher chance
of cheating on each other. Using hash functions to generate random numbers can
indeed make the exchanging behavior even more unpredictable. Still, again, this
may result in too many costs for calculation (e.g., gases in Ethereum blockchain)
when too many students are enrolled in the course. On the other hand, the random
numbers are predictable by those who decide the seeds of the hash functions (e.g.,
the responsible teachers) or those who generate the blocks (i.e., the miners).
Finally, the properties claimed in this work have been tested and proved stable
with 10–20 nodes run on the same personal computer. The stability of the involved
blockchain is expected to handle lots of users since it is Ethereum based reliably. Of
course, a real public test of the system is a must before it is ready to be deployed in
practical usage.
To increase the practical value of our current system, the user interface should
be designed friendlier; for example, realizing the function selection based on
keystrokes, which is more intuitive to most people. Some procedures in our design
can be done automatically, such as decrypting ciphertext once the teacher’s account
has received a certain amount of hand-in homework from students. Other works
for improving our system’s practicability include: supporting various types of files
(PDF, images, etc.), allowing users to choose their files instead of asking them to
transfer their messages into specific file formats, and helping users back up their
passwords to recover them whenever necessary, etc.
As for the involved cryptographic techniques, many algorithms claimed to have
better performances in timing and security; therefore, applying those methods to
upgrade our system is worthy of doing. For example, to achieve natural fairness
to all members, picking another random number generator with higher randomness
and efficiency (i.e., it will introduce less computational cost) on the Solidity is an
essential task for contract design to provide more unpredictability.
Of course, in the future, combining our work with other related works to
integrate the merits of blockchain technology into higher-level education usages,
such as sharing and maintaining students’ certificates and learning results between
institutions and colleges, is of great interest. Nevertheless, this goal is currently
A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 323

difficult to achieve since it requires the support of cross-chain techniques which

allow the interactions between different blockchains. This direction is worthy of
devoting because we can build a complete blockchain-based educational system
based on the above cross-chain system integration. We can then achieve information
sharing between institutions and conduct fundamental interactions between teachers
and students to establish an actual transparent and fair education system for all
students, teachers, and administration staff.

Appendix

A.1. Pseudocodes of the “Grading by Exchanging” Smart

Contract
324 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

A.2. Pseudocodes of the “Auto-correction” Smart Contract

A Blockchain-Based Fair and Transparent Homework Grading System for. . . 325

A.3. Pseudocodes of the “Collective Correction” Smart Contract

326 C. T. Tsai and J. L. Wu

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Improving Supply Chain Management
Performance with Blockchain Technology

Saurav Negi

1 Introduction

Blockchain has become one of today’s most popular buzzwords, and its applications
and operations have flourished in recent years. This technology is now seen to have
the ability to transform not only the financial sector but a variety of other industries
due to its ability to be used without the involvement of intermediaries or central
authorities [83]. Due to its ability to validate double-spend payments, it was first
used in the finance sector [32]. However, blockchain technology (BT) has expanded
beyond finance in recent years, demonstrating its utility as an underlying technology
in several industries, comprising power, tourism, and, most notably, supply chain
management (SCM) [81].
A supply chain (SC) is defined as “the set of organizations and connections that
cumulatively define the materials and information flow both downstream toward
the customer and upstream toward the very first supplier,” according to Schroeder
et al. [85, p. 223]. Technology can be utilized to promote communication and
transparency between SC participants in SCM [37].
Modern SCs have seen significant transformations recently, transforming a
formerly operational activity into a stand-alone SCM function [4]. Many logistical
operations are included in SC processes, such as “planning, implementing, and
managing the efficient flow and storage of goods, services, and related information
from the source to the point of consumption to meet consumer needs” [20].
Streamlining and integrating these tasks provides a competitive edge concerning
revenue optimization, transparency, high inventory turnover, efficient customer
service, and SC speed [82]. However, achieving these goals is difficult because of

S. Negi ()
Modern College of Business and Science (MCBS), Muscat, Oman
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 327
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_14
328 S. Negi

the higher complexities in the SC due to the interaction of various geographically

diverse organizations acting independently and regularly competing to provide bet-
ter customer services [12, 63, 84, 99]. Apart from complexities, SCs face a variety
of uncertainties and risks [17, 18, 39, 95], including trading members engaged in
opportunistic actions (e.g., cheating, distorting information) [51], privacy leakage
[111], fraud and cybercrime [10], and fake product recognition [81]. Managing
information in the SC is difficult because reliability and real time are required to
prevent any risks, fraud, and poor performance [84, 91]. A better verification and
information sharing system is needed to enhance the reliability, authenticity, and
traceability of data [45, 84].
Due to the complexity of processes, the number of documents, and global
collaborations, the SC is regarded as a vital sector of the business and is recognized
by various experts as the one with the highest potential for the adoption of
management-assist technologies [51]. Under the influence of the fourth industrial
revolution, businesses began leveraging technology to streamline processes and save
costs to boost their local and global competitiveness. Following the introduction of
integrated systems, tools such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), big data,
and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been used to focus on trying to minimize
bottlenecks and facilitate managers in making decisions based on data generated by
their operations through predictive analytics [5].
Corporate leaders in a variety of industries are attempting to improve SCM
through digitalization to address SC challenges [53]. The digitalization of SCs refers
to the “process of businesses adopting inter-organizational systems to interact and
transact with their trading partners (e.g., important suppliers and customers) along
with their respective SCs” [81]. In the digitalization era, BT is regarded as one of the
most important SCM tools [78]. It is a distributed ledger that employs cryptography
to process data (“smart contracts”) and add it to a data chain, making the process
transparent from beginning to end [69]. Inventory management, product traceability
and origin, logistics, process analysis, risk reduction, and sustainability are just a
few of the areas where blockchain may help decision-makers [19, 51, 84, 98].
Blockchain-enabled SCs are becoming more common and are proving to be
quite effective. “Depending on the product, the SC can span over hundreds of
stages, multiple geographical (international) locations, a multitude of invoices and
payments, have several individuals and entities involved, and extend over months.
Due to the complexity and lack of transparency of our current SCs, there is interest
in how blockchains might transform the SC and logistics industry” [64]. The
technology’s earliest and most well-known application is Bitcoin [69], “a peer-
to-peer digital cash system that enables parties to make payments without any
financial institution acting as a trusted third-party intermediary” [21]. Electronic
money, such as Bitcoin, has gained popularity in recent years because of improved
usage in both offline and online markets, as well as the significant variation in
the value of money in the e-money transactions market. The BT underpins this
digital currency [4, 20]. BT offers benefits like greater transparency, immutability,
and “smart contracts” to enhance connectivity and reliability, both of which are
necessary for SC collaboration [82].
Improving Supply Chain Management Performance with Blockchain Technology 329

Blockchain has drawn the interest of various academicians and professionals

from numerous sectors because it has the potential to improve data security, data
immutability, trust, transparency, and traceability in the SC [32, 112]. By 2025,
global investment in BT is estimated to reach USD 176 billion [50].
The primary features of blockchain, such as decentralization, intangibility, and
transparency [93], have augmented the interest of researchers, entrepreneurs, and
governments interested in learning more about the benefits that this technology can
provide to a variety of industries [45]. Blockchain applications are not limited to the
finance business. They are already being used in a variety of industries. For example,
BT is being discussed in a range of industries, involving healthcare [27, 51, 90],
tourism [30, 73, 74, 100], social media and marketing [17, 18, 80], finance [86], e-
commerce [58, 101], energy [110], education [35], agriculture [61], transportation
[71], and humanitarian action [8, 9, 24, 25, 75, 113].
Similarly, blockchain research has gained plenty of attention, especially from the
logistics and SCM sectors [2, 3, 23, 32, 46, 106, 108].
As a result, this chapter aims to illustrate how BT may be utilized to improve
SCM and overall business performance. To answer the following research questions,
the study employed a systematic review approach:
• What are the applications of BT to improve an organization’s SC performance?
• What are the benefits and challenges of incorporating BT into the SC?
The present study contributes to the SCM literature by describing the contribu-
tions of BT to SC performance based on blockchain properties like traceability,
transparency, security, and real-time data exchange. Both practitioners and aca-
demics may find the study useful as a starting point for additional debate and
research. The research also makes recommendations for future research on BT in
SCs.
The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. The methodology is
presented in Sect. 2. Section 3 explains the BT and describes the functioning of
the BT. Section 4 presented the application of BT in SC, as well as the use of
BT to improve SC performance. The benefits and challenges of BT in SCM are
discussed in Sect. 5. The study’s conclusion is offered in Sect. 6, including the
study’s contributions and constraints, as well as a research agenda to direct future
research.

2 Methodology

This chapter examines BT and its possible applications in SCM to help businesses
improve their performance. This chapter serves as guidelines for possible use within
the SC community, as well as to propose future study and exploration areas. The
study analyzed available literature to determine the application of BT in SCM and
its associated benefits and challenges. This study identifies the primary articles
on the subject that are available in academic databases (primarily in Scopus as it
330 S. Negi

offers more coverage than WoS and any other database [[29]]) using the following
keywords “blockchain,” “blockchain technology,” “blockchain in the supply chain,”
etc. Then, the studies were screened, and the only studies that served the purpose
were included for review. The collected studies were then analyzed to understand
BT and its role in the supply chain. Based on that, the author presented the narrative
review to explain the concept of BT, its applications, benefits, and associated
challenges. The studies which were referred to write this chapter range mainly
from 2015 to 2021, as most of the studies related to blockchain are carried out
during this period. The secondary data was collected from the research papers,
reports, chapters, and proceedings. Some of the highly reputed journals that are
referred to for this study are Supply Chain Management: An International Jour-
nal; International Journal of Production Research; Sustainability; Supply Chain
Forum: An International Journal; International Journal of Logistics Management;
Journal of Operations Management; International Journal of Production Eco-
nomics; International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management;
Frontiers in Blockchain; Electronic Commerce Research and Applications; IEEE
Transactions on Engineering Management; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics: Systems; Computers & Industrial Engineering; International
Journal of Information Management; Information Processing and Management; and
Manufacturing and Service Operations Management.

3 Overview of Blockchain Technology

Satoshi Nakamoto was the first to conceptualize and introduce BT in 2008 [69].
L’Hermitte and Nair [55] define blockchain as a “distributed ledger system or a
shared data platform that enables authorized communication and widespread shar-
ing of real-time information among participants.” It’s a distributed data structure
where the data is exchanged between peers through a network. A blockchain is
made up of a chain of blocks that documents/track transactions between participants.
Transactions in a peer-to-peer network must be approved and confirmed by the
members in a network according to an established protocol. The transaction data
are maintained on a distributed ledger, which is a public ledger [34]. A “distributed
ledger” records transactions in a decentralized manner. All network users have
access to the same blocks, which can be viewed by anyone. When specific members
of the network originate and validate a transaction/block, it is connected to prior
blocks by adding to the network [33, 104]. Individuals, robots, algorithms, and
organizations can all execute transaction verification. Blockchain is viewed as an
alternate tool for forming networks, not just among individuals but also among
businesses [54]. Blockchain can cut out middlemen in a network and connect
participants directly, potentially lowering transaction costs and human error. Storing
data in shared databases rather than centralized ones decreases the data loss risk and
improves security and information transparency [28].
Improving Supply Chain Management Performance with Blockchain Technology 331

“Smart contracts” are digital agreements that can be created using BT. According
to Crosby et al. [21], “A smart contract is a computer code embedded in the
blockchain. It establishes a set of pre-determined conditions agreed upon by the
participants, verifies the performance of the parties, and automatically executes the
terms of the agreement as soon as pre-programmed conditions are met. ‘Smart
contracts’ are, therefore, enforced by computer protocols, without any human
intervention and manual paperwork.” “Smart contracts” lower transaction costs by
eliminating the need for intermediates [57]. “Smart contracts” improve information
privacy and security since all transactions must adhere to the inherent legal
agreements and must be accepted and confirmed by the participants based on the
“smart contracts” transaction validation standards [28, 91].
Blockchain has the ability to fundamentally alter the way a wide variety of
companies operate [72]. Blockchain, according to IBM [42], can benefit businesses
in a variety of industries by speeding up operations, freeing up money, lowering
transaction costs, and ensuring trust and security. BT has sparked a lot of interest
all over the world and in a variety of industries. The United States’ “Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency” (DARPA) is looking into using blockchain
for a messaging service. The United Kingdom, Russia, Estonia, and Delaware
in the United States have investigated blockchain applications for commercial
vendors, public record-keeping, and voting systems. Banks have already organized
consortiums and research labs focusing on the blockchain applications possibilities
in the financial sector [48].
Blockchain is rapidly transforming the digital tools used to operate daily
transactions [113], and a plethora of studies show that blockchain’s innovative and
diversified qualities present several potential in a variety of application sectors. Fur-
thermore, it does not require the involvement of a third party, reducing transaction
costs and charges [83].

3.1 Functioning of Blockchain Technology

The blockchain, as depicted in Fig. 1, is a “chain of blocks” that compiles a sequence

of transactions carried out within a process, therefore the name “blockchain.” In a
word, a blockchain is a database that consists of a continuously growing series of
timestamped blocks holding data [102].
According to Piscini et al. [76], “blockchain is assuming the role of trusted
gatekeeper and purveyor of transparency.” It allows for the secure and efficient
transfer of resources among parties who do not know or trust one another. First,
blockchain’s ability to store and disseminate relevant data like transaction logs,
security records, and histories builds trust and transparency. In turn, this provides
network participants with more influence over exchange operations [76]. Second,
blockchain creates a trail of safe, unchangeable, and shareable transaction records
that can be traced back to network participants via a cryptographic signature
332 S. Negi

Fig. 1 A look at blockchain technology. (Source: World Economic Forum [109])

method. Third, trust is generated via technology’s ability to create unchangeable

consensus-based norms. These terms and conditions are stored in the “smart
contract” codes and the system’s algorithms. Lastly, trust is built based on self-
executing contracts (autonomous contract execution) and automated monitoring of
the members’ adherence to the conditions. Pre-agreed transactions occur automati-
cally upon fulfillment of the contract’s conditions, with no hassle or risk of mistake
[11, 40, 76].

