@conference {522, title = {Can{\textquoteright}t Understand SLAs? Use the Smart Contract}, booktitle = {2021 Third IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA)}, year = {2021}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Atlanta, GA, USA}, abstract = {

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a special kind of legal contract that binds a vendor to its customers where the vendor commits to provide certain services in exchange for certain payment from the customers. On the other hand, a Smart Contract is a contract that is a computer program that also binds multiple parties into given agreements but is a set of a precise rules and is self-enforceable and self-executable. Since almost all legal contracts are ambiguous by nature and are complex to read and understand, we perform a novel study on how we can replace the traditional vague legal contract with the smart contact and the effect of the ambiguity on the smart contract by performing a thorough analysis on SLAs by measuring their ambiguities in various aspects. We take several samples of real SLAs from six different popular broadband vendors. We use four random SLAs to train the machine learning model to classify and then detect ambiguous words in two unseen SLAs which were the SLAs of Ziply Fiber and Century Link. As different people form different interpretations while reading the ambiguous legal contracts, we generate various human interpretations from the machine detected ambiguous words and convert all those generated interpretations into Smart Contracts to perform testing in Ethereum-based Blockchain to identify the most ambiguous as well as accurate interpretation of the SLA. From our analysis and observation, we were able to find out the most ambiguous interpretation of SLAs and we concluded that the SLA of Ziply Fiber was more ambiguous in general compared to the SLA of Century Link. Moreover, our proposed approach to detect ambiguous terms and to translate an ambiguous legal contract to a smart legal contract using a formal language to measure the degree of ambiguity can be extrapolated and replicated to legal contracts from other types of industries as well.

}, keywords = {ambiguity, ambiguity index, blockchain, clauses, complexity, Ethereum, interpretations, machine learning, service level agreement, SLA, smart contract, smart legal contract}, isbn = {978-1-6654-1623-8}, doi = {10.1109/TPSISA52974.2021.00015}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9750250}, author = {Upadhyay, Kritagya and Dantu, Ram and He, Yanyan and Badruddoja, Syed and Salau, Abiola} } @conference {528, title = {Data Cooperatives for Neighborhood Watch}, booktitle = {2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)}, year = {2021}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Sydney, Australia}, abstract = {

The increasing proliferation of user data is moving the world from the era of {\textquoteright}big data{\textquoteright} to a new era of shared data, and some are considering data as a factor of production that is paving the way for a new business economy. In this paper, we propose a solution that uses blockchain technology as a platform for online neighborhood watch using a form of data cooperative among individuals or organizations in the sharing of data through a peer-to-peer mechanism. We prove the concept by implementing a distributed phishing data sharing system that will maintain a community ledger of reported phishing activities with a consensus-based approval of the phishing transaction and a novel reputation scoring system thereby adding reliability to the system and effectively tackling the phishing problem. The data cooperative provides a way for timely multi-party sharing of phishing data among anti-phishing organizations and users of the internet eliminating the current approach of each organization maintaining its database. Our results show that blockchain is effective in complementing the existing methods of phishing detection and serves as a platform for sharing phishing data with respect to scalability, cost, and memory consumption. Also, our results further show that transaction times on the Ropsten test net follow a Gamma distribution. Our approach can be extrapolated to other data sharing systems like medical data, spam calls, discussion forums, etc.

}, keywords = {blockchain, Cybersecurity, data cooperative, data sharing, distributed ledger, peer-to- peer, phishing, smart contract}, isbn = {978-1-6654-3578-9}, doi = {10.1109/ICBC51069.2021.9461056}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9461056}, author = {Salau, Abiola and Dantu, Ram and Upadhyay, Kritagya} } @conference {513, title = {Make Consumers Happy by Defuzzifying the Service Level Agreements}, booktitle = {2021 Third IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA)}, year = {2021}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Atlanta, GA, USA}, abstract = {

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a special kind of legal contract that binds a vendor to its customers where the vendor commits to provide certain services in exchange for certain payments from the customers. However, when customers do not get the services that they have subscribed for, it becomes a laborious job for customers to contact or visit the company and claim the correct amount of compensation or service credits. On the other hand, a Smart Contract is a contract that is a computer program that also binds multiple parties into given agreements but is a set of precise rules and is self-enforceable and self-executable. In this paper, we have introduced a novel work where we use fuzzy logic inside the Ethereum-based smart contract for two significant objectives. The first objective is to make the claim of the compensation easier and faster for customers by translating the SLA into a smart contract. The second objective is to make the smart contract even smarter and intelligent by implementing fuzzy logic so that customers who have a hard time understanding the legal jargon and ambiguities of the legal contract and SLA to find out if the compensation amount they are getting when the service is poor is good enough. Since fuzzy logic models semantics of linguistic expressions by capturing vagueness in the fuzzy sets, it becomes easier to solve the problem of contractual ambiguities and expedite the process of claiming compensation when implemented in a Blockchain-based smart contract.

