Supply chains are evolving into automated and highly complex networks and are becoming an important source of potential benefits in the modern world. At the same time, consumers are now more interested in food product quality. However, it is challenging to track the provenance of data and maintain its traceability throughout the supply chain network. The traditional supply chains are centralized and they depend on a third party for trading. These centralized systems lack transparency, accountability and auditability. In our proposed solution, we have presented a complete solution for blockchain-based Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chain. It leverages the key features of blockchain and smart contracts, deployed over ethereum blockchain network. Although blockchain provides immutability of data and records in the network, it still fails to solve some major problems in supply chain management like credibility of the involved entities, accountability of the trading process and traceability of the products. Therefore, there is a need of a reliable system that ensures traceability, trust and delivery mechanism in Agri-Food supply chain. In the proposed system, all transactions are written to blockchain which ultimately uploads the data to Interplanetary File Storage System (IPFS). The storage system returns a hash of the data which is stored on blockchain and ensures efficient, secure and reliable solution. Our system provides smart contracts along with their algorithms to show interaction of entities in the system. Furthermore, simulations and evaluation of smart contracts along with the security and vulnerability analyses are also presented in this work.

/pdf/blockchain-based-agri-food-supply-chain-a-complete-solution-3xoefwnv1r.pdf

Blockchain-Based Agri-Food Supply Chain: A Complete Solution

Blockchains offer a decentralized, immutable and verifiable ledger that can record transactions of digital assets, provoking a radical change in several innovative scenarios, such as smart cities, eHealth or eGovernment. However, blockchains are subject to different scalability, security and potential privacy issues, such as transaction linkability, crypto-keys management (e.g. recovery), on-chain data privacy, or compliance with privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR). To deal with these challenges, novel privacy-preserving solutions for blockchain based on crypto-privacy techniques are emerging to empower users with mechanisms to become anonymous and take control of their personal data during their digital transactions of any kind in the ledger, following a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model. In this sense, this paper performs a systematic review of the current state of the art on privacy-preserving research solutions and mechanisms in blockchain, as well as the main associated privacy challenges in this promising and disrupting technology. The survey covers privacy techniques in public and permissionless blockchains, e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as privacy-preserving research proposals and solutions in permissioned and private blockchains. Diverse blockchain scenarios are analyzed, encompassing, eGovernment, eHealth, cryptocurrencies, Smart cities, and Cooperative ITS.

/pdf/privacy-preserving-solutions-for-blockchain-review-and-2jyz7hcxld.pdf

Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges

The reputation system has been designed as an effective mechanism to reduce risks associated with online shopping for customers. However, it is vulnerable to rating fraud. Some raters may inject unfairly high or low ratings to the system so as to promote their own products or demote their competitors. This study explores the rating fraud by differentiating the subjective fraud from objective fraud. Then it discusses the effectiveness of blockchain technology in objective fraud and its limitation in subjective fraud, especially the rating fraud. Lastly, it systematically analyzes the robustness of blockchain-based reputation systems in each type of rating fraud. The detection of fraudulent raters is not easy since they can behave strategically to camouflage themselves. We explore the potential strengths and limitations of blockchain-based reputation systems under two attack goals: ballot-stuffing and bad-mouthing, and various attack models including constant attack, camouflage attack, whitewashing attack and sybil attack. Blockchain-based reputation systems are more robust against bad-mouthing than ballot-stuffing fraud. Blockchain technology provides new opportunities for redesigning the reputation system. Blockchain systems are very effective in preventing objective information fraud, such as loan application fraud, where fraudulent information is fact-based. However, their effectiveness is limited in subjective information fraud, such as rating fraud, where the ground-truth is not easily validated. Blockchain systems are effective in preventing bad mouthing and whitewashing attack, but they are limited in detecting ballot-stuffing under sybil attack, constant attacks and camouflage attack.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2Fs40854-016-0039-4.pdf

Fraud detections for online businesses: a perspective from blockchain technology

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is revolutionizing the retail industry for manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers to improve operational efficiency and consumer experience. In IIoT-enabled retail marketing, reputation systems play a critical role to boost mutual trust among industrial entities and build consumer confidence. In this paper, we focus on reputation management in the consumer–retailer channel, where retailers can accumulate reputations from consumer feedbacks. To encourage consumers to post feedbacks without worrying about being tracked or retaliated, we propose an anonymous reputation system that preserves consumer identities and individual review confidentialities. To increase system transparency and reliability, we further exploit the tamper-proof nature and the distributed consensus mechanism of the blockchain technology. With system designs based on various cryptographic primitives and a Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, our blockchain-based reputation system is more efficient to offer high levels of privacy guarantees compared with existing ones. Finally, we explore the implementation challenges of the blockchain-based architecture and present a proof-of-concept prototype system by Parity Ethereum. We measure the on/off -chain performance with the scalability discussion to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.