3.2 When Does Blockchain Make Sense?

Blockchain technology, like any new technology, has its own set of benefits and
drawbacks. Practitioners must decide whether BT is the best tool for a specific issue
or topic or whether another tool would be more appropriate.
Blockchain technologies are more valuable:
• When there is no central authority in place that is well established and effective
• When it is desirable to have a record or verification of transactions
• When there are several parties or actors involved
• When they are used to track ownership of complicated things over time
• When the groups or actors are engaged must work together
Improving Supply Chain Management Performance with Blockchain Technology 333

4 Application of Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain

Management

Several authors suggested using blockchain in various SCs for automation, smart
contracting, tracking, tracing, data management, and other purposes [23, 38, 70,
88].
There are four primary properties of blockchains that make them appealing
in the context of SCM. First, because the blockchain is meant to be distributed
and synchronized across networks, it encourages data contribution from all parties
involved, making it ideal for multiorganizational trade systems such as SCs. Second,
the blockchain is constructed on peer-to-peer networks, which need unanimous
agreement from all appropriate groups that a transaction is legitimate, preventing
erroneous or potentially fraudulent transactions from being stored in the database.
Third, the data’s immutability ensures that agreed-upon operations are recorded and
unchanged. This ensures asset source, which implies that it is feasible to establish
the location of an asset, its history, and the events that occurred throughout its life
[6, 19]. Fourth, “smart contracts” are supported by some blockchains. Contrary to its
name, a “smart contract” is not a legally binding agreement, but rather a computer
protocol or trusted program that runs on the blockchain’s nodes [15]. The objective
of a “smart contract” is to digitally enable, verify, or enforce the terms of a contract,
enabling trustworthy transactions without any need for third-party involvement.
These protocols can be used to assess whether a given action, such as a payment,
should be approved. In comparison to standard contracts, “smart contracts” provide
the advantages of decreasing risk, cutting service and administrative costs, and
boosting the efficiency of business processes [6]. “Smart contracts,” moreover,
could build trust among parties [7].
Blockchain is seen as a game-changing technology with enormous potential
in SC and logistics management. Blockchain is expected to radically change SC
operations by substantially increasing trust, visibility, transparency, and traceability
[55, 77, 103] and resistance when linked with technological advances such as
IoT, RFID, and data analytics [66]. Blockchain helps SC organizations to answer
questions like “Where is my container?” and “Under what conditions were my prod-
ucts transported?” by breaking down data silos and improving business-to-business
connectivity [105]. More specifically, blockchain monitors each transaction (from
items ordered through the receiving of the items, the invoice, and the financial
settlement), removes paperwork, and, as a result, helps to reduce cost, delays, and
errors throughout the SC [97].
According to recent studies, there is significant interest in the application of
blockchain in SC and operations management (e.g., [60]). According to Queiroz et
al. [79], SC scholars have discovered blockchain contributions such as improving
SC efficiency, persuading new product design and development, minimizing the
need for intermediaries, advancing inventory management and replenishment,
334 S. Negi

advancing sustainable SCM, reducing illegal counterfeiting, improving quality

management, and enhancing product safety and security. According to Queiroz
and Wamba [78], “blockchain can improve information flow (document workflow
management), financial transactions (data confidentiality), and SC coordination
(device connectivity).” According to Wang et al. [106], blockchain allows for more
SC integration, which improves overall SC performance. According to Kshetri [51],
the blockchain-based SC increases customer confidence by offering benefits such as
real-time product tracking, lower product moving costs, extremely secure transac-
tions, and protection against product counterfeiting. According to Kouhizadeh and
Sarkis [49], the openness, visibility, and security properties of blockchains foster
trust in commercial SCs and can eliminate or at least reveal any hidden unethical
behavior by SC participants. In conclusion, the potential of blockchain for SCM
is that it will significantly improve visibility, accountability, traceability, and the
trustworthiness of relationships [8, 9].
BT has the potential to contribute significantly to SC operations in a wide range
of businesses [67, 68], including pharmaceuticals [41], agri-food products, and
luxury products, by creating background knowledge and, as a result, decreasing
consumer risk perceptions [13, 14, 96]. The properties and advantages of BT, such
as real-time information sharing, data security, transparency, and traceability can
assist numerous businesses’ SCs [28, 33, 45, 47].

5 Benefits and Challenges in Applying Blockchain

Technology in the Supply Chain

This section discusses the benefits of BT application in the SCM and the related
challenges.

5.1 Benefits

Due to its ability to track the flow of commodities in real time and improve the
visibility and transparency of operations, BT was introduced in this field with the
promise of fixing the SC’s key problems [5, 51, 84]. Because all transactions will be
authenticated by a group of partners, these benefits can increase transaction security
[59, 62] and partner trust [39]. Furthermore, BT can save costs [98] and eliminate
hazards associated with product provenance and quality [51, 67, 68]. The following
are the benefits that BT provides to improve an organization’s SC performance:
• Lower transaction costs: By “connecting people and organizations closely
together through a shared ledger and distributed processing over a network,” the
blockchain allows actors to transfer value without the use of a middleman [36].
Improving Supply Chain Management Performance with Blockchain Technology 335

This eliminates many of the costs associated with using a third party to facilitate
transactions.
• Distributed data structure: The blockchain’s main innovation is that it allows
actors to interact directly with one another without any requirement for a
middleman to oversee exchanges [48]. Blockchain is a distributed data format
that connects SC stakeholders via a peer-to-peer network. All parties concur on
standardized protocols, which are then used to communicate and validate data
[1, 16]. The decentralized structure of blockchain allows for direct transaction
verification among parties, eliminating the need for intermediaries [28, 48].
• Transparency and accountability: One of the main attributes of blockchain is
“transparency,” which implies information sharing among SC partners [26]. BT
allows stakeholders in the SC network to share real-time information, increasing
transparency and reliability among SC partners and customers [32, 84]. The
blockchain creates a permanent public ledger. This makes open and transparent
data more readily available. It has a favorable impact on SC transaction reliability
and trustworthiness, SC operations, SC activity time, and decision-making
effectiveness [47, 91].
• Faster transaction times: When compared to current financial transaction tech-
nologies in the banking system, the blockchain provides a significantly faster
way. On a blockchain, “smart contracts” are almost instantaneous [48].
• Traceability and usage information: Blockchain facilitates customers to acquire
accurate and valid data about items and processes [84, 91]. Another attribute of
blockchain is “traceability,” which refers to identifying and validating the series
of events and components in all stages of a chain. It’s critical to keep track of
information across the SC to ensure compliance with standards and track down
failures [89]. Stakeholders can track and monitor items and shipments along
the SC owing to traceability [52, 56]. The traceability feature of blockchain
improves the transparency of SC activities, which in turn improves trust among
SC stakeholders, such as suppliers and customers, decreases conflicts, lowers
verification costs, and allows stakeholders to detect unethical actions [32, 47].
Actors can see the source and timing of each action because the blockchain stores,
verifies, and timestamps every action on the network.
• Encryption of data: Blockchain allows organizations in the SC network to
securely communicate, retrieve, and validate information since data and transac-
tions are cryptographically safeguarded [16]. Advanced cryptography decreases
the chance of information loss and alteration, as well as human mistakes in
transactions [28, 91]. “Anyone can upload anything to the blockchain, just like
they can on the internet, but the reliability and veracity of that material are
established by whoever’s digital signature was utilized” [31].
The benefits of BT in SC are also summarized in Fig. 2.
In a nutshell, BT improves SC performance by increasing collaboration [25],
leveraging relationships with 3PL service providers [7], enhancing traceability
336 S. Negi

Fig. 2 Benefits of blockchain in SCM. (Source: Author)

and cost-efficiency [43], improving coordination and reducing intermediaries [44],

increasing trust [22, 24], and ensuring security, accountability, and transparency
[87].

5.2 Challenges

The challenges of BT in a SC can be categorized as the following:

• New technology: The technology is still in its early stages. Because present
applications are restricted and untested, it’s difficult to see their entire potential
and repercussions. Furthermore, because the majority of blockchain applications
are now vendor driven, more development is required at this early stage [48].
• Scalability limitations: As BT is still in its early stages, the technology can
only be scaled within its existing applications, as essential algorithms or
other advancements have yet to be developed. New advancements, such as
BigChainDB [65], have begun to address this issue by creating new algorithms.
• Internet access and infrastructure: Using BT necessitates Internet access; places
with insufficient capacity or infrastructure are not suitable for blockchain applica-
tions. This digital divide also exists in terms of technological knowledge between
people who understand how to “operate securely on the Internet” and those who
do not [92].
• Technical challenges in comprehending BT: BT is new, complex, and difficult
to comprehend [48]. For blockchain solutions, more relevant and user-friendly
applications are still needed.
• Bitcoin’s reputational risk: There is a common misperception that BT is inextri-
cably linked to Bitcoin and digital currencies, rather than being viewed as two
distinct developments. Furthermore, speculators, profit-driven entrepreneurs, and
libertarians have all been associated with Bitcoin [94, 107].
• Social, legal, and regulatory issues to be addressed: The socio-legal and regu-
latory frameworks for blockchain, containing related privacy rules, are evolving
at a slower rate than the technology itself [48]. Blockchain practitioners should
keep an eye on these advancements and keep up with the latest advances.
The challenges related to blockchain are presented in Fig. 3.
Improving Supply Chain Management Performance with Blockchain Technology 337

Fig. 3 Challenges in blockchain. (Source: Author)

6 Conclusion

This study investigated the applications of BT in SCM and presented the benefits
and challenges related to BT. The study answers the following research questions:
(1) “what are the applications of BT to improve an organization’s SC performance?”
and (2) “what are the benefits and challenges of incorporating BT into the SC?”
To answer these research questions, the author extensively explored the available
literature on BT and SCM.
Blockchain technology provides an advanced platform for a new transparent
and decentralized transactional method in organizations and industries. This tech-
nology’s features improve trust by ensuring transparency in all kinds of data,
goods, and financial transactions. In SCM, BT can readily deliver safe business
operations. The technological platform is built on a distributed system that provides
a continuous record that can be shared and made public. This technology provides
more secure transaction tracking of all kinds (data and information transactions,
money transactions, etc.). BT has the potential to drastically minimize human errors,
338 S. Negi

additional costs, and time delays in the SC and logistics industry. Finally, by utiliz-
ing BT, the logistics and SC sector’s challenges may be reduced, if not eliminated,
and the organization’s overall performance can be improved considerably. In the
fifth section, relevant conclusions concerning prospective hurdles and benefits of
BT application are drawn based on prior research. This technology facilitates SC
activities such as tracking purchase orders, order modifications, and documentation
of freight, as well as communicating information regarding production and delivery.
BT offers enormous potential for growth and implementation in the field of logistics
and SC, posing several challenges for future research.
This study adds to the literature on BT and SCM by synthesizing the literature
on applications of BT. In addition, the study classified the contributions of BT to
SCM performance in any firm. Even though the study addressed the two research
questions, significant limitations must be considered. Firstly, the study is purely
based on the available literature and the scope is limited to the application of BT
in the supply chain. Secondly, papers that were assessed were mostly publications
from “Scopus-indexed” journals. While Scopus is the most comprehensive database,
future research may also be conducted using Web of Science, ProQuest, EBSCO,
etc. How BT can be used to improve performance varies by industry. A future study
needs to examine how blockchain technologies may contribute to the performance
of SCs in various industries.

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Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate
Governance

Ikram Bensalah and Aïda Kammoun Abdelmoula

1 Introduction

This chapter explores the potential of blockchain technology in corporate gover-

nance. At a time of crisis of confidence and dissatisfaction with traditional third
parties and intermediaries, institutions, banks, and states, blockchain technology
is emerging along with the Bitcoin phenomenon and is now on the agenda of all
decision-makers. Even if the blockchain is still very little known to the general
public and even if it is still difficult to precisely assess the extent of the impact
that this technology will have on our society, many people already see it as the
next great innovation since the emergence of the Internet. Blockchain is one of the
buzzwords in the world of technology, and it has impacted many sectors. Atlam et
al. [2] show that this technology, which carries the promise of disintermediation and
transparency, is attractive and complicated. Blockchain promises to revolutionize
the way we conduct transactions, just as the computer has changed the way we
process data today and just as the Internet has transformed the way we share
information at all levels. Yeretzian [28], pointed that among the first applications
of blockchain technology is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, an innovative payment
network and a new form of currency that operates without a central authority; it
is free and open.
According to Laurent [22], blockchain is a technology invented in 2008, made
public and open source in 2009 in the same way as Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Blockchain technology has the unique feature of allowing economic agents to

I. Bensalah ()
LEG, Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia
A. K. Abdelmoula
Higher institute of Business Administration, University of Sfax, BESTMOD Laboratory,
University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 345
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_15
346 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

abstain from intermediaries or trusted third parties to secure their transactions. The
principle is simple: a blockchain is a decentralized and public history of transactions
that have taken place since its creation. Its operation is based on cryptography to
ensure the security of transactions and relies on the exponential development of
the number and computing power of machines connected to the Internet. While the
academic literature on the blockchain is just beginning to emerge, most of it focuses
on the technical aspects of the technology and tends to ignore the organizational
complexities of technology adoption. However, institutional, business, and technical
factors interact and influence each other.
The applications of blockchain are numerous. In finance, for example, the
technology can be used to trade cryptocurrencies and financial assets, to register
voting rights associated with shares, to raise funds through an ICO (Initial Coin
Offering) by creating equity assets associated with tokens that can be exchanged for
cryptocurrencies, and to program the execution of smart contracts. Let’s not forget
that banks and other financial institutions, being intermediaries par excellence, may
fear that their activity will be challenged by this technology, but the blockchain
could strongly contribute to the reduction of the operating costs of banks in the
largest sense, especially in terms of infrastructure.
Despite the extraordinary interest in blockchain, research on the subject has until
recently been rather limited. Behnke and Janssen [3] and Cermeño [7] show that
the emergence of modern blockchain technology has been announced as the next
revolution that will change the size and structure of organizations and the way
business transactions are conducted. According to Crosby et al. [9], a series of
blocks can be explained by a series of date-stamped functions and a link to the
previous block.
In our chapter, we ask the following question: what is the effect of the adoption
of blockchain technology on corporate governance? To answer this question, we
draw on the literature that focuses on the development of blockchain technology
and its impact on corporate governance. Our research is more linked to Yermack
[30], which focuses on the impact of blockchain adoption on various stakeholders
such as executives, minority shareholders, institutional investors, and other parties.
Yermack [30] states that the adoption of blockchain in corporate governance will
reduce costs and improve liquidity, transparency, and accounting accuracy.
In this chapter, the first section presents the applications of blockchain technol-
ogy in businesses. In the second section, we define the background of corporate gov-
ernance, before specifying in the third section the relationship between blockchain
and corporate governance. Finally, we analyze in the last section how blockchain
impacts corporate governance based on a literature review.