}, keywords = {ambiguity, blockchain, clauses, complexity, Ethereum, Fuzzy logic, interpretations, service level agreement, SLA, smart contract, smart legal contract}, isbn = {978-1-6654-1623-8}, doi = {10.1109/TPSISA52974.2021.00011}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9750258}, author = {Upadhyay, Kritagya and Dantu, Ram and He, Yanyan and Salau, Abiola and Badruddoja, Syed} } @conference {533, title = {Making Smart Contracts Smarter}, booktitle = {2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)}, year = {2021}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Sydney, Australia}, abstract = {

Blockchain technology develops static smart contracts for decentralized business transactions, lacks dynamic decision-making capabilities that limit the possibilities of ever-increasing demands of modern business applications. Artificial intelligence, a computational prediction platform provides intelligent predictions, actions, and recognition that lacks the ability to hold on to the integrity of the prediction result and requires the help of external authorities to secure the system. Blockchain-based AI prediction can cover the gaps of individual technologies and can mutually benefit from one another to develop a decentralized machine learning architecture that promises to yield better security, automation, and dynamism of the application. This paper proposes a Naive Bayes prediction algorithm to perform prediction with inside blockchain smart contracts that promises to open up more opportunities in the field of Blockchain-AI decentralized applications.

}, keywords = {artificial intelligence, blockchain, DApp, machine learning, Naive Bayes, smart contract}, isbn = {978-1-6654-3578-9}, doi = {10.1109/ICBC51069.2021.9461148}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9461148}, author = {Badruddoja, Syed and Dantu, Ram and He, Yanyan and Upadhayay, Kritagya and Thompson, Mark} } @conference {518, title = {Paradigm Shift from Paper Contracts to Smart Contracts}, booktitle = {2021 Third IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA)}, year = {2021}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Atlanta, GA, USA}, abstract = {

The ambiguity and complexity of the traditional legal contracts have motivated the study and exploration of a better and advanced contract known as blockchain-based smart contracts. A smart contract is a self-executable contract where the terms of the agreement between the involved parties are directly written into the lines of code that resides in the distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain. Obtaining a better understanding of smart contracts to overcome the fundamental issues of traditional legal contracts is vital for the successful and faster dispute settlement process without the intervention of any third-party mediators like courts, banks, lawyers, etc. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the key features of the paradigm shift from traditional paper contracts to smart contracts. In addition, we also discuss why smart contracts are necessary to be legally enforced and the crucial conditions that are required for them to be legally enforceable. Furthermore, we outline recent trends and emerging technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and the Internet of Things that have been combined together with smart contracts.

}, keywords = {ambiguity, artificial intelligence, blockchain, electronic contract, enforceability, Ethereum, interpretations, smart contract, traditional legal contract}, isbn = {978-1-6654-1623-8}, doi = {10.1109/TPSISA52974.2021.00029}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9750226}, author = {Upadhyay, Kritagya and Dantu, Ram and He, Yanyan and Salau, Abiola and Badruddoja, Syed} } @conference {538, title = {Integrating DOTS With Blockchain Can Secure Massive IoT Sensors}, booktitle = {2020 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)}, year = {2020}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {New Orleans, LA, USA}, abstract = {

This paper presents a novel approach to securing IoT devices by leveraging DDoS Open Threat Signaling (DOTS) architecture on a Blockchain framework. Like many areas of the information technology domain, IoT sensors are also prone to attacks but on a larger scale. There are millions of devices being connected to a central domain to provide different types of services. Since these low-powered IoT devices have constrained technical requirements with less computational capabilities, they lack the capacity to judge their behavior as benign or malignant. IoT relies heavily on the higher level of intelligent nodes to decide on their status. An IoT Controller/Edge server handles the registration and the limited management of devices. Since traditional security is unable to protect the IoT environment sufficiently, we present a Blockchain-based DDoS detection approach to secure and mitigate such attacks in the IoT environment. Our test setup includes dataset from four sensors over two months. These values were tested using a threshold calculation against the variation of temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind direction on that day to find out whether an IoT sensor is under a DDoS attack. Our results show how DOTS can help in detection of attack when mapped on IoT edge computing.

}, keywords = {blockchain, Cybersecurity, DDOS Protection, distributed ledger, Edge Computing, IoT, Smart Contracts}, isbn = {978-1-7281-7445-7}, doi = {10.1109/IPDPSW50202.2020.00156}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9150345}, author = {Badruddoja, Syed and Dantu, Ram and Widick, Logan and Zaccagni, Zachary and Upadhyay, Kritagya} } @conference {403, title = {Blockchain Based Authentication and Authorization Framework for Remote Collaboration Systems}, booktitle = {2019 IEEE 20th International Symposium on "A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks" (WoWMoM)}, year = {2019}, month = {June}, abstract = {

Due to the advantages of blockchain technologies, including decentralization, immutability, transparency and security, people try to replace existing problematic architectures /frameworks with blockchain based ones. In this paper we propose a novel authentication and authorization framework based on blockchain technologies to control access to the resources of an IoT device. In this paper, we focus on devices such as the Cyber Handyman used in remote collaboration applications to develop our framework. We tested our smart contracts on the Ropsten test network. Our results showed that it can handle 25 service requests simultaneously.

