Blockchain Based Distributed Package Management Architecture

Blockchain technology has found a great number of applications, from banking to the Internet of Things (IoT). However, it has not yet been envisioned whether and which problems in Software Engineering (SE) Blockchain technology could solve. In this paper, we coin this field 'Blockchain-based Software Engineering' and exemplify how Blockchain technology could solve two core SE problems: Continuous Integration (CI) Services such as Travis CI and Package Managers such as apt-get. We believe that Blockchain technology could help (1) democratize and professionalize Software Engineering infrastructure that currently relies on free work done by few volunteers, (2) improve the quality of artifacts and services, and (3) increase trust in ubiquitously used systems like GitHub or Travis CI.

<title>Abstract</title> Brain tumors, complex and potentially devastating, demand precise classification for effective patient prognosis and treatment planning. This paper introduces a novel approach to automate brain tumor classification using deep learning techniques, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, conventional centralized methods compromise patient privacy and data security. To address this issue, federated learning (FL), a collaborative paradigm enabling model training across multiple institutions and aggregating models at a central server while preserving the confidentiality of sensitive medical data, is proposed. Moreover, an aggregation function at the central server is modified to identify the effect of aggregation on global model training. In addition to that, Blockchain technology is also integrated with FL architecture to enhance privacy preservation and trust, to ensure the integrity and immutability of patient data. By synergistically integrating modified FL, CNNs, and Blockchain technology, the proposed approach achieves accuracy (98%) and security in brain tumor classification. Through this, it aims to advance the field of medical imaging while prioritizing patient privacy and data security (through Blockchain technology) in brain tumor diagnosis and treatment.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is developing as a novel phenomenon that is applied in the growth of several crucial applications. However, these applications continue to function on a centralized storage structure, which leads to several major problems, such as security, privacy, and a single point of failure. In recent years, blockchain (BC) technology has become a pillar for the progression of IoT-based applications. The BC technique is utilized to resolve the security, privacy, and single point of failure (third-part dependency) issues encountered in IoT applications. Conversely, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on mining pools revealed the existence of vital fault lines amongst the BC-assisted IoT networks. Therefore, the current study designs a hybrid Harris Hawks with sine cosine and a deep learning-based intrusion detection system (H3SC-DLIDS) for a BC-supported IoT environment. The aim of the presented H3SC-DLIDS approach is to recognize the presence of DDoS attacks in the BC-assisted IoT environment. To enable secure communication in the IoT networks, BC technology is used. The proposed H3SC-DLIDS technique designs a H3SC technique by integrating the concepts of Harris Hawks optimization (HHO) and sine cosine algorithm (SCA) for feature selection. For the intrusion detection process, a long short-term memory auto-encoder (LSTM-AE) model is utilized in this study. Finally, the arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) is implemented for hyperparameter tuning of the LSTM-AE technique. The proposed H3SC-DLIDS method was experimentally validated using the BoT-IoT database, and the results indicate the superior performance of the proposed H3SC-DLIDS technique over other existing methods, with a maximum accuracy of 99.05%.

Real-Time Video Distribution (RTVD) is now the focus of many applications, including video conferencing, surveillance, video broadcasting, etc. This paper introduces a multi-IP camera-based method for distributing video signals to several levels using a hybrid client/server with peer-to-peer. There are four primary functions in the proposed structure: firstly, all linked camera transmissions will be received by the central server, and video signals will be shown to all attached clients and servers in Level two. The second function means that the clients/servers in level two start viewing received video signals and rebroadcasts them to the next level. The third function is clients/servers in level three who receive the video signals from the upper level and rebroadcast them to the fourth level. The fourth level consists of many clients that start viewing received video signals from level three. Therefore, the planned architecture and mechanism of the proposed system can provide the admin the capability to concentrate on the frames obtained from IP cameras to/from the central server. Furthermore, this mechanism can register and store the stream of frames and encode these frames during transmission. The proposed system depended on VC# programming language as a dependent tool that relied on various architectures and algorithms.

With the rapid development of smart grid, the lack of a very accurate and consistent grid model has become a bottleneck for its development. However,the traditional maintenance and sharing methods for grid model can not meet the requirements of the current grid environment since it is centralized and once the central server is attacked, huge loss will be caused. To this end, this paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture for province-prefecture power dispatching system to realize secure and transparent cross-regional model parameters updating and sharing, which can ensure the integrity, consistency and traceability of the grid model applied in each local dispatching center. In this paper, the blockchain technology is used to store, update and share model parameters in a secure way, and different clients have different permissions to access the blockchain network. The implementation of the proposed approach shows that it is a feasible and promising solution for smart grid model communication in a secure way.