2 The Applications of Blockchain Technology in Businesses

At present, there is a crisis of confidence and displeasure with traditional third

parties and mediators, institutions, banks, and states. The blockchain technology
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 347

that carries the Bitcoin phenomenon is currently on the agenda of all stakeholders.
While blockchain is still largely unknown to the general public, and while it is still
difficult to precisely appreciate the magnitude of the impact this technology will
have on our society, many already see it as the next great innovation since the
advent of the Internet. Blockchain technology (BT) is largely used as technical
support for enterprises to enhance production processes and reduce costs [24].
The developing research offers a good opportunity to improve the performance of
investment efficiency [30]. Nonetheless, there are many challenges to the perfection
of BT and its application.
Blockchain technology, created in 2008, has the unique characteristic of permit-
ting economic stakeholders to do without intermediaries or trusted third parties to
secure their transactions. The principle is very simple: a blockchain is a decentral-
ized and public history of transactions that have taken place since its creation. Its
operations are based on cryptography to assure the security of transactions and rely
on the exponential development of the number and computing power of machines
connected to the Internet. The applications of the blockchain are multiple; in finance,
the technology can be used to make exchanges of cyber-currencies and financial
securities, register voting rights associated with shares, raise funds through an ICO
(“Initial Coin Offering”) by establishing equity securities associated with tokens
that can be exchanged for cyber-currencies, and program the operation of “smart
contracts.” Secondly, as banks and other financial institutions are intermediaries by
excellence, they may fear that their trade will be challenged by this technology. But,
on the other hand, the blockchain could strongly contribute to the reduction of the
operating costs of banks in the broadest sense, especially in terms of infrastructure.

2.1 Digital Payments

The blockchain has the potential to change the payment industry by enabling
significant improvements in four areas: security, transaction costs, transaction times,
and access to a payment method for the majority. When payment is made via the
blockchain, no personal information is transmitted to the operator. In the case of a
credit card transaction, the payment data is saved on a database by entities such as
merchants or service providers in the area of payment. These entities then become
an attractive target for hackers, feeding fraud, which in 2014 alone accounted for
$16 billion worldwide.
One of the other advantages of a blockchain serving as a mode of payment is that
the payments passing through it are irremediable, which can be very interesting for
merchants affected by credit card fraud. Cryptocurrency payments are confirmed in
a very short time. In most cases, 1 h is sufficient for the transaction to be validated
and become irreversible. The money is therefore available on the merchant’s account
very quickly. On the contrary, credit card payments, although instantaneous on the
clients’ side, in reality, take several days to reach the merchant’s bank account.
This time lag leads to a cash flow cost for businesses that could be reduced by the
348 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

blockchain. In addition, for the merchant, there is a 180-day period during which
the transaction can be canceled unilaterally by the card issuer (upon request of
the end customer, in case of fraud or dispute). The time for a transaction to be
final is, therefore, 1 h for a cryptocurrency payment and 180 days for a credit card
payment. In the same way, for individuals and small- and medium-sized businesses,
an international transfer can require more than seven business days to reach its
destination. During this period, on the one hand, the funds are immobilized, as they
are not available to either the sender or the recipient of the transfer, and on the other
hand, there is a significant exchange rate risk. Blockchain could therefore make the
payment sector more efficient.

2.2 Banking

There is also another sector that could be transformed with the blockchain tech-
nology that has arrived with the promise of creating a secure environment, or
decentralization and disintermediation; this is the banking sector. Banks are excited
about blockchain technology. These motivations are caused by the prospects of
reducing costs, reducing the risk of default and security of financial transactions,
reducing delays, double spending, and standardized register.
Blockchain and, more specifically, Bitcoin were created in the aftermath of the
2008 financial crisis, which severely undermined the trust people had in financial
institutions. It was therefore necessary to find a way to operate without them. This
solution was found with the blockchain. Blockchain is based on the assumption that
trusted third parties such as financial institutions are no longer necessary and would
be replaced by a distributed consensus. Indeed, it is first of all its characteristics, at
first sight perfectly implementable in the banking sector that pushed people to be
interested in the blockchain.
The first element to consider is the cost of banking transactions, especially for
international money transfers. As an illustration, in some countries outside the
European Union, the commissions charged during the various transfers go up to ten
percent of the transaction amounts, which is a considerable sum. This cost is mainly
due to the various intermediaries involved in a transaction and the infrastructure
required for the actual transactions.
The blockchain could then be a solution to this problem. Indeed, the cost of
a transaction on the blockchain amounts to only a few cents. Thus, according
to a 2015 report by Santander Bank, blockchain technology could result in a
reduction in infrastructure costs for banks of $15–20 billion per year, which is a
sum of approximately 17.9 billion euros. We also see through the blockchain a
way to secure banking transactions and decrease the risk of default. Thanks to the
traceability and transparency that the blockchain provides, we could follow money
transfers from their origin to their destination, in any hand, they pass and anywhere
in the world. This would, first of all, allow us to ensure the solvency of a customer
but also to fight against corruption, money laundering, and terrorism financing.
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 349

This is indeed an obligation imposed on banks by the law but which is not
always easy to achieve. It was enshrined in particular in the recent law of September
18, 2017, on the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing and
the limitation of the use of cash, which replaces the law of January 11, 1993,
on the prevention of the use of the financial system for money laundering and
terrorist financing. It should be noted, however, that some individuals may, on
the contrary, use the anonymity they enjoy on these platforms for their fraudulent
transactions. The European Commission intervened as early as February 2, 2016,
when it published a communication on “an action plan to strengthen the fight
against terrorist financing.” The main idea of this communication was to force
these platforms to apply vigilance measures when trading cryptocurrencies. It is
feared that terrorist organizations, among others, use these virtual currency transfer
platforms to hide the real origin of their financial movements, given that these
transactions are recorded without being subject to reporting mechanisms as is
the case for current banking systems. We can therefore see the emergence of an
embryonic legal framework. However, this is more related to the regulation of
Bitcoin than to the blockchain itself. We must therefore be able to ensure a balance
between the effectiveness of the blockchain’s registers in terms of traceability and
the legal obligations of vigilance to have a system that is both effective and secure.
The problem with current online payments is that they are slow, as banks have
to wait for confirmation messages before they can complete a transaction. For
example, international transfers can take several days. Blockchain technology, on
the other hand, makes it possible to certify a transaction almost instantaneously. For
the moment, the time needed on the blockchain to validate a Bitcoin transaction
is 10 min, but the Ethereum blockchain, for example, only needs 15 s to complete
a transaction. This could mean that there is room for improvement to make the
systems even faster. At the European level, there is also interest in this opportunity
of the blockchain. Seven European banks joined forces in 2016 to set up a financing
platform for the international trade of small- and med-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The objective is to create a secure space in which the various actors can share
information, operate transactions more easily, and use smart contracts, thus allowing
a reduction in payment times.

2.3 Supply Chain

Blockchain technology can cover the broad domain of the supply chain. Supply
chains are considered favored use cases for blockchain technology, as their members
operate in a context of shared goals and mutual reliance. With the ability to track
data from smart devices embedded in factories, depots, vehicles, and shipping sites
and automatically execute payments and document delivery via smart contracts
triggered by that data, blockchain concepts promise to break the trust gap that has
traditionally hindered communication between members of a supply chain. As such,
the technology is seen to improve efficiency, resource utilization, provenance and
traceability, and credit availability.
350 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

An indicator of how effective this could be is found in the ambitions of

the Hong Kong Belt and Road Blockchain Consortium (BRBC). Comprised of
banks, shippers, consultants, and technology companies, the BRBC is developing
a standardized system of blockchain-based business identifiers and a common
dispute resolution mechanism to help make the technology the enabling platform for
China’s planned $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative. This massive project includes
a network of advanced, intelligent manufacturing and supply chain systems in 70
different countries covering two-thirds of the world’s population.
In two high-profile trials, IBM and Walmart used distributed registries tech-
nologies to track the movement of Chinese pork and Mexican mangoes along a
supply chain by integrating data from farmers, produce buyers, shippers, delivery
companies, wholesalers, and the retail giant itself. By making information available
to chain members that would otherwise not be shared, the retailer was able to more
easily identify the origin of spoiled food. Walmart, Unilever, Dole Foods, and others
then joined an alliance with IBM to deploy blockchain technology for the food
industry.
Similarly, blockchain startup Everledger touted its work in tracing diamonds,
prompting Anglo American Ltd De Beers unit to partner with BCG Digital Ventures
to do the same, in part to comply with industry rules banning diamonds from global
markets war. And on the shipping side, shippers such as Maersk are working on
blockchain solutions and smart contracts to streamline the processing of customs
and shipping procedures.
Abeyratne et al. [1] and Kshetri et al. [19] shows that the technology Blockchain
has the potential to provide solutions to problems such as those mentioned above
by addressing the challenges of visibility and traceability. Blockchain technology
allows companies to record every event or transaction within a supply chain (SC)
on a distributed ledger, which is shared among all participants, making it secure,
immutable and irrevocable.

2.4 Insurance

The insurance sector has characteristics that make it potentially susceptible to

blockchain and smart contracts. The declaration and claim procedures are often
tedious to fill in for the victims and costly to process for the insurance companies.
Smart contracts could allow automating this administrative part and the triggering
of compensations. The most obvious example is the so-called parametric insurance,
which uses a parameter as a trigger. A typical farmer facing a drought will turn to
their insurance company to claim compensation. A smart contract, combined with
an oracle service that has access to data from the rainfall department in the area,
could lead to automatic payment of compensation to all farmers concerned, without
the need for any administrative formalities. This could help reduce the structural
costs of insurance and increase the overall efficiency of the sector, but in the medium
term, we can imagine an even more advanced use. In the continuity of companies
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 351

like Uber or Airbnb, which emphasize collaborative consumption, projects have

been launched to create a cooperative insurance system, without going through a
classic insurance company.
Another area of insurance where blockchain could play a role is in fraud pre-
vention. The company Everledger, for example, specializes in preventing diamond
fencing by recording the unique technical characteristics of each diamond as well
as its serial number on a blockchain. When a diamond is stolen or reported stolen
fraudulently, it will be difficult to resell it. Also, assuming this solution is adopted on
a large scale, it could stem the trade in diamonds from conflict regions. According
to a note from Deloitte, using a blockchain in the car insurance industry could also
reduce fraud by making it impossible to report the same claim to multiple insurance
companies.

2.5 E-Government

Blockchain technology offers potential benefits for use in the public sector to
improve the delivery of public services. Some of the advantages such as distribution
architecture, immutability, and transparency may be useful for eradicating fraud
and corruption in the public sector. With the use of technology, every transaction
in public services can be recorded without manipulation and allows for better
transparency and can subsequently improve trust in public services. As a result,
the public sector can be more efficient and effective in its operations. Some of
the advantages such as distribution architecture, immutability, and transparency
may be useful for eradicating fraud and corruption in the public sector. With the
use of technology, every transaction in public services can be recorded without
manipulation and allows for better transparency and can subsequently improve trust
in public services.
If the promised benefits of blockchain technology could be proven, it is possible
that this technology could reach an inflexion point and soon begin to be widely
accepted by governments around the world. However, we emphasize that these
potential benefits still need to be proven through empirical evidence. There-
fore, there is a need for further interdisciplinary research on broader aspects of
blockchain, such as governance models, design variables, impact, and risks.
For example, Estonia is the first country to use blockchain on a national level
(e-government). Indeed, it has developed its own Ksi blockchain, focused on the
security of private data and the protection of networks, systems, and data. Also,
Sierra Leone is the first country to use an e-voting CB for presidential elections in
2018.
Dubai: secure passports
Illinois: digitizing birth certificates
India: land registration
Gibraltar, Singapore, etc.: the creation of a regulated government cryptocurrency
352 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

3 Defining the Background of Corporate Governance

3.1 Corporate Governance Definitions

The term corporate governance came into common usage in the 1970s in the United
States during the Watergate scandal, when it was revealed that US companies were
involved in American politics, making contributions to various political parties.
Later, in the late twentieth century, financial scandals such as Guinness 1986,
Poly Peck International 1989, Maxwell 1991, BCCI 1991, Enron 2001, etc., shook
the financial world and raised serious trust issues regarding corporate governance
systems. The unbridled development of financial innovations, including derivatives,
has contributed to the dematerialization of business operations and encouraged
creative accounting practices designed to manipulate those who analyze financial
statements.
So, from a historical point of view, the concept of “corporate governance”
appeared in the 1970s following a series of scandals, particularly in England and the
United States. The first author who manifested interest in investigating the causes of
the financial disasters was Adrian Cadbury, who published the Cadbury Code. He
gives the first definition of the term corporate governance as “The system by which
companies are managed and controlled.” Since then, several definitions were given
to the term “corporate governance,” and there is not a single precise definition of
this term.
Table 1 presents a synthesis of several definitions.
From this table, we can remark that, in the definition of Shleifer et al. [25], the
objective of corporate governance is limited to maximizing shareholder wealth. The
focus is on shareholder value. However, such a definition is part of a predominantly
Anglo-Saxon trend based on the predominance of the shareholder.
Other authors define this concept differently, such as Charreaux et al. [8].
In their definition, the central element is the manager (decision-making power
of the company). It aims to go beyond the analysis that focuses only on the
relationship between managers and shareholders. It broadens corporate governance
to include stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, etc.) and concerns all the
relationships that the company has with its many partners.
A broader definition is given by the OECD [31], “Corporate governance refers
to all issues related to the separation of powers between the owners of stock firms
and their managers.” For Peter Wirtz [27], corporate governance is defined in this
case as the set of mechanisms that delimit the discretionary space of the manager
and is now recognized as an important aspect in the life of a company based on the
transparency of major decisions taken and accountability to shareholders and other
stakeholders.
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 353

Table 1 Some definitions for corporate governance concept

Andrei Shleifer and Corporate governance refers to the way a company’s funding
Robert Vishny [25] providers ensure that they will receive the due benefits of their
investment
Charreaux and “Corporate governance covers all the mechanisms that have the
Pitol-Belin [8] effect of delimiting the powers and influencing the decisions of
managers, in other words, that ‘govern’ their conduct and define
their discretionary space”
OECD [31] “Corporate governance refers to all issues related to the separation
of powers between the owners of stock firms and their managers”.
OECD [32] A set of relationships between the management of the company, the
administration board, its shareholders, and some stakeholder
groups
Australian National “Corporate governance refers to the processes by which
Audit Office (ANAO) organizations are managed, controlled and owned. This refers to
[33] authority, responsibility, administration, management, guidance
and control within the organization”
Peter Wirtz [27] “Corporate governance specifies processes that should be adopted
by managers to fulfil their duties as managers”
Marcel Ghita [34] Corporate governance is “an attempt to implement risk analysis,
verification, evaluation, control systems that contribute to efficient
management for their functioning. ( . . . ) this has to be approached
alongside risk management for the entire organization and with the
evolution of the financial management and internal control system”
The United Kingdom Corporate governance refers to “what a company’s administration
Corporate Governance board does and the way it sets the company values, and it is
Code [35] different from day-to-day operational management by full-time
managers”
Matei and Drumasu “How an organization (public or private) is lead and controlled, to
[23] accomplish its responsibilities and bring added value, as well as
using financial, human, material and informational resources
efficiently, while respecting the rights and obligations of all
involved parties (shareholders, managers, employees, state,
suppliers, clients and other people with a direct interest)”

3.2 Universal Models of Corporate Governance

From the previous section, it appears that corporate governance is the system for
lining up the divergent goals of the different parties in the company and ensuring
that everyone is working toward the common goal of the firm. In shareholder
governance, the common goal is to maximize value for the owners of the company,
which usually means making money for the owners. In stakeholder governance,
the common objective is to maximize value for the different stakeholders, while
recognizing that the different stakeholders define value in different ways.
According to specialized literature, there are two approaches regarding the CG
involved parties:
354 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

(a) Some authors focus on shareholder value which is stakeholders who are directly
involved and affected by the performance or failure of the company. In this
case, various studies on corporate governance mention, in particular, the agency
theory of Jensen and Meckling [36].
The agency theory is based on the potentially conflicting relationship between
the owners of the company (principal) and the managers who ensure the daily
management (agent). Initially, the manager is the sole owner of the company.
Subsequently, an agency relationship, as well as possible conflicts of interest, is
created by opening up the capital. This opening generates costs, called agency costs.

