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Future Internet
Special Issues
Blockchain Security and Privacy
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Blockchain Security and Privacy

A special issue of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903). This special issue belongs to the section "Cybersecurity".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2022) | Viewed by 26085

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Peter Kieseberg

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute of IT Security Research St. Pölten, University of Applied Sciences, 3100 St. Pölten, Austria
Interests: digital forensics; privacy aware machine learning; trustworthy AI; blockchain and AI
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Thomas Moser

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department Media and Digital Technologies, St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, 3100 St. Pölten, Austria
Interests: big data; Industry 4.0; semantic web; data integration; mechatronic engineering
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Blockchains have been a thriving topic throughout the last few years, especially considering cryptographic currencies, but also extending to other application domains such as integrity protection and secure information sharing. Still, the widespread application of blockchains to oft-cited domains (e.g., digital notaries), and into the healthcare sector has encountered some obstacles. One major issue for the widespread adoption of this technology in many domains is the issue of security against attacks specific to blockchains, and, in particular, privacy concerns in the case of sensitive data, with many open issues ranging from highly technical problems to issues regarding security and privacy management.

Thus, in this Special Issue, we focus on novel research in the area of security and privacy in blockchains, not only with respect to attacks against cryptographic currencies, but especially to the combination of traditional systems and environments interfacing with blockchains. Furthermore, we not only focus on highly technical issues, but also on problems in managing security-related issues in blockchain-enhanced systems, as well as issues pertaining to systems incorporating sensitive (personal) data.

Thus, this Special Issue invites researchers from a variety of different backgrounds in IT security to discuss new technological and organizational solutions, as well as future challenges in this emerging area of research. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Novel or enhanced attacks against blockchain-based systems;
  • Countermeasures against existing threats;
  • Strategies for security management for blockchain-based systems;
  • Solutions for privacy-related issues in blockchains;
  • Legal issues of using blockchains;
  • Threat detection and mitigation on an industry level in blockchain-enhanced systems.

Dr. Peter Kieseberg
Dr. Thomas Moser
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • blockchains
  • security
  • privacy
  • distributed systems
  • security management
  • cryptographic currencies

