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Background: The pharma supply chain comprises various parties including distributors, manufacturers, raw material suppliers, regulators, pharmacies, hospitals, and patients. Due to the product's complexity and transaction flows, an efficient traceability system is needed in the pharma supply chain to identify the current and all previous product owners. Digitizing the track and trace process significantly improves regulatory oversight and guarantees product quality. A distributed platform for shared data that is immutable, trustworthy, accountable, and transparent in the pharmaceutical supply chain could be built using blockchain-based drug traceability., Objective: This review aims to shed light on blockchain technology's significance and necessity for pharmaceutical supply chain management systems., Method: A comprehensive literature review was performed between January 2017 and September 2023. The search was conducted to elaborate on blockchain technology. Blockchain is a software-based technology that logs and records transactions using a block structure arranged chronologically. Cryptography technology links and secures these blocks on a peer-to-peer network. Blockchain is anticipated to transform the pharmaceutical supply chain by giving all participants access to a single, straightforward system that provides transparency, security, and oversight of the end-to-end delivery of goods., Result: In all, various literature data were included in this review. Using a supply chain powered by blockchain has many benefits. To begin with, it gives a thorough account of the entire procedure from start to finish. A single piece of software can manage the entire supply chain. Additionally, it increases communication between parties with permission. The enhanced security and traceability that blockchain offers is another important benefit. A blockchain system can track, trace, and recall products., Conclusion: Blockchain-based pharmaceutical supply chain management enables the tracking of medicinal drug transactions from raw materials suppliers to end consumers. The pharma blockchain has the potential to enhance the security, integrity, data provenance, and functionality of the supply chain due to its transparency, immutability, and auditability., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

We investigate the potential and limits of privacy-preserving corporate blockchain applications for information provision. We provide a theoretical model in which heterogeneous firms choose between adopting a blockchain application or relying on traditional third-party intermediaries to inform the capital market. The blockchain's ability to generate information depends on each firm's data profile and all firms' endogenous adoption decisions. We show that blockchain technology can improve the information environment and outperform traditional institutions with firms' adoption decisions serving as a credible value signal and the application uncovering firm values by analyzing all participating firms' data. However, we also characterize an adverse mixed-adoption equilibrium in which neither of the two channels realizes its full potential and information provision declines not only for individual firms, but also in aggregate. The equilibrium is a warning sign that has broad implications for policymakers' regulatory effort and investors' assessment of corporate blockchain applications. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: B. Franke and Q. Gao Fritz gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Project-ID 403041268–TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency. A. Stenzel gratefully acknowledges financial support from the DFG through CRC TR 224 (Project C03) during prior employment at the University of Mannheim. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4718. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work shows the comprehensive model of obfuscation techniques in decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network transactions by consolidating a distributed learning approach and blockchain as the backbone technologies. We provide several protocols by utilizing the CryptoNote protocols to be deployed into the Ethereum blockchain environment that can overcome the demerits of most current blockchain systems in terms of traceability and linkability of data flows. The concerns of traceability and linkability of transactions arise since data record breaches have occurred intermittently, where valuable information is often mishandled and misused, inducing a security threat to personal privacy. Furthermore, We thoroughly analyzed the pros and cons of the constructed protocols along with a systematic security evaluation to satisfy the design objectives and requirements. The constructed protocols are unbiased since the observers cannot extract and associate transactional information with any entity. Our assessment and assumptions neglect the hard fork where a radical change in the blockchain network is required for thorough real-world implementation. Finally, the numerical results and symbolic modelling indicate that the proposed protocols fill the gap of the existing model found in the literature. These findings highlight a fresh concept of privacy awareness in decentralized network environments, the properties that most constructions are lacking.