(b) More and more studies consider other stakeholders, such as managers, sup-
pliers, state, employees, clients, banks, customers, staff members, and other
persons with interests within a company. In line with this approach, several
theories have been established: such as the theory of transaction costs and signal
theory.
The theory of transaction costs, which is part of the theory of organizations,
originates from the article of R. H. Coase published in 1937, in an article entitled
“The Nature of the Firm”; the theory of transaction costs was then structured by the
Nobel Prize in Economics Olivier Williamson.
For this economist, all economic transactions generate costs before their realiza-
tion. Because of the uncertainties associated with them, as well as the context in
which they take place, these transactions produce costs that reduce the performance
of companies.
Olivier Williamson’s theory begins with an analysis of the components of
these transactions (called “attributes”) and the structures that carry them out, the
firms, which have multiple operating models (hierarchical or hybrid). From there,
according to Williamson, agents become aware that saving on transaction costs is
preferable to the wasteful resulting from choices guided by chance or managerial
intuition. This desire to reduce costs conditions the choice of appropriate modes
of governance. Finally, these governance modes serve as reference frameworks for
transactions, to improve the return on investment.
The theory of signals, applied to companies, is based on the principle that the
managers of a company have better information than the shareholders and the
various partners of this company. A positive signal, emitted by the managers of
a company, can make it possible to anticipate better future performances and to
generate an increase in the share price of the value of the company and conversely.

3.3 Corporate Governance for Public Sector

The United Kingdom was among the first countries to introduce a policy of public
sector governance. According to Bacon et al., the expansion of the public sector was
bad for the economy. Indeed, the authors argued that an unproductive sector (the
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 355

public sector) was seen as growing at the expense of a productive sector (the private
sector). This led to the development of a new approach to public management when
Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. This new form of governance assumed
that private sector management techniques were far superior to the restraining
principles of public administration. The application of these techniques to state
entities was therefore supposed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the
public sector. Clark [11] argues that the New Public Management (NPM) consists
of three main concepts:
1. Marketization, which consists of introducing market competition into public
services by separating the buyer from the supplier, creating “quasi-markets”
within the public sector by tendering or outsourcing to the private sector.
2. Moving from a focus on the process to a focus on results in control and
accountability mechanisms.
3. And finally, motivation, that is, creating incentives to encourage entrepreneur-
ship, better results, and efficiency measured by performance indicators.
NPM could therefore be reduced to three M’s: markets, managers, and measures.
In practice, this has led to the redesign of one of England’s most important public
services: the health sector.
In July 1995, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA)
developed the first corporate governance framework for the public sector, containing
a common set of principles and standards for management and control of public
organizations, organized in three fields:
– Organizational processes and structures: Discuss several aspects regarding
responsibility toward the law, responsibility for public money communication
with stakeholders, and roles and responsibilities for president, non-executive
members of the board of directors, and executive management
– Controls and financial reporting: Consists of the following components, annual
reporting, audit committees, and internal and external controls
– Behavioral standards of directors: Refers to selflessness, objectivity, integrity,
accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership
In 1999, the OECD developed the key principles of corporate governance, which
are:
1. Ensure the development of an adequate framework for good corporate gover-
nance. This framework should promote transparency and efficiency of markets,
compliance with rules and laws, and separation of responsibilities between the
different regulatory institutions and authorities.
2. Guarantee and protect shareholders’ rights and key aspects of property rights.
3. Ensure equal treatment of all shareholders, including minorities and foreign
shareholders. All shareholders should have the opportunity to obtain effective
compensation if their rights are not respected.
4. Recognize the rights of stakeholders as set out in law or other approved commit-
ments and encourage cooperation between organizations and stakeholders for the
creation of value and jobs and to support financially sound enterprises.
356 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

5. Issue/transmit credible and timely information on all matters concerning the

company, including the financial situation, performance, ownership, and man-
agement of the company.
6. Define the responsibilities of the board of directors, namely, the strategic
direction of the company, the management control, and its accountability to the
shareholders and the company.

4 The Relationship Between Blockchain Technology

and Corporate Governance

4.1 Theoretical Basis

The main premise of this technology is new governance, both for public and
private sectors, based on innovative principles: collaboration, decentralization, and
transparency.
Blockchain technology can provide intelligent solutions to corporate governance
issues, especially in the relationship between shareholders and companies. Oper-
ators of the technology, such as companies that may be listed on a blockchain
exchange, have many reasons to worry about the governance of the blockchain
itself. Open public blockchains run autonomously by computer software. This code
specifies the basic inputs for each transaction, the timing and priority of encoding
those transactions into the blockchain, and limits on the sizes or contingencies
associated with each transaction, among other issues.
The use of blockchains ensures transparency and immutability, as transactions
cannot be altered or deleted. Users have the certainty that transactions will always
be executed according to the agreed protocol, ensuring the integrity of the process
and thus ensuring complete, consistent, accurate, and timely data. In the case of an
asset (a house for example), it is, therefore, possible to trace it from the beginning,
eliminating the risk of counterfeiting or duplicate sales, since blockchain users can
ensure that the person who claims to own an asset does own it.
Eventually, blockchains could contribute to a significant reduction in unit
transaction costs as the involvement of a trusted intermediary would no longer
be necessary. And that is the main innovative character of this technology which
persuades some hopeful future-orientated people that traditional banks, auditors,
brokerage houses, and many such intermediaries will soon disappear.
Several concrete benefits can be obtained from the adoption of blockchain
technology in the public sector, especially if we talk about collaboration between
public administrations. In fact, blockchain is a technology that allows different
actors to coordinate with each other, so it may lead to new governance systems based
on more collaborative models. This could make it easier for public administration
structures, which are highly dependent on each other, to work together. It is possible
to group and federate the activities of different structures without having to bear the
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 357

cost and complexity of creating a central entity to govern the relationships between
actors. Here, blockchain can help foster collaboration, creating network effects,
new synergies, and a more collaborative and participatory working environment,
based on shared trust. This could remove redundant tasks of data verification and
duplication of processes through the sharing of a common source validated and
accepted as such by all parties. Giving the example of the attempt launched by
the German government in the region of Zug to use blockchain technology to
assign a digital, decentralized and sovereign identity to each of its citizens, it allows
them to take part in government-related activities such as getting checked by local
authorities, voting and using public services.
In addition, the use of blockchain enhances transparency and trust as there is no
“single” owner of the data in the shared register, and it makes it easier to identify
and quantify the benefits for each of the administrations involved since the common
interest and the service of the user are the main values shared by the participants.
Finally, fraud, violation of information, and data confidentiality are problems for
government data operations. The silos within different government parts result in
multiple versions of multiuser data. Without a single version, the risk of fraud and
the difficulty of ensuring conformity increases each time a dataset is accessed, as
there is no way to distinguish correct from incorrect entries. Blockchain technology
could provide the solution by creating a shared and trusted database ledger that
is sequentially adding data cryptographically secured. This assures government
administrators that they are working with up-to-date, accurate data that is virtually
impossible to manipulate.

4.2 Potential Uses of Blockchain Technology by Financial

Sector for Better Governance

Blockchain technology seems to have great potential in financial activities and

particularly in financial markets. The main reasons are the expected decrease in
transaction costs due to the reduction in the number of intermediaries and the
security of transactions.

4.2.1 Primary Market Activities

Beyond the technology as an exchange system, the blockchain has also found
through cryptocurrencies a use as a means of raising funds, in place of both
traditional stock exchanges and the private equity market.
For several months now, new public offerings have been successful in the United
States and elsewhere; they are carried out in the form of cryptocurrencies, such as
Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH). Hence their name is Initial Coin Offering (ICO), like
the Initial Public Offering (IPO).
358 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

These operations are a fast mode of financing; it takes a few days to a few hours
to raise the funds.
Among the characteristics of ICOs and the differences with traditional fundrais-
ing, we can note the following:
– Investors often do not need to identify themselves on the platform.
– The amount raised is transparent: BTC and ETH payments are recorded on
public blockchains, which allows anyone to see the amount and amounts going
to an ICO address. However, although the amounts invested are transparent, it
is almost impossible to know if the project is a real success or if the fundraising
is artificial due to the presence of the issuer itself in the raising.
– There are sometimes minimum and maximum total fundraising amounts. If the
minimum is not reached, the investors are reimbursed and the project does not
continue. When the maximum is reached, no more tokens are distributed.

4.2.2 Means of Payment

When a payment is issued through the blockchain, no personal information is

transmitted to the merchant. On the other hand, in the case of a credit card
transaction, the payment data is recorded on a database by entities such as merchants
or service providers in the field. These entities then become targets for hackers, and
fuel fraud, the amount of which in 2014 alone reached $16 billion globally.
Another advantage of a blockchain serving as a means of payment is that
cryptocurrency payments are validated in a very short time. In the majority of cases,
1 h is enough for the transaction to be confirmed and irreversible. The money is
therefore available in the merchant’s account very quickly. In contrast, credit card
payments, although instantaneous on the customer’s side, actually take several days
to reach the merchant’s bank account. This time lag leads to a cash flow cost for
businesses that could be reduced by the blockchain. Similarly, for individuals and
small- and medium-sized businesses, an international transfer can take more than
seven working days to reach its destination. During this period, on the one hand, the
funds are immobilized, as they are not available to either the sender or the recipient
of the transfer, and, on the other hand, there is a significant exchange rate risk.
Blockchain could therefore make the payment sector more efficient.

4.2.3 Automation of Procedures

The invention of blockchains and smart contract programs could have a strong
impact on the financial sector by allowing the automation of certain procedures,
contributing to the reduction of costs and risks, particularly counterparty risk.
Counterparty risk is the risk that a business partner is unable or unwilling to meet
its commitments for one reason or another. For example, a company or government
experiencing poor economic conditions may decide to unilaterally defer payment of
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 359

its debts. If the terms of a contract are clearly defined in a smart contract, which is
itself registered in a blockchain, the execution of the contract becomes unavoidable,
regardless of the degree of honesty of the parties involved. The notion of ambiguity
then disappears completely, thus reducing the risk of the counterparty. The reduction
of costs comes again from the possibility of abstaining from intermediaries.
We can thus distinguish several areas that could be affected by automation of
procedures. These areas are financial transactions, crowdfunding, insurance, and
supply chains.
– Financial transactions
The automation of financial transactions is an innovation of particular interest to
banks. Deutsche Bank has revealed that it is researching to develop a smart bond
project whose characteristic is that coupons are automatically deducted from the
borrower and credited to the lender by the smart contract.
We can further imagine smart contracts on derivatives, whose post-trading pro-
cess would be carried out automatically. The smart contract could thus automatically
trigger the payment of margins, continuously throughout the day, draw down the
account of the party concerned, and close when one of the counterparties defaults.
By reducing the counterparty risk in this way, the services of clearinghouses could
become superfluous. All contract data (amount, involved parties, duration, etc.) are
recorded in the blockchain, becoming then a database that could be consulted by
regulators.
– Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is an alternative means of financing that aims to allow companies,
especially startups, to finance themselves directly from individuals. The objective is
to short-circuit the classical way by avoiding banks, which allows reducing the cost
of financing. It is even in some cases the only possible source of financing, in cases
where banks are reluctant to grant credits. Blockchain and smart contracts allow
investors to go into the field of crowdfunding by allowing direct financing between
individuals and companies.
– Insurance
The insurance sector presents characteristics that make blockchain and smart
contracts potentially useful for it. Indeed, the declaration and claim procedures are
often tedious to complete for the victims and costly to process for the insurance
companies. Smart contracts could allow automating this administrative part and the
triggering of compensations. In the continuity of companies like Uber or Airbnb,
which promote collaborative consumption, projects have been launched to create a
cooperative insurance system, without going through a classic insurance company.
– Supply chain management
There are four main strategies on how to use the basic idea of blockchain
technology to improve supply chains themselves or develop new business models.
– Improve transparency:
360 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

– Authenticate products
– Secure the traceability of certificates
– Reduce the audit burden required by internal systems and processes
– Understand product characteristics
– Facilitate collaboration
– Provide end-to-end data on your location in the supply chain
– Simplify and automate invoicing and payments
– Easily streamline processes
– Facilitate manufacturer-based (rather than distributor-based) reward pro-
grams

4.2.4 The Impact of Blockchain on the Banking Sector

The banking sector could see itself transformed with blockchain technology that can
promise of creating a secure environment, or decentralization and disintermediation.
This is due to the prospects of lowering costs, reducing the risk of default and
security of financial transactions, and reducing delays. Blockchain and, more
specifically, Bitcoin were created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which
severely damaged the trust people had in financial institutions. It was therefore
necessary to find a way to operate without them. This solution was found with
the blockchain which is based on the assumption that trusted third parties such as
financial institutions are no longer necessary and would be replaced by a distributed
consensus. Indeed, this idea of eliminating the intermediaries traditionally necessary
for financial transactions, such as payments, leads some to believe that banks, as we
know them today, are doomed to disappear.