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 945 KiB  
Article
Toward Vulnerability Detection for Ethereum Smart Contracts Using Graph-Matching Network
by Yujian Zhang and Daifu Liu
Future Internet 2022, 14(11), 326; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14110326 - 11 Nov 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 6212
Abstract
With the blooming of blockchain-based smart contracts in decentralized applications, the security problem of smart contracts has become a critical issue, as vulnerable contracts have resulted in severe financial losses. Existing research works have explored vulnerability detection methods based on fuzzing, symbolic execution, [...] Read more.
With the blooming of blockchain-based smart contracts in decentralized applications, the security problem of smart contracts has become a critical issue, as vulnerable contracts have resulted in severe financial losses. Existing research works have explored vulnerability detection methods based on fuzzing, symbolic execution, formal verification, and static analysis. In this paper, we propose two static analysis approaches called ASGVulDetector and BASGVulDetector for detecting vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contacts from source-code and bytecode perspectives, respectively. First, we design a novel intermediate representation called abstract semantic graph (ASG) to capture both syntactic and semantic features from the program. ASG is based on syntax information but enriched by code structures, such as control flow and data flow. Then, we apply two different training models, i.e., graph neural network (GNN) and graph matching network (GMN), to learn the embedding of ASG and measure the similarity of the contract pairs. In this way, vulnerable smart contracts can be identified by calculating the similarity to labeled ones. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the superiority of our approaches to state-of-the-art competitors. Specifically, ASGVulDetector improves the best of three source-code-only static analysis tools (i.e., SmartCheck, Slither, and DR-GCN) regarding the F1 score by 12.6% on average, while BASGVulDetector improves that of the three detection tools supporting bytecode (i.e., ContractFuzzer, Oyente, and Securify) regarding the F1 score by 25.6% on average. We also investigate the effectiveness and advantages of the GMN model for detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Security and Privacy)
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15 pages, 936 KiB  
Article
Multifractal Cross-Correlations of Bitcoin and Ether Trading Characteristics in the Post-COVID-19 Time
by Marcin Wątorek, Jarosław Kwapień and Stanisław Drożdż
Future Internet 2022, 14(7), 215; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi14070215 - 21 Jul 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2291
Abstract
Unlike price fluctuations, the temporal structure of cryptocurrency trading has seldom been a subject of systematic study. In order to fill this gap, we analyse detrended correlations of the price returns, the average number of trades in time unit, and the traded volume [...] Read more.
Unlike price fluctuations, the temporal structure of cryptocurrency trading has seldom been a subject of systematic study. In order to fill this gap, we analyse detrended correlations of the price returns, the average number of trades in time unit, and the traded volume based on high-frequency data representing two major cryptocurrencies: bitcoin and ether. We apply the multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis, which is considered the most reliable method for identifying nonlinear correlations in time series. We find that all the quantities considered in our study show an unambiguous multifractal structure from both the univariate (auto-correlation) and bivariate (cross-correlation) perspectives. We looked at the bitcoin–ether cross-correlations in simultaneously recorded signals, as well as in time-lagged signals, in which a time series for one of the cryptocurrencies is shifted with respect to the other. Such a shift suppresses the cross-correlations partially for short time scales, but does not remove them completely. We did not observe any qualitative asymmetry in the results for the two choices of a leading asset. The cross-correlations for the simultaneous and lagged time series became the same in magnitude for the sufficiently long scales. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Security and Privacy)
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16 pages, 13718 KiB  
Article
Healthchain: A Privacy Protection System for Medical Data Based on Blockchain
by Baocheng Wang and Zetao Li
Future Internet 2021, 13(10), 247; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13100247 - 24 Sep 2021
Cited by 26 | Viewed by 3966
Abstract
Recently, with the great development of e-health, more and more countries have made certain achievements in the field of electronic medical treatment. The digitization of medical equipment and the structuralization of electronic medical records are the general trends. While bringing convenience to people, [...] Read more.
Recently, with the great development of e-health, more and more countries have made certain achievements in the field of electronic medical treatment. The digitization of medical equipment and the structuralization of electronic medical records are the general trends. While bringing convenience to people, the explosive growth of medical data will further promote the value of mining medical data. Obviously, finding out how to safely store such a large amount of data is a problem that urgently needs to be solved. Additionally, the particularity of medical data makes it necessarily subject to great privacy protection needs. This reinforces the importance of designing a safe solution to ensure data privacy. Many existing schemes are based on single-server architecture, which have some natural defects (such as single-point faults). Although blockchain can help solve such problems, there are still some deficiencies in privacy protection. To solve these problems, this paper designs a medical data privacy protection system, which integrates blockchain, group signature, and asymmetric encryption to realize reliable medical data sharing between medical institutions and protect the data privacy of patients. This paper proves theoretically that it meets our security and privacy requirements, and proves its practicability through system implementation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Security and Privacy)
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22 pages, 340 KiB  
Article
A Survey of Ledger Technology-Based Databases
by Dénes László Fekete and Attila Kiss
Future Internet 2021, 13(8), 197; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13080197 - 31 Jul 2021
Cited by 16 | Viewed by 2703
Abstract
The spread of crypto-currencies globally has led to blockchain technology receiving greater attention in recent times. This paper focuses more broadly on the uses of ledger databases as a traditional database manager. Ledger databases will be examined within the parameters of two categories. [...] Read more.
The spread of crypto-currencies globally has led to blockchain technology receiving greater attention in recent times. This paper focuses more broadly on the uses of ledger databases as a traditional database manager. Ledger databases will be examined within the parameters of two categories. The first of these are Centralized Ledger Databases (CLD)-based Centralised Ledger Technology (CLT), of which LedgerDB will be discussed. The second of these are Permissioned Blockchain Technology-based Decentralised Ledger Technology (DLT) where Hyperledger Fabric, FalconDB, BlockchainDB, ChainifyDB, BigchainDB, and Blockchain Relational Database will be examined. The strengths and weaknesses of the reviewed technologies will be discussed, alongside a comparison of the mentioned technologies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Security and Privacy)
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16 pages, 3832 KiB  
Article
EngraveChain: A Blockchain-Based Tamper-Proof Distributed Log System
by Louis Shekhtman and Erez Waisbard
Future Internet 2021, 13(6), 143; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13060143 - 29 May 2021
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 4042
Abstract
A reliable log system is a prerequisite for many applications. Financial systems need to have transactions logged in a precise manner, medical systems rely on having trusted medical records and security logs record system access requests in order to trace malicious attempts. Keeping [...] Read more.
A reliable log system is a prerequisite for many applications. Financial systems need to have transactions logged in a precise manner, medical systems rely on having trusted medical records and security logs record system access requests in order to trace malicious attempts. Keeping multiple copies helps to achieve availability and reliability against such hackers. Unfortunately, maintaining redundant copies in a distributed manner in a byzantine setting has always been a challenging task, however it has recently become simpler given advances in blockchain technologies. In this work, we present a tamper-resistant log system through the use of a blockchain. We leverage the immutable write action and distributed storage provided by the blockchain as a basis to develop a secure log system, but we also add a privacy preserving layer that is essential for many applications. We detail the security and privacy aspects of our solution, as well as how they relate to performance needs in relevant settings. Finally, we implement our system over Hyperledger Fabric and demonstrate the system’s value for several use cases. In addition, we provide a scalability analysis for applying our solution in a large-scale system. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Security and Privacy)
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28 pages, 1312 KiB  
Article
A Digital Currency Architecture for Privacy and Owner-Custodianship
by Geoffrey Goodell, Hazem Danny Al-Nakib and Paolo Tasca
Future Internet 2021, 13(5), 130; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13050130 - 14 May 2021
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5328
Abstract
In recent years, electronic retail payment mechanisms, especially e-commerce and card payments at the point of sale, have increasingly replaced cash in many developed countries. As a result, societies are losing a critical public retail payment option, and retail consumers are losing important [...] Read more.
In recent years, electronic retail payment mechanisms, especially e-commerce and card payments at the point of sale, have increasingly replaced cash in many developed countries. As a result, societies are losing a critical public retail payment option, and retail consumers are losing important rights associated with using cash. To address this concern, we propose an approach to digital currency that would allow people without banking relationships to transact electronically and privately, including both e-commerce purchases and point-of-sale purchases that are required to be cashless. Our proposal introduces a government-backed, privately-operated digital currency infrastructure to ensure that every transaction is registered by a bank or money services business, and it relies upon non-custodial wallets backed by privacy-enhancing technology, such as blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, to ensure that transaction counterparties are not revealed. Our approach to digital currency can also facilitate more efficient and transparent clearing, settlement, and management of systemic risk. We argue that our system can restore and preserve the salient features of cash, including privacy, owner-custodianship, fungibility, and accessibility, while also preserving fractional reserve banking and the existing two-tiered banking system. We also show that it is possible to introduce regulation of digital currency transactions involving non-custodial wallets that unconditionally protect the privacy of end-users. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Security and Privacy)
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