Bitcoin is a popular decentralized cryptocurrency, and the Bitcoin network is essentially an unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) network that can synchronize distributed database of replicated ledgers through message broadcasting. In the Bitcoin network, the average clustering coefficient of nodes is very high, resulting in low message propagation efficiency. In addition, average node degree in the Bitcoin network is also considerably large, causing high message redundancy when nodes use the gossip protocol to broadcast messages. These may affect message propagation speed, hindering Bitcoin from being applied to scenarios of high transactional throughputs. To illustrate, we have collected single-hop propagation data of transactions of 366 blocks from Bitcoin Core. The analysis results show that transaction verification and network delay are two major causes of low transaction propagation efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel P2P network structure, called local clique network (LCN), for message broadcasting in the Bitcoin network. Specifically, to reduce transaction validation latency and message redundancy, in LCN local nodes (logically) form cliques, and only a few nodes in a clique broadcast messages to the other cliques, instead of each node sending messages to its neighboring nodes. We have conducted extensive experiments, and the results show that message redundancy is low in LCN, and message propagation speed increases significantly. Meanwhile, LCN exhibits excellent robustness when average node degree remains high in the Bitcoin network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain technology has a wide range of applicability in the fields of transportation infrastructure construction and maintenance, transportation big data analysis and application, expressway toll collection, and logistics. The core technology lies in the distributed, decentralized, immutable, and programmable features brought about by consensus. This paper studies the dynamic analytical modeling of Proof-Based Consensus (PBC) strategies in blockchain systems, focusing on basic strategies, including Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Authority (PoA), and Proof of Luck (PoL), which can be extended to other PBC models. We focus on modeling these typical strategies and discuss their solution characteristics in terms of algorithmic mechanisms and principles. The relevant results can be used for quantitative analysis and evaluation of distributed consensus based on the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity Management System (IDMS) refers to how users or individuals are identified and authorized to use organizational systems and services. Since traditional identity management and authentication systems rely heavily on a trusted central authority, they cannot mitigate the effects of single points of failure. As a decentralized and distributed public ledger in a peer-to- peer (P2P) network, Blockchain (BC) technology has garnered a considerable amount of attention in the field of IDMS in recent years. Through Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), users can have full authority over their digital identity. Successful implementation of a BC-based IDMS can significantly increase the degree of privacy and security of a user’s SSI. However, the integration of BC-based IMDS to provide a user with SSI is still an unorganized area of research in its early stages of development. This article presents an extensive literature review of state-of-the-art academic publications as well as commercial market offerings regarding the applicability of BC-based SSI solutions. It also provides a detailed preliminary regarding the building blocks of blockchain technology and a progressive roadmap of IDMS solutions. In order to develop an effective BC-based IDMS solution that focuses on securing a user’s SSI, this article outline five essential components of a BC-based IDMS: authentication, integrity, privacy, trust, and simplicity. Furthermore, we perform a security analysis that outlines several types of adversarial threats that can cause potential damage to the BC-based IDMS. We identify and discuss associated issues and challenges by analyzing several notable BC-based IDMS solutions in academic literature. We also highlight potential research gaps and provide future research scope.

The strong growth of communication and storage gives rise to the significantly increasing demand for collecting, storing, and sharing a large amount of data on networks. This is further enhanced by the data-driven market, where everyone wants to access other parties' data. Data is the bedrock of today's technologies and researchers, especially in machine learning and deep learning. The business value of organizations is also massively data-dependent. Recent studies and industry applications can apply analytic techniques for exploiting data, or Internet users can exchange data on social networks or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. However, sharing secured data is a challenging problem that attracts much attention from researchers. Sharing secure data with a group of users using P2P applications faces the unavailability problem of peer nodes. Thus users cannot certify and download the protected data. This affects a P2P-based application class of sharing and storing online services or customer-to-customer e-commerce applications. This article proposes a solution for sharing secured data on P2P-based applications using blockchain and attribute-based encryption. The attribute-based encryption guarantees sharing keys among a group of users, while blockchain guarantees keys distribution. We have simulated the proposed solution on the mobile peer-to-peer network that provides services for sharing and storing data securely.