5 Empirical Literature Review

This section presents a literature review on the effect of blockchain technology on

several aspects of corporate governance

5.1 Blockchain Technology

Kristoffer and Swanson [13] study the relationship between blockchain technology
and underlying value factors and use a conceptual model based on UTAUT. The
results show that the factors of performance, social influence, and trust act positively
on blockchain technology.
Holotiuk and Moormann [16] consider that the adoption of blockchain orga-
nizational technology depends on factors of technology, project management,
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 361

environment, people, and organization using a data triangulation methodology

based on interview data and archival data by conducting in-depth interviews in
11 cases with experts leading to the adoption of blockchain. The objective is to
better understand the organization and adoption to explore the factors that influence
adoption. The results show that the technology can replace existing technologies and
the adoption of this technology is not an organization but rather an ongoing process.
Carter et al. [5] examined the adoption of public blockchain using a review on
354 items. The results show that blockchain application adoption in e-government
is still very limited and there is a lack of empirical data.
Grover et al. [14] propose a conceptual framework for blockchain technology
adoption capturing the complex relationships between institutional, market, and
technical factors; this framework shows that different outcomes are possible and
the factors interact with each other. The results show us that the organization is
impacted by the adoption of blockchain.
With the enlarged research devoted into the exploration of the potential business
opportunities of blockchain technology adoption, the advantages of using this
technology become more recognizable and clear.

5.2 Blockchain and Corporate Governance

At the moment, blockchain technology is one of the most discussed topics. Some
recent research discusses its impact on corporate governance; there is a vast and
growing literature on the effect of blockchain technology, but very few studies
explore the applications of blockchain, especially in corporate governance. Our
study is most relevant to Yermack [30], which focuses on the impact of blockchain
adoption in corporate governance on different stakeholders such as managers, small
shareholders, institutional investors, and other parties. Yermack [30] finds that
the adoption of blockchain in corporate governance would lead to reduced costs,
increased liquidity, transparency, and accounting accuracy. Our study differs from
these articles and prior literature in several respects.
The applications of blockchain technology are numerous. Record-keeping via
blockchain can solve the problems associated with companies’ inability to keep
accurate and timely records of who holds their shares, thereby reducing settlement
time. According to CPA Canada and AICPA [37], “Blockchain technology has
the potential to impact all recordkeeping processes, including the way transactions
are initiated, processed, authorized, recorded and reported.” Blockchain offers new
opportunities to simplify the agency relationship between participating companies,
generating trust and transparency. Yermack [29] and Lepore et al. [21] believed
that blockchain presents a high degree of increased accuracy, efficiency, and
transparency in shareholding, corporate voting, and record keeping.
Bradley [12] argues that the use of blockchain significantly reduces illegal
corporate practices. Lafarre and Van der Elst [20] assume that for shareholders,
blockchain could offer lower trading costs and more transparent ownership records
362 I. Bensalah and A. K. Abdelmoula

while allowing visible real-time observation of share transfers from one owner to
another. Besides, according to Kahan and Rock [18], the adoption of blockchain to
record stock ownership could solve many long-standing problems associated with
the inability of organizations to maintain accurate and timely records of who owns
their stock.
Nakasumi [41] shows that a decentralized platform improves and facilitates the
decision process of storing sensitive data. Also, Kshetri [19] states the need to
develop blockchain solutions in supply chains with the argument of its current
dependence on the Internet of Things. The current way of sharing information
between parties within the supply chain is mainly through enterprise resource plan-
ning (ERP) systems such as SAP. According to Casey and Wong [38], blockchain
technology allows supply chain partners and stakeholders to identify bottlenecks in
product flow. The system can detect if products have been sitting in one place for too
long or in the wrong location, which is especially important for refrigerated goods.
Queiroz Maciel et al. [39] examined the impact of blockchain technology on supply
chain adoption using the PLS-SEM model in a transnational context (in India and
the United States). The results suggest that trust among supply chain actors is not
affecting blockchain adoption.
Caldero et al. [4] argue that blockchain offers partners the ability to operate
securely without the intervention of a central authority or any intermediary. This
enables the broader development of peer-to-peer economies and provides opportu-
nities for a wide range of applications, from e-commerce to corporate governance.
Catalini et al. [6] affirm that integrating various bank ledgers via blockchain
would speed up processes and reduce costs. However, Cong et al. [40] find that
smart contracts may lead to an increase in collusive behavior among participants.
Several studies explore payment system applications for blockchain.
According to Kaal [17], the Blockchain allows companies and other forms of
business organizations to be complemented by agency constructs that build on
this technology. Thus, blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
(DAO) governance enables dynamic regulatory features that facilitate decentralized
regulatory solutions.

6 Conclusion

Blockchain technology has revolutionized almost every sector of the business

world. Whether it is banking, insurance, general management, or marketing, it
is being touted as the key symbol of the fourth industrial revolution and one
of the biggest disruptors for many industries [4]. Blockchain technology can not
only transform the organizational culture but also increase trust between different
stakeholders. The main objective of the study was to demonstrate how blockchain
technology can be useful in the context of corporate governance. We can see that
all aspects of corporate governance can be improved as a result of the adoption of
blockchain, namely, improving efficiency by eliminating the administrative burden,
Using Blockchain to Improve Corporate Governance 363

guaranteeing greater transparency, minimizing the risk of fraud for organizations by

providing a complete audit trajectory, and enabling efficient and easy collaboration
between different government entities.
The technology has the potential to revolutionize the governance system. This
chapter also highlights the opportunities for the adoption of blockchain technology
at the governance level involving aspects of management, oversight, and account-
ability. The chapter’s findings also align with available research [10, 12, 15, 20, 26]
and suggest that corporate governance could change and benefit in different ways
from the adoption of blockchain technology.

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Blockchain Security as “People
Security”: Applying Sociotechnical
Security to Blockchain Technology

Kelsie Nabben

1 Introduction

Blockchain is forecast by some to be “future of financial and cybersecurity,”

with the potential to “revolutionize applications and redefine the digital economy”
[1]. Blockchains hold great promise to re-instate “trust” in society by enabling
coordination without relying on trusted third parties [2]. If this is the case, then it is
imperative to develop blockchains into functional, digital institutional infrastructure
with not just transparent but legible rules of governance, operation, and security.
Yet, it is rarely acknowledged that security in blockchains is contextual, according
to the type of blockchain architecture, the governance model, the needs of the
participants using the system, and the context in which it is being applied. Beginning
from the premise that blockchains are sociotechnical systems, this chapter explores
the question: “What security guarantees do different types of blockchain-based
systems offer people?”. The aim of this analysis is to apply a sociotechnical security
approach to blockchains to clarify the expectations, assumptions, and security
guarantees for those participating in blockchain infrastructure, in order for this
technology to more accurately meet the needs and expectations of people. By
adopting a sociotechnical security analysis framework, this chapter argues that both
public and private blockchains have security shortcomings at the social, technical,
and infrastructural layer. Given the sociotechnical nature of blockchain-based sys-
tems, this sociotechnical security approach is termed “people security.” For private
blockchains, these trust and security issues are evident in macrosocial (societal)
applications. For public blockchains, security issues are present at the micro-
(individual) and meso- (organizational) levels and unknown at the macrosocial level

K. Nabben ()
RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 367
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_16
368 K. Nabben

as there is a lack of suitable desktop case studies by which to analyze security

in broader, social applications. These “people security” findings are important as
the sociotechnical security gaps of different types of blockchains across different
applications are underexplored, despite the increasing prominence of blockchain-
based systems in organizations and society.

1.1 Structure of the Chapter

First, this chapter defines blockchains as a sociotechnical construct and outlines

the different types of blockchains and the traditional promises of “blockchain
security.” Then, it adopts a sociotechnical security lens to frame “blockchain
security” as “people security” and applies a sociotechnical security approach to
both public blockchains and private blockchains (“Applying Sociotechnical Security
to Blockchains” section). Here, it becomes evident that both public and private
blockchains hold inherent security limitations in terms of technical security, trust in
social processes, and infrastructural dependencies. This chapter finds that although
public blockchains afford users with a greater participatory role in technical and
governance processes, private blockchains are more commonly being adopted
in contexts as macrosocial coordination systems, resulting in inherent security
limitations for users of these systems through centralization and lack of ownership
or participation in governance processes (“Observations and Findings” section). If
blockchains are to become any closer to fulfilling their promise as “tools of trust”
to offer more secure institutional infrastructures in society, a sociotechnical “people
security” approach is essential (“In Code We Trust? The Limitations of Security in
Blockchains” section). Further research directions are then proposed to extend this
theoretical framework (“Conclusion and Further Directions” section).

1.2 Methodology

This chapter adopts a science and technology studies (STS) methodology to analyze
blockchains as interdisciplinary sociotechnical systems that are co-constructed in
relations between the technology itself and the “real-world” social processes, norms,
and application in various forms of organizations [3]. The approach is grounded
in a social-constructivist view of security in sociotechnical systems, to reflect on
the narrower technological determinist perspective which dominates much of the
current discourse on blockchain security. Sociotechnical studies allow us to view
cryptoeconomic organizing technologies as complex social systems that operate at
three primary levels: the work systems level, the whole organization level, and the
macrosocial system. Eric Trist first described sociotechnical systems, in the context
of the coal mining industry, as micro-level work practices, meso-level organizational
practices, and macro-level social systems [4]. All three of these “multiscale” levels
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 369

are apparent in the organizational capabilities of blockchains as complex systems,

in the actions of individual agents, the system-level setting of objectives, and the
structural, system level [5]. Hayes suggests that blockchain-based cryptoeconomic
systems should not be studied as money but as systems that organize individuals
through the radical disintermediation of institutions [6]. Thus, employing STS
methods is a suitable approach to reveal the implicit and embedded technical, social,
economic, and political assumptions and decisions that influence how blockchains
are applied in social contexts [7].
A sociotechnical security framework will be applied to analyze how under-
standings of blockchain security can evolve to consider “people security.” This
framing broadens existing technical approaches to inspect the social layer (people
and processes), the software layer (code and applications), and the infrastructure
layer (physical and technological infrastructure) [8]. This sociotechnical approach
to blockchain security is termed “people security.” I then draw on qualitative, digital
ethnography research insights to examine a number of case studies of both public
and private blockchains to test the people security approach.

1.3 Key Contributions

1. Framing of blockchains as a sociotechnical construct and multiscale institutional

infrastructure that operates at micro-, meso-, and macrosocial levels across
different implementations
2. A sociotechnical analysis of the security attributes and limitations of blockchain
security for people across various types of blockchains and blockchain applica-
tions, to expose the trust assumptions and security issues
3. An analysis of the security assumptions for participants across different types
of blockchain applications, including possible future risks from blockchain
automation and why blockchain may not be a desirable digital infrastructure in
macrosocial contexts

2 Blockchains as a Sociotechnical Construct

The innovation of public blockchains is the application of cryptoeconomic mech-

anisms to facilitate coordination at each level of a complex, sociotechnical digital
system. At the technical level, blockchains incorporate the encoding of economic
game theory mechanisms of byzantine fault tolerance and governance rules to
enforce certain attributes, such as Sybil resistance, execute transactions, and perform
certain functions as part of a broader system. At an organizational infrastruc-
ture level, blockchains are responsible for coordination within a system. At a
macrosocial level, blockchains operate as a coordinating infrastructure at the social,
economic, and political level in society [9]. This is why a deeper understanding of
370 K. Nabben

the security affordances and limitations of this digital infrastructure for the people
that use it is imperative.
Blockchain security in a cybersecurity sense tends to consider blockchains as
a technical object of inquiry, when, in fact, they are a sociotechnical construct
[6]. Blockchains are comprised of both software code, hardware, developers,
maintainers, users, standards, policy frameworks, and social processes. Blockchains
enable transactions between participants in a network. They can be centrally issued
and administrated (“permissioned” or “semi-permissioned”), such as private and
consortium blockchains, or public and “permissionless.” The key attributes of both
public and private blockchains demonstrate the ways in which security is both a
technical and a social consideration.

3 Different Types of Blockchains

Blockchain technologies can be divided into three broad categories. These distinc-
tions are important for understanding the role of people in the system and how the
system operates in the context in which it is applied.

3.1 Public Blockchains

Public blockchains emphasize transparency and participation. The consensus of

transactions is “decentralized,” in that anyone can participate in validating transac-
tions on the network, and the software code is publicly available or “open-source.”
Examples include Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Through their technical attributes, public blockchains offer the unique ability
to provide decentralized consensus. Public blockchain networks pursue distributed
consensus through “cryptoeconomics” or digital tokens to align incentives and
ensure cooperation in a distributed network. In this case, “decentralization” refers to
the characteristic of having no political center of control and no architectural central
point of failure in the design of the software system [10]. The degree to which
a blockchain is decentralized depends on the design of the consensus algorithm,
issuance of cryptoeconomic incentives, ownership of cryptographic “private keys,”
and governance of the network. Governance considerations include who can develop
the software code, who can participate in the consensus mechanism, and who
can take part in ownership and governance processes to maintain the network.
The consensus mechanisms of the dominant blockchains by market capitalization,
Bitcoin and Ethereum, are “proof-of-work” (PoW) or “proof-of-stake” (PoS).
These unique attributes are why blockchain is ideologically conceived of as an
infrastructural solution for self-governance, to address macrosocial coordination
problems in society [11].
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 371

3.2 Private Blockchains

Private blockchains mean that participation in validating transactions on the network

is restricted to only include parties that are approved members by a central
administrator. Thus, private blockchains are centralized and operate more closely
to a traditional database or governance structure.
Private blockchains often employ a “proof-of-authority” (PoA) consensus
approach, meaning only approved authorities, or a single authority, can participate
in validation [12]. Transaction data is most often kept private, making private
blockchains more suitable for internal, secure environment business needs, such as
access, authentication, and record keeping.

