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1. Enhancing Research Results with Programmable Blockchain Network

   Ajayi, O; Saadawi, T (October 2023, IEEE 14th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communications (UEMCON 2023))

   Since its inception in 2008, Blockchain has been proposed in different fields of study, and the research results have shown promising prospects in these areas. Despite these study results, blockchain technology has suffered some setbacks in adoption for real-life implementations. The unwillingness to adopt it stems from industries and organizations not being convinced about the proposed solutions' results. The reason is that many of the presented solution results come from simulation. While simulation results are acceptable for research purposes, industries might be skeptical about adopting a new system based only on simulation results. Researchers must present results from real-life implementations to fully convince stakeholders of the usefulness of adopting blockchain technology. However, presenting blockchain results from reallife performance is challenging because of the following significant problems: 1. Blockchain networks are customized to implement a single approach, i.e., no blockchain network can test multiple proposed implementations concurrently, and 2. There is a lack of testbeds (with enough blockchain nodes) to test proposed solutions. This ongoing work presents a Programmable Blockchain Network (PBN), which can implement multiple approaches simultaneously and a global testbed to evaluate proposed solutions in real-life scenarios. The PBN, implemented on Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) global testbed, uses a master-slave model for smart contracts calling to implement concurrent blockchain solutions. The preliminary result shows that the proposed solution enhances research results, convincing more industries to adopt blockchain technology. 

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2. A Blockchain based Framework for Secure and Decentralized Energy Trading in a Community

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIT58465.2023.10143101  

   Sachdeva, Saurabh; Fatehaj, Latif; Tan, Stefan; James, Joel; Ajayi, Oluwaseyi; Saadawi, Tarek (April 2023, IEEE)

   Blockchain is a decentralized, digital, and distributed ledger which allows transparent and secure information sharing among the peer-to-peer network. It eliminates the need for a centralized trusted party and, though it was introduced as the backbone technology for cryptocurrencies but has proved to be a promising and revolutionary technology for almost all global industries. The application of blockchain technology in the energy sector proposes a paradigm of solutions to problems of different levels of complexity in the traditional energy ecosystem. Extensive research has been proposed to exploit the inherent benefits of blockchain technology for the integration of distributed energy sources and facilitate peer-to-peer energy trading. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture to facilitate secure and decentralized energy trading generated from renewable energy sources. The solution utilizes the Ethereum blockchain and Smart Contracts for energy trading among the members of a small community without any trusted third entity and adopts features to achieve data integrity and confidentiality, and user identity privacy. 

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3. Transpacific Testbed for Real-Time Experimentation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/5GWF52925.2021.00095  

   Ajayi, Oluwaseyi; Huseynov, Huseyn; Saadawi, Tarek; Tsuru, Masato; Kourai, Kourai (January 2021, IEEE 4th 5G world forum (5GWF))

   null (Ed.)

   The transpacific testbed is a generic routing encapsulation (GRE) tunnel built between CUNY City College (CCNY), USA and Kyushu Institute of Technology (KYUTECH), Japan. The tunnel, built through internet2, originated from CCNY through the JGN network in Seattle and terminated at Kyutech in Japan. The testbed defines the future of the Internet by focusing on addressing research challenges associated with enabling trustworthy networks, supporting the Internet of Things (IoT), which encompasses everything connected to the Internet and cyber-physical systems (CPS) - a controlled mechanism monitored by computer-based algorithms. In this paper, we describe the setting up and testing of the testbed. Furthermore, we describe the real-time experiments conducted on the testbed and present the results. The experiments are classified into two: blockchain-based cooperative intrusion detection system (CoIDS) and Secure Virtual Machine introspection. In each of the experiments, we describe the method and present the results. Finally, we look into the ongoing works of extending the testbed to the COSMIC global testbed. 

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4. Security Assessment of Blockchains in Heterogenous IoT Networks : Invited Presentation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CISS.2019.8693034  

   Jemal, Jay; Kornegay, Kevin T. (March 2019, Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS))

   As Blockchain technology become more understood in recent years and its capability to solve enterprise business use cases become evident, technologist have been exploring Blockchain technology to solve use cases that have been daunting industries for years. Unlike existing technologies, one of the key features of blockchain technology is its unparalleled capability to provide, traceability, accountability and immutable records that can be accessed at any point in time. One application area of interest for blockchain is securing heterogenous networks. This paper explores the security challenges in a heterogonous network of IoT devices and whether blockchain can be a viable solution. Using an experimental approach, we explore the possibility of using blockchain technology to secure IoT devices, validate IoT device transactions, and establish a chain of trust to secure an IoT device mesh network, as well as investigate the plausibility of using immutable transactions for forensic analysis. 

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5. Securing blockchain-based timed data release against adversarial attacks

   https://doi.org/10.3233/JCS-230001  

   Wang, Jingzhe; Palanisamy, Balaji (November 2023, Journal of Computer Security)

   Sural, Shamik; Lu, Haibing (Ed.)

   Timed data release refers to protecting sensitive data that can be accessed only after a pre-determined amount of time has passed. While blockchain-based solutions for timed data release provide a promising approach for decentralizing the process, designing an attack-resilient timed-release service that is resilient to malicious adversaries in a blockchain network is inherently challenging. A timed-release service on a blockchain network is inevitably exposed to the risk of post-facto attacks where adversaries may launch attacks after the data is released in the blockchain network. Existing incentive-based solutions for timed data release in Ethereum blockchains guarantee protection under the assumption of a fully rational adversarial environment in which every peer acts rationally. However, these schemes fail invariably when even a single participating peer node in the protocol starts acting maliciously and deviates from the rational behavior. In this paper, we propose a systematic solution for attack-resilient and practical blockchain-based timed data release in a mixed adversarial environment, where both malicious adversaries and rational adversaries exist. We first propose an effective uncertainty-aware reputation measure to capture the behaviors of the peer involved in timed data release activities in the network. In light of such a measure, we present the design of a basic protocol that consists of two critical ingredients, namely reputation-aware peer recruitment and verifiable enforcement protocols. The former, prior to the start of the enforcement protocols, performs peer recruitment based on the reputation measure to make the design probabilistically attack-resilient to the post-facto attacks. The latter is responsible for contractually guarding the recruited peers at runtime by transparently reporting observed adversarial behaviors. However, the basic recruitment design is only aware of the reputation of the peers and it does not consider the working time schedule of the participating peers and as a result, it results in lower attack-resilience. To enhance the attack resilience further without impacting the verifiable enforcement protocols, we propose a temporal graph-based reputation-aware peer recruitment algorithm that carefully determines the peer recruitment plan to make the service more attack-resilient. In our proposed approach, we formally capture the timed data release service as a temporal graph and we develop a novel maximal attack-resilient path-finding algorithm on the temporal graph for the participating peers. We implement a prototype of the proposed approach using Smart Contracts and deploy it on the Ethereum official test network, Rinkeby. For extensively evaluating the proposed techniques, we perform simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of the reputation-aware timed data release protocols as well as our proposed temporal-graph-based improvements. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and strong attack resilience of the proposed mechanisms and our approach incurs only a modest gas cost. 

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