Blockchains are currently gaining attention as a newly emerging technology in both academia and industry, capable of impacting a variety of domains beyond cryptocurrencies. Performance modeling can be used to provide us with a deeper understanding of the behavior and dynamics within blockchain peer-to-peer networks. Blockchain system architects can leverage network models to properly tune their system and to reduce design costs significantly. In this article, we focus on the original and well-established Bitcoin blockchain network. In particular, we propose a random graph model for performance modeling and analysis of the inventory-based protocol for block dissemination. This model addresses the impact of key blockchain parameters on the overall performance of Bitcoin. We derive some explicit and closed-form equations for block propagation delay and traffic overhead in the Bitcoin network. We also adapt our model to study the impact of deploying a relay network and investigate the effect of the relay network size on the network performance and decentralization. We implement our model using the popular network simulator OMNet++. We validate the accuracy of our theoretical model and its implementation with our dataset mined from the Bitcoin network. Our results show the tradeoff between the default number of connections per node, network bandwidth, and block size in order to compute the optimal block propagation delay over the network. Additionally, we found that bigger relay networks can jeopardize the decentralization of the Bitcoin network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, real estate markets hold and contribute a fair share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of any country. The real estate transactions generate revenue in stamp duties, which goes directly into the government kitty. However, this suffers from land document forgery and fraudulent activities due to a lack of an efficient, distributed, and completely digital system. This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework for digitizing property transactions that mitigate the risk of document forgery and other fraudulent activities. Over time, the amount of these transactions can become overwhelming, thus increasing the number of blocks. The proposed framework is based on blockchain technology to decentralize the complete ecosystem. The framework encompasses all major activities for property transactions. The framework uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that is a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) swarm network, to integrate different region registry offices in the state/country seamlessly. In order to make it secure, a consensus algorithm is proposed that reduces overhead transmissions for multicasting nodes by about 50%. The message exchange communication overhead also reduces by 54.86%. The time taken for the consensus algorithm is around 53.7% lesser than the Proof-of-Work mechanism in which all nodes participate in consensus and 10% lesser than the existing load-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The land registry system is one of the very important revenue generator in any governance system that stores land ownership records. There are various issues and loopholes in the existing system that gives rise to corruption and disputes. The digitization of land records is not sufficient to prevent fraud, time delays, and brokers' involvement. Distributed Ledger Technology can be used to make this digitized record more secure and process it in a decentralized way, reducing paperwork in selling and buying of land. This paper presents a scalable and novel blockchain technology-based land/property registration architecture that utilizes a scalable trust based consensus mechanism, where all registry offices participate in improving the registration process. The framework integrates different state registry offices in the country. This article proposes a secure and efficient consensus mechanism compared to fewer message exchanges with the existing Proof-of-Work algorithm. Hence, this approach requires less time to append the block into the blockchain. Time required for message exchange per consensus is lesser by 59.01% than the PoW mechanism and takes 11% less time than the load-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patients and healthcare practitioners are faced with the challenge of accessing, managing, integrating, and sharing health records securely. Patients should be able to manage their health records anywhere in the world, keep track of medical background, give access to data, and share those with any healthcare professional securely. Direct access to data for patients and a more robust data-sharing infrastructure could better prepare the healthcare system to manage public health threats during the emergence of deadly disease outbreak such as COVID-19. Current technologies in use by the healthcare industry do not adequately address these requirements due to limitations related to privacy, security, and full ecosystem interoperability. This paper conducted a literature review to find out the pivotal roles blockchain technology play in solving some of the most critical and challenging issues facing the healthcare industry. This paper identifies challenges and opportunities for implementing blockchain technology in healthcare and summarizes health-related blockchain products and key players offering solutions across different applications. In doing this, our research extends and complements existing blockchain research in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strong growth of communication and storage