3.3 Consortium Blockchains

Consortium blockchains are comprised of participants that are known to one another
and preapproved by a central authority to participate in consensus mechanisms in
a blockchain network. This “semi-permissioned” approach allows for a network to
be distributed, or partly decentralized, while allowing for a degree of control over a
network between participants.
Consortium blockchains can reach consensus via PoW, PoS, PoA, or other
consensus mechanisms, such as delegated proof-of-stake and more. Transaction data
may be kept private. This type of blockchain may be used between known parties,
in supply chain management, banking, or Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

4 Security in Different Types of Blockchains: Surfacing

Assumptions

Blockchain security research is deeply focused on the technical attributes of

security, which are under continuous development and improvement to strive toward
the goal of offering stronger security guarantees to users [13]. All blockchains
rely on secure software code to enable peer-to-peer transactions through the use
of digital currency to offer security to users. A number of blockchain cybersecurity
vulnerabilities remain under active investigation in the field of computer science
[14].
What security means for users of a blockchain network is different across
different disciplines. While cybersecurity focuses on securing networks against
external threats, sociotechnical security focused on securing people, as participants
in the network.
372 K. Nabben

Public blockchains are often referred to as decentralized, transparent,

autonomous, immutable, and pseudonymous [10]. Transactions are executed
by software code in “smart contracts” or rules that govern the network [15].
According to the game theory of “cryptoeconomics,” economic incentives align
the interests of participants for cooperation within the network. Ownership of these
cryptographically secure digital assets makes it very expensive to tamper with the
network and prevent “double-spending” the same digital assets in the network,
despite distributed computation of transactions between unknown parties [16].
The broader “consensus algorithms” that secure the network against cooption or
“forking” of the ledger of transaction history via a 51% attack to control the network
differ depending on the design of the particular blockchain network [17].
Thus, the fundamental threat which “blockchain security” protects against
in public blockchains through technical characteristics and economic consensus
mechanisms is the threat of centralization. The attribute of decentralization in public
blockchains refers to freedom from relying on central intermediaries in its original
interpretation from the cypherpunk culture and cryptoanarchic politics from which
Bitcoin, the first fully functioning decentralized public blockchain, emerged [18].
In contrast, when information and validation on a blockchain are limited to
certain parties, as with private and consortium blockchains, the privacy and security
guarantees for users of that chain become very different. On private and permis-
sioned blockchains, transactions can be censored through corruption or collusion,
rules can be altered without the consent of users, and the administrator owns the
digital assets of users if they hold the cryptographic “keys” to that data. Storage and
computation may be distributed, but the “nodes” (people that run software code)
that validate transactions are known to other parties in the network [1]. Thus, the
authority to govern is not decentralized. These design and governance attributes
have critical security implications for the assumptions of people that participate in
the network if blockchains are applied as a coordination system in society but still
controlled by a central issuer of digital tokens and administrator of the system.
Understanding the type of blockchain, who is being trusted in its operation
and maintenance, the context in which the blockchain is being applied, and the
expectations and needs of participants is vital in reframing blockchain security for
sociotechnical settings.

5 Applying Sociotechnical Security to Blockchains

Sociotechnical security allows for a broader security analysis lens, encompassing

the social, technical, and contextual aspects of a digital system. These aspects
are integral to studying the security of blockchains as macrosocial governance
infrastructure in society. This lens allows us to reframe “blockchain security” from
referring to “decentralization from trusted third parties” to “people security,” which
considers the expectations and the needs of users as participants in blockchain-based
systems.
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 373

A sociotechnical analysis is particularly valuable in analyzing blockchain sys-

tems in macrosocial contexts. People depend on “macrosocial” institutional infras-
tructure, such as financial systems, communication infrastructure, and voting pro-
cesses, to govern society. As these institutions become digitized in the post-internet
era, including through the adoption of blockchain technology, then blockchain sys-
tem design requires deliberate attention regarding the promises of decentralization
and “trustless” security that are often assumed.
Governance in blockchain-based systems presents a unique set of security
challenges. Governance rules are encoded in the technical aspects of blockchain-
based systems and, thus, formalized in software code. The aim of governance
in sociotechnical settings is to recognize the need to support flexible interactions
among participants in the administration of network settings [3]. While public
blockchains encourage people to participate in software development, consensus
mechanisms, and ongoing governance decisions, private blockchains maintain these
governance functions centrally, reducing the role of people to that of “users,”
rather than participants. Despite the popularity of blockchains as an infrastructural
solution, these contexts of public and private governance matter for those using these
systems. A sociotechnical lens to analyze governance in blockchains questions what
is external, or “constituted of,” and what is internal, or “constituted within,” via
interactions between administrators, technology, participants, and other stakehold-
ers in the network [19].
More limited security frameworks that only focus on the technical components
of a system do not fully address the challenges of participatory information systems,
as they tend to disassociate people as “passive recipients of engineering decisions”
instead of orienting the system around the expectations and needs of people [20].
This is not to say that existing security practices are unnecessary or wrong, but
rather that science and technology studies can further enhance security practices by
drawing in an analysis of the social aspects of a system. This is especially relevant
in digital systems that operate in an institutional infrastructure role in society, such
as blockchain. Systems that are secure when used by people, known as “effective
security,” are complex and difficult to achieve because of gaps in the designer’s
awareness of user goals, threats, and behaviors in practice [21].
There are numerous frameworks by which to guide a sociotechnical analysis
of blockchains. Rather than inventing a new security framework, this chapter
adopts a general sociotechnical security approach and applies this to blockchains
as macrosocial institutional technology.
Sociotechnical security offers a general approach to study the interacting layers
of technical, social, and contextual aspects of security, by asking “who in the
community participating in the network is in need of protection?”, “what features
can be exploited within this dynamic, human network—including technical as
well as agency, governance, and influence?”, “what are the external and internal
threats to participants, including other participants?”, and “who is responsible
and accountable for securing participants in the network?” [20]. An example of
a specific sociotechnical security framework is “Sociotechnical Attack Analysis”
or “STEAL,” which supports both a formal technical analysis and a hypothetical
374 K. Nabben

deductive social analysis of a complex system [21]. Security threats in sociotech-

nical systems relate to both intentional and nonintentional exploits. Latour refers
to using a system outside of its anticipated context of use or application as
“antiprograms,” arguing that this can be counter to the designer’s intent [22].
These lenses require us to consider the expectations and needs of participants in
the system. If blockchains are to be applied as organizational and macrosocial
structures, a sociotechnical understanding of blockchain security is required, to
place the participants within the system as the referent focus of security.
The “people security” approach takes an existing sociotechnical security frame-
work and applies it to blockchain, to investigate the role of people in both public and
private blockchain instantiations. “People security” applies a simple, pre-existing
three-layer sociotechnical security analysis to blockchains. This includes the social
layer (people and processes), the software layer (code and applications), and the
infrastructure layer (physical and technological infrastructure) [8].
The next section of this chapter applies a sociotechnical security analysis to
blockchains to address how the social, technical, and infrastructural layers of the
system are interconnected, with the aim of revealing assumptions about where
and how blockchains are applied in relation to context, participant needs, and
expectations. The aim of this approach is to determine if blockchain systems serve
the security needs of users and whether the blockchain architecture of private, with
people as “users,” or public, with people as “participants,” makes a difference to
their security as a social outcome of the system.

6 People Security and Public Blockchains

Public blockchains remove the ability for central parties to unilaterally change the
rules of the system to secure users against third-party interference. They do so by
aligning economic incentives among participants to enable “trustless” interactions,
whereby actors or “nodes” in a network can collaborate with others they do not know
or trust. This is often referred to as “trustlessness” [23]. The notion of blockchains
as a trustless technology has been reinforced in numerous studies on blockchains,
advocating for “code as law,” whereby participants can collaborate with others that
they do not know or trust according to the rules of the software code-governed
network [24].
Yet, “trustlessness” requires trust. Rather than a rhetoric of trustlessness, we
must interrogate who is being trusted to design, deploy, and secure blockchain-
based systems against the expectations of participants in that network to afford or
undermine security guarantees about user information, user-owned value, and more.
Blockchain security as a guarantee against the threat of centralization and a promise
of trustlessness can be misleading.
In the first instance, the rules of blockchain-based technology are a product
of the context and beliefs in which they were developed and then applied. For
example, the narrative of “trustlessness” is heavily embedded in the libertarian
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 375

ideology and tech-utopian narratives that have informed the development of the
technology [18]. The development of peer-to-peer electronic cash emerged from
the discourse and action of the “cypherpunks.” This heterogeneous group of
cryptography advocates, developers, and philosophers jointly participated in an
online mailing list, administered by cryptoanarchists Timothy May, Eric Hughes,
and John Gilmore [25]. This politics heavily influences the ideology and security
aspirations of public blockchains.
In public blockchains, the ideology of trustlessness refers to the “cypherpunk
philosophy of leveraging the economic cost of an attack on the network vs. the cost
to use and maintain it, to preserve the autonomy of individuals that are reflected in
cryptoeconomics consensus mechanisms” [26]. Trustlessness in not requiring third-
party verification to execute transactions has been conflated with broader meanings
of trust, which can create misleading assumptions regarding the capabilities of
blockchains for users beyond the initial context [27]. Bitcoin, the initial “peer-
to-peer electronic cash,” is described by its inventor, the pseudonymous “Satoshi
Nakamoto,” as being “an electronic payment system based on cryptographic
security instead of trust allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with
each other without the need for a trusted third party” [28]. From these origins,
trustlessness is a normative property that represents what people hope to achieve
with blockchain technology, rather than a security guarantee.
Trustlessness really refers to “trust minimization,” as it is not possible for
participants to maintain zero trust at every layer of the blockchain [29]. When
blockchains are applied to manage macrosocial interactions that are responsible
for the coordination of, and arbitration between, people in society, they function
as institutions. The aim here is not to substitute human trust with computation but
to offer trust guarantees through technical and social mechanisms, thus establishing
“trustful” infrastructures [30].
Public blockchains require trust between stakeholders in numerous ways. Trust
between people is required on an ongoing basis between stakeholders in the
“multi-sided” aspects of a blockchain-based system, including code development by
developers, maintenance by miners, and participation by users. For example, coor-
dination between software developers is necessary in each change to the software
protocol code, such as issuance of a cryptocurrency (e.g., Initial Coin Offering)
and network upgrades or “forks” [31]. Similarly, the consensus mechanism that
affords the system with “fault tolerance” depends on access to hardware “miners.”
Satoshi highlighted that it is computationally impractical for an attacker to change
the public history of transactions “if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power”
[28]. Yet, at the infrastructure layer, cryptocurrency hardware mining has become an
extremely competitive industry across the manufacturing and supply chain, where
innovation gains in computing power (such as the leap from GPU miners to ASIC
miners) can “pre-mine” with increased hash rate to win more cryptocurrency-based
block rewards, before releasing the technology to market [32]. According to a study
by the University of Cambridge which analyzed the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses
of Bitcoin miners, China controls 65% of the mining power or “hash rate,” with the
United States second at just over 7% [33]. This means that collusion might influence
376 K. Nabben

the underlying record of transactions in forks or other governance disputes, thus

demonstrating the need for trust in some actors in the network for blockchain
security.
Transition from “proof-of-work” to “proof-of-stake” consensus is also a social
coordination process. Proof-of-stake is the proposed solution to the risk of central-
ization of hardware miners in “Ethereum,” the second largest blockchain by market
capitalization. Yet, barriers to entry exist in the requirements to own substantial
amounts of cryptocurrencies to “stake” in order to validate transactions and
secure the blockchain, and this process can be socially engineered. Cryptocurrency
“whales” who own enough funds to move the market (such as initial team members
of a project or hedge funds) can collude to dominate the staking market or
“flash-crash” the market price of a cryptocurrency to endanger the security of the
protocol. Another vulnerability of staking-based public blockchains is that trust
can be allocated to “staking pool” infrastructure providers. These “staking-as-a-
service” providers set up and maintain validator nodes for large proportions of
some protocols, which forms points of failure if their systems or processes are
compromised [34]. In reality, blockchain technology can be compromised at the
technical, software code, and social coordination layers in systems that are shaped
by software engineers, social processes, and market forces.
Another limitation to “trustlessness” in public blockchain security is that the
social layer of governance is still in open experimentation and is not yet, if
at all, decentralized. This includes the invention of software-based governance
via “decentralized autonomous corporations” (DACs), later termed “decentralized
autonomous organizations” (DAOs) [35]. The idea is not to replace trust with code
but to provide accountability by making the rules of the system transparent through
publicly available, open-source code [36]. Yet, decentralized infrastructure does
not necessarily lead to the decentralization of influence within that infrastructure.
“Any blockchain-based organization whose governance system relies mainly or
exclusively on market dynamics is, therefore, ultimately bound to fail” [37]. Despite
technical sophistication, security through decentralization and trustlessness at the
micro and meso levels in public blockchains is difficult to achieve due to social,
technical, and infrastructural dependencies.

6.1 Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Public blockchains are most readily being adopted as the infrastructural base
for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). The fundamentals of
“Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs) are a community of
participants, working toward a shared objective that leverage decentralized
technologies to do so in a scalable manner. The term DAO emerged out of the
field of cybernetics to describe a multi-agent system that self-governs toward an
objective [38]. DAOs have been defined in relations to blockchain communities as “a
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 377

blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves

mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and
whose governance is decentralised (i.e. independent from central control)” [39].
DAOs are heterogeneous, meaning that the goals, scale, and participants of
DAOs vary widely. They can be micro- or macro-scale, be socially focused or
technologically focused, and exist for purposes such as shared investment vehicles,
special interest hobby groups, or software development (e.g., Flamingo DAO, Seed
Club, and 1Hive). There have been rapid uptake and prolific growth of the number,
size, and purposes of DAOs since the term was adopted in blockchain communities
in 2015 [40].
DAOs enable people to participate in the ownership and governance of coordi-
nation infrastructure. For example, “ConstitutionDAO” was a group of people that
collectively pooled funds in a failed attempt to purchase an original copy of the US
Constitution [41]. This has led to ongoing social experimentation in self-governance
and collective action. People also initiated a number of funding DAOs to rapidly
raise millions of dollars to donate to support others in the crisis in Ukraine [42]. Due
to their flexibility and scalability, DAOs may be the avenue for more widespread
adoption of public, permissionless blockchain infrastructure.
The next section explores a number of private blockchain case studies by
applying the sociotechnical people security framework to investigate the social,
software, and infrastructure layers of private blockchains in action at a macroso-
cial level, including which community participating in the network is in need
of protection, what features can be exploited within the network, and who is
responsible and accountable for securing participants in the network. In contrast
to public blockchains, permissioned blockchains are more readily being applied to
macrosocial uses at a societal level on communities outside of software developers
themselves, and thus this context has been chosen for the analysis of private
blockchains as relevant to assess against the parameters of the sociotechnical
“people security” approach.