}, keywords = {Access Control, authorization, blockchain, Digital Certificate, IoT, remote collaboration, Security}, doi = {10.1109/WoWMoM.2019.8792994}, author = {Widick, Logan and Ranasinghe, Ishan and Dantu, Ram and Jonnada, Srikanth} } @conference {409, title = {Distributed Ledger for Spammers{\textquoteright} Resume}, booktitle = {2019 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)}, year = {2019}, month = {June}, abstract = {

Unsolicited, and most likely spoofed, robot calls are not just an annoyance, but also carry a potential threat with the onset of automation, impersonation, and even voice manipulation technologies as malicious elements attempt to use deception to steal sensitive information or invoke action. Despite steps taken to protect consumers, the issue appears to be far from under control. In this paper, we propose a solution to use blockchain as a platform to share spam transactions through a peer-to-peer mechanism that will maintain a global database of reported spam transactions in order to identify and trace spam activity effectively. Storing spam transactions on a distributed ledger with consensus-based approval of transactions adds reliability to the data and can optimize the data points that will be available to spam detection algorithms in order to fight spam effectively. As this is peer to peer-based sharing, there is no need to rely on third-party providers for storing and sharing this data to the users. Every spam call received will be added as a detailed transaction on the blockchain to execute a smart contract that will calculate the trustworthiness of the caller. Call records are used to identify spam transactions while the blockchain ledgers store this data. We discuss the relevance and advantages of a distributed ledger to store these transactions. This paper does not aim at solving the spam problem with an optimized detection algorithm but evaluates the characteristics and performance of the blockchain as a distributed ledger and its relevance to serve as a platform for peer-to-peer spam detection mechanisms. We evaluate different blockchain metrics like transaction processing rates, gas costs and ledger sizes and discuss how they scale in order to store the spam reports data on the blockchain.

}, keywords = {blockchain, Peer-to-peer, Robocalls, smart contract, Spam detection}, doi = {10.1109/CNS.2019.8802789}, author = {Muttavarapu, Anudeep and Dantu, Ram and Thompson, Mark} } @conference {322, title = {A Decentralized Marketplace Application on the Ethereum Blockchain}, booktitle = {IEEE 4th International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC)}, year = {2018}, month = {10/2018}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Philadelphia, PA, USA}, abstract = {

Modern centralized online marketplaces such as eBay offer an alternative option for consumers to both sell and purchase goods with relative ease. However, drawbacks to these marketplaces include the platform{\textquoteright}s ability to block merchants at their own whim, the fees paid to the platform when listing a product and when selling a product, and the lack of privacy of users{\textquoteright} data. In this paper, we propose an application that remedies all three of these drawbacks through use of the Ethereum blockchain platform. The application was developed using the Truffle development framework. The application{\textquoteright}s functions were contained within an Ethereum smart contract, which was then migrated to the Ethereum network. The user{\textquoteright}s input was read through a web interface and sent to the Ethereum network via the web3.js API. Statistics about the application were gathered on the Rinkeby test network. The application was shown to have an average transaction runtime of 3.8 seconds, and an average gas consumption of 4.6 wei. Contract creation times for the application were shown to be less than a second. A cost analysis of the application was then conducted. The gas consumption of the transactions needed to both buy and sell a product was converted into US dollars, and the gas cost of the application was then compared to the cost to use an online auction marketplace such as eBay as well as an in-person auction house such as Sotheby{\textquoteright}s. The results showed that selling on the application is cheaper than existing online options as well as existing in-person options. These tests showed that our application was successful in addressing the drawbacks of current auction marketplaces.

}, keywords = {API, application program interfaces, auction marketplaces, average gas consumption, blockchain, centralized online marketplaces, Computer science, contract creation times, cost analysis, Cryptocurrency, decentralized, decentralized marketplace application, e-commerce, eBay, electronic commerce, Ethereum, Ethereum blockchain platform, Ethereum network, Ethereum smart contract, gas cost, human factors, in-person options, Internet, marketplace, Measurement, online auction marketplace, online options, peer-to-peer computing, Rinkeby test network, security of data, smart contract, Truffle development framework, user data, user interfaces, Web interface}, doi = {10.1109/CIC.2018.00023}, author = {Ranganthan, Vishnu Prasad and Ram Dantu and Paul, Aditya and Mears, Paula and Morozov, Kirill} }