In this paper, a secure energy trading mechanism based on blockchain technology is proposed. The proposed model deals with energy trading problems such as insecure energy trading and inefficient charging mechanisms for electric vehicles (EVs) in a vehicular energy network (VEN). EVs face two major problems: finding an optimal charging station and calculating the exact amount of energy required to reach the selected charging station. Moreover, in traditional trading approaches, centralized parties are involved in energy trading, which leads to various issues such as increased computational cost, increased computational delay, data tempering and a single point of failure. Furthermore, EVs face various energy challenges, such as imbalanced load supply and fluctuations in voltage level. Therefore, a demand-response (DR) pricing strategy enables EV users to flatten load curves and efficiently adjust electricity usage. In this work, communication between EVs and aggregators is efficiently performed through blockchain. Moreover, a branching concept is involved in the proposed system, which divides EV data into two different branches: a Fraud Chain (F-chain) and an Integrity Chain (I-chain). The proposed branching mechanism helps solve the storage problem and reduces computational time. Moreover, an attacker model is designed to check the robustness of the proposed system against double-spending and replay attacks. Security analysis of the proposed smart contract is also given in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed work efficiently reduces the charging cost and time in a VEN.

An identity management system (IDMS) manages and organizes identities and credentials information exchanged between users, identity providers (IDPs), and service providers (SPs) to ensure confidentiality and enhance privacy of users’ personal data. Traditional or centralized IDMS rely on a third party to store a user’s personal information, authenticate the user, and organize the entire process. This clearly constitutes threats to the privacy of the user, in addition to other issues, such as single point of failure (SPOF), user tracking, and data availability issues. Blockchain technology has many useful features that can contribute to solving traditional IDMS issues, such as decentralization, immutability, and anonymity. Blockchain represents an attractive solution for many issues related to traditional IDMS, including privacy, third-party control, data leakage, and SPOF, supported by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) security features and powerful smart contracts technology. The current study presents a systematic literature review and analysis for recently proposed solutions that adopt the traditional centralized approach, as well as solutions based on blockchain technology. The study also aims to provide a deep understanding of proposed IDMS solutions and best practices, and highlight the research gaps and open issues related to IDMSs and users’ privacy. In particular, the current research focuses on analyzing the blockchain-based solutions and illustrating their strengths and weaknesses, as well as highlighting the promising blockchain technology framework that can be utilized to enhance privacy and solve security issues in a centralized IDMS. Such a study is an important step towards developing efficient solutions that address the pressing needs in the field.

Modern age banking systems has the utilities of the digital world but having said that, it also suffered from its challenges &amp; limitations. Basically, the structure of today’s banking system is driven by traditional client-server interactions, here system became heavily dependent upon central servers and it’s concerning information. The challenges like KYC compliance, fraud detection, manipulation of records and many more are the prime concerns to address in present banking systems. Here Blockchain Technology plays a vital role to overcome the limitations of existing banking systems and provide revolutionized changes in traditional banking systems. This paper based on various Blockchain Technology utilities which can provide a safer &amp; easier prospective to the future banking landscape.

Blockchain technology permits a highly secured record keeping and digital transaction. Blockchain technology is changing the digital world and industry by bringing a new view to security, transparency, and efficiency of systems. It provides a safe way for the exchange of products, services, or transaction. Blockchain will enable more agile value chains, faster product innovations, closer customer relationship sector. This paper provides an overview of blockchain technology and its potential in developing a secure and reliable agriculture supply chain management. Agriculture supply chain management systems are vital for getting food products delivered from farmers to the consumers. Blockchain technology can also be used to achieve better prices and payment options, land title registration and for transparent disbursement of subsidies to farmers.

Git has been the de-facto version control system for the Software Development industry. Although Git is distributed, developers' tools for collaboration, such as GitHub, are centralized entities owned by large corporations such as Microsoft. The centralization creates trust and privacy issues for software development companies (preserving their intellectual property), along with a significant" single point of failure" issue. In addition, such centralized systems are susceptible to Sybil and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks due to the presence of malicious individuals. Blockchain technology has many key characteristics (such as decentralization, transparency, immutability, and audibility), solving these centralization issues. However, the requirement of having a storage system to store the user's repositories over the blockchain creates a scalability issue (in terms of storage). Most importantly, it makes data (code) privacy more severe due to its open nature. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving decentralized alternative solution and framework named "DCGit" powered by Web3 technologies such as the Ethereum Blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to provide security and scalability yet user-friendly collaboration for software development.