7 Applying a Sociotechnical Security Analysis to Private

Blockchain Networks

Private blockchains are prevalent in a number of real-world, macrosocial-level

applications across humanitarian, government, and corporate applications. Each
case study below focuses on a use case of blockchain as a macrosocial institutional
infrastructure for coordinating goods, services, and people in society. Each example
is then run through a sociotechnical analysis.
378 K. Nabben

7.1 Humanitarian Case Study: Blockchain-Based Cash

Voucher Assistance

Blockchains have been piloted in a number of humanitarian, not-for-profit organiza-

tion use cases at the macrosocial level, predicated on governing the most vulnerable
with efficiency. While some “humanitarian”-oriented adoption is localized and
organic, in response to hyperinflation and mistrust in government, like that of
Venezuela, many cases are centrally issued by not-for-profit or aid organizations
[43].
One of the first high-profile humanitarian use cases of blockchain is the World
Food Programme’s (WFP) “Building Blocks” project [44]. Blockchains were
applied in the project as a ledger of transactions and settlement layer to transfer
cash aid to Syrian refugees in a Jordanian refugee camp. The system is intended to
“create more choice” for refugees to spend their cash aid at the supermarket [44].
The project received overwhelmingly positive coverage in the media [45]. However,
this blockchain-based system has a number of shortcomings which could equate to
significant people security vulnerabilities for participants.
The community participating in the network in need of protection are Syrian
refugees, who are a highly vulnerable population fleeing a civil war. Protection of
identity is a necessity for this population [46]. Yet, digital identities are being created
that are permanently linked to biometric indicators which could then be hacked and
traced back to family members or used as leverage to direct behaviors. Biometric
registrations were made mandatory when receiving cash aid, making participation
in the system mandatory and not voluntary.
Furthermore, a number of technical and social features can be exploited in the
system. The system is inextricably linked in political and infrastructural contexts
which may not be in the best interests of users. For example, the blockchain is
centrally issued and administered by WFP, and administrative access is afforded to
a consortium of international aid organizations [47]. This results in significant power
asymmetries in terms of how the system operates, what data is recorded, where it is
stored, who has permission to access the data, and for what purposes. The biometric
iris scanners used are provided by a local Jordanian company, IrisGuard, meaning
persistent, biometric digital identities of refugees are being stored locally. The UN
Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has also used IrisGuard to register and store the irises
of 2.5 million people on UNHCR’s “Eyecloud” server, alongside other personal
data for cross-referencing [48]. Once data is recorded, it is hackable, replicable,
and vulnerable to technical or human exploitation [49]. The IrisGuard database
and Eyecloud are also linked to Amman Bank ATMs in Jordan, where refugees
can scan their eyes and withdraw cash. Numerous technical systems and levels
of cybersecurity, as well as numerous permissions to access and correlate highly
sensitive data, with little to no consent from participants persist throughout this
system.
In this case, accountability falls on the humanitarian agencies who are respon-
sible for ethically providing aid without establishing systemic vulnerabilities for
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 379

recipients. Although the system may provide operational control and coordination
efficiencies among aid agencies, this instantiation of the digital economy inextri-
cably links the biometric digital identity of refugees with an immutable ledger,
across numerous local and international databases. This means that the system is
not cryptographically secure and requires significant trust in the IT security of local
companies and government agencies. Here, blockchain is simply a database which is
centrally issued and administered, rather than a digital infrastructure that empowers
users to participate in the ownership or governance of the system.
Similar private, blockchain-based applications in humanitarian contexts are being
explored by UNICEF, the Human Rights Foundation, the International Federation
of Red Cross, and Oxfam [50].

7.2 Government Case Study: Central Bank Digital Currencies

Blockchains are also gaining prominence as the infrastructure for nation-state

central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The development of national CBDCs is
underway in multiple countries, including Australia, Canada, and China [51]. Public
blockchain platforms that enable digital currency, such as Bitcoin and Facebook’s
“Libra” platform, are perceived as competitors to nation-state central bank-issued
currency in the move for governments to issue their own central bank digital
currency [52]. Some of the justifications for CBDCs include financial inclusion
of people in remote and marginalized regions and consumer protection as a low-
cost interbank settlement layer. However, what Canada has coined the “road to
digital currency” has been referred to in the case of China as “the road to digital
unfreedom,” with fears of state surveillance, as the system is designed in the
interests of administrators, with centralized development, issuance, and governance
[53].
Digitization of entire nation-state monetary systems creates astounding data
security vulnerabilities for populations. Significant concerns have been raised on
the data security of government-led databases, as this sensitive national data creates
a target for hackers from both the inside and the outside that could be exploited for
geopolitical reasons [54].
Unlike other digital asset platforms, CBDCs may not be voluntary for partici-
pants. As digital identity, value, and transactions are tied to citizenship, participation
in CBDCs could be mandatory. The system is not intended to be decentralized or
interoperable in order to circumvent the threat of centralization.
Furthermore, the myth of financial inclusion is predicated on access to propri-
etary computing devices and digital literacy, most of which is not within reach of
the most vulnerable, who rely on the cash economy [55]. The aims of CBDCs are
antithetical to the public blockchain ideology of decentralization. CBDCs will not
offer anonymity, and the advantages of cash for users to avoid exposure to customer
profiling or hacking will be lost in the transition to digital currency.
380 K. Nabben

Of course, CBDCs are contextual, and the risks differ according to where and
how the system is designed and issued [56]. In general, the introduction of CDBCs
could lead to disintermediation of the banking sector, trigger digital bank runs, and
threaten banks’ liquidity and business models [57]. Given the risks to participants in
the network vs. the gains, CBDCs do not offer a positive macrosocial infrastructure
that is private, decentralized, censorship resistant, or cost-saving and places a
significant burden on the state to secure technical infrastructure and the data of
citizens against geopolitical threats.

7.3 Corporate Case Study: Private Currency Platforms

Corporations are also able to leverage their user audience to issue blockchain-
based platforms. In corporate situations, blockchains are often applied internally,
to perform a specific function in corporations and industry, such as transparent
record keeping, as a tool for organizational efficiency, and cost reduction [58].
Here, blockchains are often private or permissioned networks, responsible for
coordination of supply chain goods and record keeping between known, distributed
parties. Examples include supply chain experimentation to ship and trace almonds
from Australia to Germany and J.P. Morgan’s “JPM Coin” for interbank settlement
between institutional clients [59]. However, corporate blockchain-based currency
platforms have also been proposed, such as the prominent case of Facebook’s
“Libra” blockchain (now re-branded to “Diem”).
Facebook’s Libra blockchain was proposed as a solution for global payments
and financial inclusion. Through its own digital wallet called “Calibra,” Facebook
is aiming to capture the “super-app” trend by forming a digital ecosystem within
its own services to capture customers. China has already digitized the majority of
consumer payments through corporate giants Alibaba and Tencent “digital wallet”
applications which account for 90 percent of the $17 trillion mobile payments’
market in China in 2017 [60]. Due to Facebook’s poor record on consumer
protection and user privacy, alarms were raised by global data protection and privacy
enforcement authorities [61]. Libra raises significant concerns regarding the security
of participants in the network.
When they made this announcement, Libra was heavily criticized as competing
against sovereign currencies and because of Facebook’s record of consumer protec-
tion and privacy breaches. A number of “Libra Association” consortium members
subsequently left, including PayPal, eBay, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa [62]. A top
Senate Banking Committee official stated that “we cannot allow giant companies
to assert their power over critical public infrastructure. The largest banks and the
largest tech companies do not act in the interest of working Americans, but in the
interest of themselves and their investors” [63]. This instantiation of privately owned
and governed blockchain as a potentially global payment railway became a critical
public infrastructure in society. Thus, security for users is paramount and yet it is
lacking.
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 381

The revised Libra 2.0 promotes itself as secure, “built on blockchain technology
and designed with security in mind” [64]. Yet, it is not technically, socially, or
infrastructurally robust against exploitation; governing members that buy-in to the
Libra Association are responsible for validating transactions on the network (noting
that this may be transitioned in the latter proposed version of Libra). While the
privacy of participants was said to match that of existing cryptocurrencies, access
to personally identifiable information via the Libra “digital wallet” (the local user
interface that sends and receives transactions) has not been specified and may be
accessible by Facebook and its affiliates. Libra, now Diem, was set to launch in
2022 and make a significant impact on the payments sector and the business modes
of banks by offering a cheaper mean of cross-border remittance for consumers. Yet,
having struggled to convince regulators that Facebook should administer a global
digital currency, the company announced that the project was winding down for
good in January [65]. It was mistrust in the operator that led to its failure to launch.
The broader implications of this lack of accountability or recourse for the security
of users’ digital information and assets remain opaque.

8 Observations and Findings

The trust and security guarantees of blockchains depend on the type of blockchain,
the context in which it is applied, and the needs of participants. Blockchain security
is dependent on how social and technical aspects of the system interact, the threat
which participants believe they are optimizing against by using the system, who
is trusted to fulfil certain functions in the system, and why a blockchain is being
applied. Empirical analysis via desktop-based research and case study investiga-
tions of the application of both public and private blockchains demonstrate that
blockchains are fraught with security assumptions and shortcomings on the promise
of system issuers toward system users at the social, software, and infrastructural
levels.
There is a major discrepancy between the promise of “security,” “decentral-
ization,” and “trustlessness” embedded in the origins of public blockchains and
attribute of encryption and the real threats, needs, and expectations of users in the
contexts that blockchains are being applied by centralized authorities. In private
blockchains, security via decentralization is not an objective, as they are centrally
administered by design and users do not have a participatory role in system design
or governance.
Yet, each private blockchain case study also reveals serious contextual gaps about
the advantages of using a blockchain for the application and the security context
and needs of the users of those systems. Private blockchain architecture is most
commonly being adopted in macrosocial contexts, where a public blockchain may
be more suitable to afford privacy and security guarantees to users. In each private
blockchain case described, threats are initiated and experienced by a number of
stakeholders across the different technical and governance layers of the blockchain
382 K. Nabben

Scale: Public, Software Social layer Infrastruc Automat Threats Participa

private, layer points of ture layer ed to nt needs /
Case
or points of centralization / points of compon network expectation:
Study
permissio centraliza trust: centralizat ents of participants:
Example:
ned tion / ion / trust: system:
blockchain: trust:

Blockcha Macro Private Central Central Third-party Unknown Refugee Unknown

in based - author / governance, provision status.
humanita scale, authority / bureaucratic of iris Loss of
rian cash socio- administrator processes, little to scanning identity
vouchers techni no user hardware. verification
cal ownership, Persecution.
system participation or
agency in rules of
network.

Libra Macro Private Central Vast gap between Smartphone Unknown Identity Unknown
blockchain - author / designer hardware and
scale, authority / processes and and reputation.
socio- administrator. target user software Third-
techni contexts. Lack of via party data
cal accountability. Facebook analytics
system mobile and
digital sharing.
wallet. Loss of
digital
value (i.e.
tokens).

Central Macro Private Central Central issuance, Central Unknown Identity Unknown
Bank - author / ownership, gover data and
Digital scale, authority / nance, and servers. reputation.
Currency socio- administrator control Potential Third-
(CBDC) techni high-value party data
cal geo- analytics
system strategic and
target. sharing.
Loss of
digital
value (i.e.
tokens).

Fig. 1 A ‘people security’ analysis of various blockchain architectures

network with little accountability for the issuers who are responsible for designing,
deploying, owning, or governing the system. This is both an information asymmetry
and a misalignment of incentives between system administrators and users.
From these findings of the shortcomings of blockchain applications as a
sociotechnical solution, the following table can be drawn as a simple tool for
the analysis of people security in blockchains. This framework was adapted from
Goerzen et al.’s sociotechnical security framework analysis, which has been applied
to social media systems [20], and Li et al.’s security requirements analysis for
sociotechnical systems [8] (Fig. 1).
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 383

8.1 Trust, But Verify: Applications and Limitations

of the “People Security” Model

Buterin defines trust as “assumptions about the behavior of others,” of which one
dimension of failure is how badly the system would fail if this assumption is not met
[66]. The security concern about a misalignment of assumptions between system
designer and user is “how badly will the system fail if the security assumption of
the user is violated?”. In the cases outlined above, the results of a system failure,
such as leaked identity or loss of one’s personal digital assets and the value they
represent, could be severely damaging to the referent user of community in need
of security within the system. This analysis outlines technical and social security
limitations in both public and private blockchains, as well as considers the context
in which blockchain is applied and the participants in the system. When users are not
entitled to participate in the ownership and governance of the system, their security
can more easily be compromised.
In public blockchains, the role of people in participating in the network is
threefold. People are invited to participate in developing the open-source code of
the network, people are needed to secure the network by validating transactions
and maintaining their software through the consensus mechanism of mining in
proof-of-work or staking in proof-of-stake, and people are able to govern the
network by participating in community discussions, voicing proposals, and voting
on movements. Although not completely “decentralized,” “trustless,” or secure, user
participation in the function and governance of the network enables new types of
macrosocial institutional digital infrastructure, in which sociotechnical security is a
consideration.
In contrast, private and permissioned blockchains in social coordination contexts
position people as “users,” with less agency, authority, or transparency over how
the system functions compared to those responsible for designing, issuing, and
administrating the system. There is little to no role for participation in developing,
securing, or governing the network. This limits the ability of private blockchains
to offer people security to users of the system through the unique cryptoeconomic
attributes evident in public blockchains of decentralization and trust minimization.
Private blockchains are being applied by private institutions and government
bodies. Meanwhile, public blockchains are being adopted for community initiatives
that demand self-organization, initially in the software developer communities in
which they are created but now more broadly. As applications and adoption broaden,
the distinctions and differences in security affordances for different blockchain
architectures are imperative for the literacy of those using them. Experimentation
with public blockchains and “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” across
different applications may be a suitable area for further exploration of sociotechnical
security research.
384 K. Nabben