gives rise to the significantly increasing demand for collecting, storing, and sharing a large amount of data on networks. This is further enhanced by the data-driven market, where everyone wants to access other parties' data. Data is the bedrock of today's technologies and researchers, especially in machine learning and deep learning. The business value of organizations is also massively data-dependent. Recent studies and industry applications can apply analytic techniques for exploiting data, or Internet users can exchange data on social networks or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. However, sharing secured data is a challenging problem that attracts much attention from researchers. Sharing secure data with a group of users using P2P applications faces the unavailability problem of peer nodes. Thus users cannot certify and download the protected data. This affects a P2P-based application class of sharing and storing online services or customer-to-customer e-commerce applications. This article proposes a solution for sharing secured data on P2P-based applications using blockchain and attribute-based encryption. The attribute-based encryption guarantees sharing keys among a group of users, while blockchain guarantees keys distribution. We have simulated the proposed solution on the mobile peer-to-peer network that provides services for sharing and storing data securely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classified protection is one of primary security policies of information system in many countries. With the increasing popularity of blockchain in various fields of applications, it is extremely necessary to promote classified protection for blockchain's risk assessment in order to push forward the sustainable development of blockchain. Taking the Level 3 in Chinese classified protection 2.0 as an example, this paper proposes the common evaluation rules on blockchain to ensure that blockchain can meet the needs of countries to build it as critical infrastructure. Both assessment requirements and enforcement proposals are presented and analyzed from the standpoint of blockchain's core technologies, e.g., peer-to-peer network, distributed ledger, contract's scripting system, and consensus mechanism. Moreover, the assessment results on three main platforms, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger, are summarized and analyzed in compliance with the control points specified in the level 3. Our investigation indicates that the current blockchain is able to satisfy the requirements of evaluation items in many aspects, such as software fault tolerance, resource control, backup and recovery, but further improvements are still needed for some aspects, including security audit, access control, identification and authentication, data integrity, etc., in order to satisfy the requirements of important fields on national security, economic development and human life.

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that has gained significant attention and growth in recent years. Unlike traditional currencies, Bitcoin does not rely on a centralized authority to control the supply, distribution, and verification of the validity of transactions. Instead, Bitcoin relies on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of volunteers to distribute pending transactions and confirmed blocks, to verify transactions, and to collectively implement a replicated ledger that everyone agrees on. This P2P network is at the heart of Bitcoin and many other blockchain technologies. In this paper, we present a comparative measurement study of nodes in the Bitcoin network. We measure and analyze how many the so-called “volunteers” are in the Bitcoin P2P network by scanning the live Bitcoin network for 37 days in 2018 and compare them with the data reported by prior work in 2013~2016. This paper is motivated by the fact that Bitcoin has experienced explosive growth in terms of a number of users, transactions, value, and interest over a recent couple of years. Our investigation includes the IP addresses of Bitcoin nodes, size of the network, power law in the geographic distribution, protocol, and client versions, and network latencies and shows how today's network is different from early days. In addition, based on the observations made from the measurement study, we propose a simple distance-based peer selection rule for improved connectivity and faster data propagation. The evaluation results show that our proposed lightweight and backward-compatible peer selection rule has the potential to reduce data dissemination latency.

Blockchain turns both currencies and commodities into a digital form without relying on middleman which allows one person to trade with another include trading the renewable energy. Blockchain technology as a secure and low-cost platform to track the billions of eventual transactions in a distributed energy economy has attracted the attention of experts in various fields of science. The current form of centralized energy trading system is still suffering from security concerns, quality of service, and to name a few. A decentralized energy system using blockchain technology allows the parties to create a trading energy transaction via microgrid. The blockchain technology offers the promise of an immutable, single source of truth from multiple sources without a third-party involvement. In this paper, we describe, explore and analyze the prominent implementation of blockchain technology in the energy sector. Furthermore, we analyze the security issues and highlight the performance of several attacks that might be occurred in the proposed system.