Anonymous Reputation System for IIoT-Enabled Retail Marketing Atop PoS Blockchain

Blockchain is considered one of the most disruptive technologies of our time. Numerous cities around the world are launching blockchain initiatives as part of the overall efforts toward shaping the urban future. However, the infancy stage of the blockchain industry leads to a severe gap between the knowledge we have and the actions urban policy makers are taking. This paper is an effort to narrow this rift. We provide a systematic literature review on concrete blockchain use cases proposed by the research community. At the macro-level, we discuss and organize use cases from 159 selected papers into nine sectors recognized as crucial for sustainable and smart urban future. At the micro-level, we identify a component-based framework and analyze the design and prototypes of blockchain systems studied in a subset of 71 papers. The high-level use case review allows us to illustrate the relationship between them and the four pillars of urban sustainability: social, economic, environmental, and governmental. The system level analysis helps us highlight interesting inconsistencies between well-known blockchain applicability decision rules and the approaches taken by the literature. We also offer two classification methodologies for blockchain use cases and elaborate on how they can be applied to stimulate cross-sector insights in the blockchain knowledge domain.

Blockchain for Cities—A Systematic Literature Review

Reputation systems are crucial for distributed applications in which users have to be made accountable for their actions, such as e-commerce websites. However, existing systems often disclose the identity of the raters, which might deter honest users from submitting reviews out of fear of retaliation from the ratees. While many privacy-preserving reputation systems have been proposed, we observe that none of them is simultaneously truly decentralized, trustless, and suitable for real world usage in, for example, e-commerce applications. In this paper, we present a blockchain based decentralized privacy-preserving reputation system. We demonstrate that our system provides correctness and security while eliminating the need for users to trust any third parties or even fellow users.

/pdf/a-trustless-privacy-preserving-reputation-system-3a6571sdqp.pdf

A Trustless Privacy-Preserving Reputation System

This paper outlines the development of the ROboMObil, an innovative electro-mobility concept based on intelligent central control of four Wheel Robots, which integrate the drivetrain, brakes, steering and dampers. The motivation behind the Wheel Robot concept, the implementation details together with the suspension design are described. The electric power system, consisting of a Li-Ion battery cluster to provide high-voltage power for propulsion and a low-voltage supply for vehicle control, is also discussed. Finally, we provide an overview of the Shared Autonomy control architecture and an outlook on the future research projects based on this demonstrator platform.

/pdf/romo-the-robotic-electric-vehicle-1wzyzd9wy6.pdf

Romo - the robotic electric vehicle

Physically unclonable functions (PUF) have been used in various applications, such as device authentication, secure storage of sensitive data, and anti-counterfeiting. Different applications require various levels of reliability from the PUF. However, as of today, no predictive model to characterize the PUF reliability has been developed. This is particularly a problem for PUFs with low error rates, because the lower the error rate, the larger the number of measurements required to obtain a good estimate. In this paper, we develop a predictive framework, which enables us to derive a closed-form expression of both entropy and reliability for several families of delay PUFs: the ring oscillator (RO) PUF, the RO sum PUF as well as the Loop PUF. Improving reliability with bit-filtering, we provide an explicit tradeoff between complexity, reliability and entropy. Error rates as low as 10^-9 or even lower can be achieved. Our theoretical results are validated by experiments on Loop PUFs implemented in 65 nm CMOS ASIC technology, also used to simulate the behavior of the RO PUF and the RO sum PUF.

An Improved Analysis of Reliability and Entropy for Delay PUFs

This paper proposes a reactive obstacle avoidance approach based solely on image data from a monocular camera stream. By clustering and analyzing the optical flow, this approach is able to identify potential collisions with dynamic obstacles. Epipolar geometry is exploited to derive velocity commands that ensure a collision-free path for a highly maneuverable autonomous vehicle via a real-time optimizer. First, the underlying image processing and optimization principles are explained in detail, before simulation results show the general feasibility of the approach. Finally, real-world tests with the ROboMObil, the German Aerospace Center’s robotic electric vehicle, are provided to demonstrate its applicability.

Reactive Obstacle Avoidance for Highly Maneuverable Vehicles Based on a Two-Stage Optical Flow Clustering

Reputation systems are crucial for distributed applications in which users have to be made accountable for their actions, such as ecommerce websites. However, existing systems often disclose the identity of the raters, which might deter honest users from posting reviews, out of fear of retaliation from the ratees. While many privacy-preserving reputation systems have been proposed, none of them was at the same time truly decentralized, trustless, and suitable for real world usage in, for example, e-commerce applications. After discussing the weaknesses and shortcoming of existing solutions, we will present our own blockchainbased trustless reputation system, and analyze its correctness and the security guarantees it promises.

/pdf/a-trustless-privacy-preserving-reputation-system-2b7jo50eoj.pdf

Alexander Schaub

Papers

A Trustless Privacy-Preserving Reputation System

Romo - the robotic electric vehicle

An Improved Analysis of Reliability and Entropy for Delay PUFs

Reactive Obstacle Avoidance for Highly Maneuverable Vehicles Based on a Two-Stage Optical Flow Clustering

A trustless privacy-preserving reputation system.