8.2 In Code We Trust? The Limitations of Security

in Blockchains

Blockchains are a sociotechnical construct, and as such, blockchain security is

not only about network security; rather, we must also consider participants in the
network as owners, operators, and/or users. Both public and private blockchains
possess sociotechnical security vulnerabilities at the social, software, and infras-
tructure layers. Citizens of public blockchain-based macrosocial digital institutions
are warned: “there is no proven linear-causal relationship between decentralization
in technical systems and equitable practices socially, politically or economically”
[67]. There is, however, a transition of trust from existing institutions toward the
designers and governors of public blockchain infrastructure.
Meanwhile, private and semi-permissioned blockchain-based systems are similar
to many other web-based technologies. They are invisible infrastructures which
operate behind user interfaces and often without legibility to users [68]. This
means that unless the software code that governs the system is open-source and
participants know how to audit (or read) code, they do not know how it has been
designed to work. Thus, many applications of blockchain systems in the real world
are permissioned and oftentimes typify the threat of centralization by codifying
dependence on private actors.
At the software level, blockchain security can be compromised by vulnerabilities
in the code itself. Examples include privacy limitations through upgrades to the core
cryptographic primitives, traceability and monitoring of pseudonymous public key
addresses, network monitoring through traffic analysis, and increasingly sophisti-
cated blockchain analytics services which deanonymize actors in the network [69].
Furthermore, people’s digital assets are also vulnerable through shortcomings in
blockchain code, such as the infamous “DAO” hack in which around $60 million
(at the time) was stolen from a “decentralized, automated” smart contract which
allowed for double withdrawals because a single line of code was not in the correct
order [70]. The pursuit of decentralization also places significant onus on people
to manage their own “private keys,” or cryptographic passwords, through secure
storage [71]. A number of other crucial technical issues remain unresolved in the
proposal for the latest version of Ethereum at the time of writing, which is predicted
to become the largest public blockchain by market capitalization and users upon
launch.
At the social level, social processes continue to enable and restrict both public
and private blockchain applications. Regulation remains an ongoing ambiguity for
participants in blockchain systems. As a “polycentric enterprise” comprised of
participants, network validators, and exchanges, public blockchains are subject to
a variety of governance restrictions, depending on jurisdiction [72]. Shortcomings
also exist in the asymmetries in the surrounding context of how and where
blockchains are deployed. Most cryptocurrency Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)
project launches have come out of the United States, but people from around the
world invest at their own risk, with little to no legal recourse in the event of loss. The
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 385

Library Law of Congress notes that one of the most common government responses
to cryptocurrency is to issue warnings about investing. “Such warnings, mostly
issued by central banks, are largely designed to educate the citizenry about the
difference between actual currencies, which are issued and guaranteed by the state,
and cryptocurrencies, which are not” [73]. ICOs have been regulated in numerous
countries due to the risk to retail investors of investing in volatile assets with
no stable underlying value—highlighting digital illiteracy in establishing realistic
expectations of what blockchain is and does.
In terms of governance, centralization exists at multiple intersections
in blockchain-based infrastructures. In private blockchains, issuance and
administration of blockchain-based networks are often synonymous with network
ownership and control. In public blockchain, early espoused ideologies of
blockchain being decentralized to create freedom and choice for individuals created
security assumptions for participants. Yet, tokens are often owned by a concentration
of actors and software and governance decisions are often made by a small group
of people.
At the infrastructure layer, significant security issues exist in the hardware and
infrastructure dependencies of blockchains. This includes reliable internet connec-
tivity, which forms the basis of the underlying infrastructure which blockchain
networks are dependent upon. Although much development was funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the internet began with
a vision of creating a “decentralized commons” that was coopted by private and
commercial interests [74]. Yet, the centralization of information, ownership, and
influence on the internet reveals significant limitations in the assumption that the
blockchain digital economy can be decentralized, because it is dependent on the
existing infrastructure of the internet. The same is true of hardware dependencies,
such as mobile phones and computer hardware.

8.3 Blockchain Evolution and Security Concerns: Looking

Ahead

As blockchain holds a potentially significant trajectory in critical economic and

governance infrastructure in society, “people security” offers a critical lens for both
designers and users for transparent, voluntary participation in systems that clarify
design assumptions and the context in which they are applied.
Pursuing people security could also help to reveal design assumptions and
user needs as functions within blockchain-based systems become more automated.
“Because artificial intelligence is about the automation of cognitive processes,
and blockchain is the automation of transactions, there are specific scenarios
where both technologies can be combined. A blockchain network can provide a
decentralized platform to support some advanced AI capabilities” [75]. Automation
of certain rules and functions by combining them with other emerging technologies
386 K. Nabben

such as artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to semi-autonomously govern

interactions based on how the system is encoded through smart contracts, DAOs, and
machines—thus lessening the agency of participants [76]. Suggested use cases for
automated blockchains include data marketplaces, explainable AI, and the Internet
of Things (IoT) [77].
While blockchains may enable more decentralized instantiations of AI, the
assumption is that this is decentralized and therefore secure, without always
considering those assumptions apply to the human participants in the network. In
such cases, trust is reallocated from existing institutions to semi-autonomous digital
agents to act on behalf of people, weakening the barrier between the rules of the
digital world and the physical world, yet software code is subjective and reflects
assumptions about behavior in the real world that are contained in theoretical models
of the system designer [78]. Therefore, surfacing where and how automation is
occurring in a system through transparent code is a crucial first step to minimizing
complexity to apply a people security approach. Further analysis is required into the
effects of automation in blockchain systems on people security.
In some circumstances, blockchains may not be a desirable macrosocial infras-
tructure to afford security to people at all, due to the fundamental assumptions
that shape the attributes of blockchain-based systems. Some of the values that
blockchains institute, such as immutable records of data, have the potential to con-
flict with privacy, legal frameworks, and data norms. Other peer-to-peer protocols
offer a different ontology which is not based on rational, economic self-interest and
individualism. By contrast, the Holochain team encourages a “post-blockchain,”
“agent-centric,” cryptographically secure data infrastructure which does not require
digital tokens for data sharing, access, storage, and verification of public data [79].
Similarly, Dat protocol offers data hosting through an “append-only” protocol that
runs on a distributed, peer-to-peer network of computers that can work offline
or with poor connectivity, whereby the original uploader can add or modify data
while keeping a full record of history and cryptographic keys are often shared
for collective governance of digital assets [80]. The fundamental assumptions of
decentralization, trustlessness, immutability, and security that undergird blockchain
systems must be made explicit in order to assess the suitability of the protocol by
potential users and carefully consider the needs, trade-offs, and consequences for
participants.

9 Conclusion and Further Directions

As a tool, blockchains possess unique, cryptoeconomic properties that are useful

for some applications. As an organizational infrastructure, blockchains enable some
decentralization by reallocating trust to other parties. Blockchains are a macrosocial
coordinating technology in society, with interlinked technical and social functions,
including automation, oracles, smart contracts, voting, and digital currency. When
applied to macrosocial coordination problems, it is imperative to analyze blockchain
Blockchain Security as “People Security”: Applying Sociotechnical Security. . . 387

security as “people security” to more accurately assess the type of blockchain

and the context of the application against the social, software, and infrastructure
requirements of participants using the system. If blockchains are to be applied as
institutions, we need the best institutions possible for society.
There are no blanket security guarantees afforded by blockchains. Blockchain
technology possesses different attributes and varying levels of security for people
participating in a system, depending on the design decisions, issuance, administra-
tion, and context in which it is applied. Many security assumptions of blockchain
are embedded in the political ideologies from which the technology emerged,
rather than the test cases that are being deployed by companies and governments.
This research chapter has found that there are a number of security and trust
issues that need to be addressed in both public and private blockchains, especially
as centralized, private blockchains which limit the autonomy of users are most
commonly being employed in macrosocial contexts. In uncovering the assumptions
regarding the promises and expectations of both public and private blockchains, it is
clear that blockchain security, in its current form, has significant security limitations
for people as participants in this infrastructure.
While blockchain-based networks are distributed, users must understand that
both public and private blockchains are far from decentralized. This sociotechnical
analysis of “blockchain security” as “people security” can support system designers
and participants to clarify expectations, assumptions, and guarantees when deploy-
ing and employing these tools as systems in order to acknowledge user expectations
and communicate realistic security guarantees.
This research leads to a number of further directions for investigation. This
includes the application of the people security framework to different use cases
for deeper sociotechnical security analysis of specific blockchain implementations
and user groups, further comparability of different blockchain designs to analyze
the people security trade-offs implementations, and investigation into the social
outcomes of automated processes within blockchain-based systems.

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Index

A Cryptocurrency, 3, 27, 39, 63, 135, 155, 188,

Anti-money laundering (AML), 28, 40, 272, 213, 252, 271, 307, 336, 345, 375
276, 283, 287–291, 293, 296 Cryptography, vi, 24, 121, 141, 148, 192, 252,
Artificial intelligence (AI), 135, 156–158, 256, 259, 267, 305, 313, 314, 319, 321,
160–162, 164, 165, 175, 176, 217, 223, 328, 335, 346, 347, 375
233, 385, 386 Cyber laundering, vi, 271–297
Cyber security, v, 85, 219, 220, 222–224, 367,
370, 371, 378
B
Bitcoin, vi, 3, 6, 8–11, 15, 17, 23, 27–30, 36,
39, 46, 47, 63, 70, 79, 84, 85, 97, 98, D
123, 124, 135, 137–139, 142, 155 Decentralised applications (DApps), v, 17, 21,
Blockchain 24, 39, 64, 65, 70, 79–82, 84–86, 123,
applications, vi, vii, 17, 23, 28, 41, 63, 138, 203
65–67, 73, 80–87, 124, 155–177, 213, Decentralised ledged, 221
216, 221, 224, 252, 254, 319, 329, Decentralized, 3, 39, 64, 94, 120, 135, 156,
331, 333–334, 336, 346–351, 361, 362, 185, 212, 273, 303, 329, 346, 370
367–369, 379, 381, 382, 384 Digital signatures, 64, 71, 128, 146, 148, 226,
technology, v, vi, 3–24, 39, 46, 63–68, 74, 251–267, 335
79–82, 84, 85, 125, 127, 128, 136, 155, DoS/DDoS, 129–132
156, 158, 160–162, 169, 176, 190–192,
211–243, 287, 295, 296, 322, 327–338,
345–351, 356–363, 367–387 E
uses, vi, 4, 21, 63, 65, 81, 83, 84, 124, 132,
137, 212, 220, 221, 230, 241, 242, 310, Education, vi, 159, 303–325, 329
351, 356–360, 362, 377 E-government, 351, 361
Epoch randomness, 135–151
Ethereum, 3, 8, 9, 11, 17, 39, 43, 65, 66,
C 69–71, 74, 75, 77–81, 84–86, 123–125,
Consensus committee configuration, 135–151 128, 132, 138, 143, 155, 161, 186, 188,
Consensus protocols, v, 8–11, 14, 16, 24, 27, 189, 191–194, 198, 200–201, 203, 204,
135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 148, 186–190, 207–209, 213, 214, 217, 227–229, 236,
214, 252, 305 240, 255, 257, 305, 307, 308, 322, 349,
Corporate governance, vi, 345–363 370, 376, 384

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 393
K. Daimi et al. (eds.), Principles and Practice of Blockchains,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4
394 Index

G Privacy, 13, 73, 93, 121, 136, 161, 185, 212,

Generalized universal composition framework 251, 279, 304, 328, 372
(GUC-framework), 48 Project automation, 69

H R
Healthcare, vi, 4, 18–19, 86, 123, 160, 162, Repeat customers, 156, 167, 169–174, 176
185–209, 211–213, 215–217, 219–238, Resilience, 28, 216, 220, 224
240–242, 329
Healthcare industry, vi, 215–219, 223, 224,
242 S
Hedonic value, 156, 169–170, 172, 173, 176 Scalability, 88, 94, 122, 124, 135–140, 142,
Homework grading, vi, 303–325 144, 150, 161, 188, 189, 217, 218, 242,
Human, 21, 84, 135, 160, 161, 167, 191, 192, 336, 377
211, 273, 293, 330, 331, 335, 337, 353, Search, v, 32, 34, 41, 46, 49–56, 58, 60, 85, 86,
373, 375, 378, 386 169, 175, 205, 252, 261
Security, 4, 39, 63, 94, 119, 135, 156, 185, 212,
251, 283, 304, 329, 346, 367
I Shareholder, 141, 346, 352–356, 361, 362
Internet of multimedia things (IoMT), Smart contracts (SC), 3, 63, 122, 135, 186,
217, 223, 224, 230, 231, 233, 211, 305, 328, 346, 372,
238–241 Smart medicine, vi, 211–213, 220, 223–224,
Internet of Things (IoT), v, vi, 20, 72, 82–87, 236–237, 240, 242, 243
93–116, 119–132, 135–151, 213, Smart Medicine 4.0, 211–243
215–217, 219–220, 223, 225–227, Smart mobile devices, 83, 163, 164, 176, 177,
230–237, 241, 242, 328, 333, 362, 371, 209
386 Sociotechnical, vi, 367–387
Intrusion detection systems (IDSs), vi, 30, Supply chain management (SCM), vi, 21–23,
119–132 85, 86, 327–338, 359, 371
IoHT, 215–217, 219–220, 224, 225, 227, 231, Supply chain performance, 327–338
232, 234, 236, 240–242 System integration, 277–278, 323

L T
Lattice-based cryptography, 253, 259 Telemedicine, 224, 227, 233, 234
Liveness, 41, 49, 54, 308, 321 Trustless operations, 63–88
Location privacy, v, 93–116

U
M Utilitarian value, 156, 169–170, 172, 173, 176
Machine/deep learning (ML/DL), 119, 120,
125–132
V
Machine learning (ML), vi, 28–30, 36, 109,
Verification, v, 4, 21, 41, 42, 46, 49–56, 58–60,
119–132, 158, 161, 212, 217
64, 80, 83, 84, 94, 121, 137, 140–142,
Medical devices and institutions, 219
146, 185, 193, 194, 197, 198, 208, 209,
Metaverse, 157, 160–162, 166
212, 216, 225–228, 230–232, 238, 256,
Money laundering, vi, 27, 271–297, 348, 349
258, 260, 261, 263–267, 279, 295, 328,
Multidimensional blockchain, v, 39–60
330, 332, 335, 353, 357, 375, 382, 386

P
W
Persistence, 19, 41, 49, 50 Workflow management, 64, 65, 68, 70, 72, 74,
Post-quantum, vi, 251–267 334