Propagation time on permissionless blockchain plays a significant role in terms of stability and performance in the decentralized systems. A large number of activities are disseminated to the whole nodes in the decentralized peer-to-peer network, thus causing propagation delay. The stability of the system is our concern in the first place. The propagation delay opens up opportunities for attackers to apply their protocol. Either by accelerating or decelerating the propagation time directly without proper calculation, it brings numerous negative impacts to the entire blockchain system. In this paper, we thoroughly review and elaborate on several parameters related to the propagation time in such a system. We describe our findings in terms of data communication, transaction propagation, and the possibility of an interference attack that caused an extra propagation time. Furthermore, we present the influence of block size, consensus, and blockchain scalability, including the relation of parameters. In the last session, we remark several points associated with the propagation time and use cases to avoid dilemmas in the light of the experiments and literary works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain technology offers an intelligent amalgamation of distributed ledger, Peer-to-Peer (P2P), cryptography, and smart contracts to enable trustworthy applications without any third parties. Existing blockchain systems have successfully either resolved the scalability issue by advancing the distributed consensus protocols from the control plane, or complemented the security issue by updating the block structure and encryption algorithms from the data plane. Yet, we argue that the underlying P2P network plane remains as an important but unaddressed barrier for accelerating the overall blockchain system performance, which can be discussed from how fast and reliable the network is. In order to improve the blockchain network performance about enabling fast and reliable broadcast, we establish a trust-enhanced blockchain P2P topology which takes transmission rate and transmission reliability into consideration. Transmission rate reflects blockchain network speed to disseminate transactions and blocks, and transmission reliability reveals whether transmission rate changes drastically on unreliable network connection. This paper presents BlockP2P-EP, a novel trust-enhanced blockchain topology to accelerate transmission rate and meanwhile retain transmission reliability. BlockP2P-EP first operates the geographical proximity sensing clustering, which leverages K-Means algorithm for gathering proximity peer nodes into clusters. It follows by the hierarchical topological structure that ensures strong connectivity and small diameter based on node attribute classification. Then we propose establishing trust-enhanced network topology. On top of the trust-enhanced blockchain topology, BlockP2P-EP conducts the parallel spanning tree broadcast algorithm to enable fast data broadcast among nodes both intra- and inter- clusters. Finally, we adopt an effective node inactivation detection method to reduce network load. To verify the validity of BlockP2P-EP protocol, we carefully design and implement a blockchain network simulator. Evaluation results show that BlockP2P-EP can exhibit promising network performance in terms of transmission rate and transmission reliability compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large organizations are increasingly attracted to the notion of reward points as a form of loyalty giveaway. However, for current markets, these points can be redeemed only within the organizational domain. No concept of interoperability or exchangeability of these points exists among cross-organization users in a decentralized manner. To address this challenge, this study proposes a solution for exchanging user-earned reward points using blockchain technology. The solution aims at a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange network wherein participants can directly exchange points through web/mobile apps of point-offering organizations. To this end, we propose using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain and Hyperledger Composer, which will synchronize the initial data from off-chain apps, and after the exchanges are done on-chain, sync the data back to them. This approach extends existing off-chain organization management systems instead of requiring a whole new system both for users and organizations and also optimizes the ever growing blockchain database size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that relies on the distributed nature of the peer-to-peer network while performing an agreement, or consensus, a mechanism to achieve an immutable, global, and consistent registry of all transactions. Thus, a key challenge in developing blockchain solutions is to design the consensus mechanism properly. As a consequence of being a distributed application, any consensus mechanism is restricted to offer two of three properties: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. In this paper, we survey the main consensus mechanisms on blockchain solutions, and we highlight the properties of each one. Moreover, we differentiate both deterministic and probabilistic consensus mechanisms, and we highlight coordination solutions that facilitate the data distribution on the blockchain, without the need for a sophisticated consensus mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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