This paper presents a survey on various security frameworks which aim to secure Hadoop clusters and the files stored there. Most of the Hadoop platforms rely on Kerberos Authentication Protocol for user authentication. It is known that Kerberos itself has some vulnerabilities like Password Guessing Attacks, Single Point of Failure, Insider Attacks, and Time Synchronization problems. A new authentication framework that can address most of the identified issues and is computationally feasible than other schemes is introduced in this paper. The proposed framework is based on Secure Remote Password Protocol (SRP), Threshold Cryptography, and Blockchain Technology. The system focus on eradicating Password Guessing Attacks and Single Point of Failure in Kerberos Enabled Hadoop Clusters. The analysis results strengthen the claim that the proposed scheme beats the others in terms of computational efficiency and feasibility while offering the same security features. The paper is concluded with directions for future work.

The growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) objects and the operational and security challenges in IoT systems are encouraging researchers to design suitable IoT architecture. Enormous data generated in the IoT environment face several kinds of security and privacy challenges. IoT system generally suffers from several issues like data storage, safety, privacy, integrity, transparency, trust, and single point of failure. IoT environment is emerging with several solutions to resolve these problems. The main objective of this paper is to design a cloud-blockchain-based secure IoT architecture that provides advanced and efficient storage and security solutions to IoT ecosystem. Blockchain technology appears to be a decent choice to resolve such kinds of problems. Blockchain technology uses a hash-based cryptographic technique for information security and integrity. Cloud computing provides advanced storage solutions with several remote services to store, compute and analyze the data. The proposed IoT architecture is based on the integration of cloud and blockchain services, which aim to provide transparent, decentralized, and trustworthy and secure storage solutions. In addition to the standard layers (perception layer, network layer, processing layer, and application layer) the proposed IoT architecture in the present paper includes a service layer, a security layer, and a parallel management and control layer, which focus on the security and management of the entire IoT infrastructure.

Based on the methods discussed, a framework for integrating blockchain technology into networking protocols was created in this study. Some of the difficulties that conventional networking protocols face when integrating blockchain technology into communication networks are covered in this paper. This paper also provides case studies and examples to provide a clearer picture of how blockchain technology might be utilised to enhance security, privacy, and decentralisation in networking protocols. Based on the open and unchangeable nature of blockchain technology, this article offered suggestions for communication networks to achieve higher levels of integrity and trust while lowering any dangers related to centralised control and single points of failure. Furthermore, the study looks at advanced security feature which is SHA-256 cryptographic hashing to show how blockchain can maintain data integrity and guard against malicious attacks.

The cloud storage and sharing system are widely used in medical systems. The unique characteristics of cloud storage enable healthy data being efficiently delivered and retrieved. Nevertheless, traditional medical cloud system suffers two flaws. For one thing, centralized cloud servers are vulnerable to malicious attack and single point of failure. For another, these systems cannot offer a powerful capability to protect medical health data. Blockchain technology is considered to be one of vital technologies of Bitcoin. In this paper, we propose a security model which combines the cloud storage technology with blockchain technology. Our model adopts Delegate Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus mechanism to ensure that all nodes have unified state in the network. Additionally, the CP-ABE scheme is introduced into the Proxy Re-encryption to store and share medical data which supports the keywords searching. Moreover, we rank medical institutions that different ranks have different duties. In our secure sharing models, there are no central nodes and it is a distributed environment. It not only can reduce the access overhead of the blockchain but also better resist the collusion attack. Furthermore, our security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme achieves provable security under the q-DBDHE assumption in the random oracle model. Then, the comparisons show that our model is more efficient and practical than previous ones.

Emerging Technologies of Fourth Industrial Revolution such as Internet of Things has the potential to change the way we are living today and interact with information systems and devices. From a small device like a simple glucose monitor of healthcare sector to Autonomous cars from transportation industry, IoT plays a vital role in connected information, human interaction and data. At the same instance, IoT deals with personalized human and quite important data from various types of devices, a small loophole can be a reason to bring disastrous impact on human lives, a minor vulnerability in IoT networks may challenge the complete cycle of IoT network. It may generate calamity type of event, not only in information systems but also on the physical human lives as well, because of a single point of failure as IoT based networks usually deployed on centralized systems. In this paper, we are proposing a decentralized approach to remove single point of failure with the help of new layer of security based on Blockchain technology as advancement in securing IoT networks.