BITS Faculty Publications
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Item Layered blockchain-based mobile crowdsensing architecture: exploring privacy and scalability challenges across layers(Springer, 2025-04) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshBlockchain technology has emerged as a transformative solution for addressing the limitations of traditional Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) systems, which rely on centralized architectures. Despite its promise, the integration of blockchain into MCS introduces challenges related to privacy, scalability, and system efficiency. This paper presents a comprehensive layered architecture for enhancing blockchain-based MCS systems (BMCS), focusing on two critical dimensions: privacy and scalability. By categorizing challenges and proposed mitigation strategies, the study explores privacy risks arising from blockchain transparency and evaluates privacy-preserving mechanisms, including zero-knowledge proofs, multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption, to protect sensitive data in decentralized environments. Scalability constraints, such as limited transaction throughput and resource intensity, are presented with targeted solutions that reduce on-chain loads and improve performance. The findings contribute actionable insights to advance BMCS systems, charting a path for resilient and scalable decentralized ecosystems.Item Multi-vendor IoT-based Resource Sharing using OAuth and Blockchain(IEEE, 2022) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshScarcity of resources is a major problem associated with growing urbanization across the globe. A natural way to address the issue is to share the resources. This solution is not only cost-effective but also sometimes environment friendly. However, sharing resources among people in a trustless environment (in big cities, people do not know each other) and preserving the participant’s privacy are important issues to be addressed. Internet-of-Things and Blockchain together are being considered by the researchers to develop solutions for different smart city applications. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving blockchain-based framework for multi-vendor IoT-based resource sharing for smart cities. OAuth is integrated with the proposed framework to authorize the blockchain to make the payment from the requester to the service provider. The proposed solution is implemented on the EOS blockchain instead of Ethereum because EOS does not require a fee for executing the smart contract and can conduct millions of transactions per second.Item Bitcoin’s Blockchain Data Analytics: A Graph Theoretic Perspective(Springer, 2022-03) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshBitcoin is the first and most widely used cryptocurrency in the world. It provides a pseudonym identity to its users that is established using the user’s public key, which leads to preserving the user’s privacy. Each transfer of bitcoin cryptocurrency among the users makes a transaction. The pseudonym identities are considered as transaction end-points. These transactions are recorded on an immutable public ledger called Blockchain which is an append-only data structure. The popularity of Bitcoin has increased unreasonably. The general trend shows a positive response from the common masses indicating an increase in trust and privacy concerns which makes an interesting use case from the analysis point of view. Moreover, since the blockchain is publicly available and up-to-date, any analysis would provide a live insight into the usage patterns which ultimately would be useful for making a number of inferences by law-enforcement agencies, economists, tech-enthusiasts, etc. In this paper, we study various applications and techniques of performing data analytics over Bitcoin blockchain from a graph theoretic perspective. We also propose a framework for performing such data analytics and explored a couple of use cases using the proposed framework.Item T-PASS: A Blockchain-based NFT Enabled Property Management and Exchange System(IEEE, 2023) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshEverybody is witnessing a tremendous rise in the tokenization of all types of assets, including stock, funds, debt, and intellectual property, as a result of the explosive growth of decentralized finance (DeFi). Blockchain technology enables users to convert physical or digital assets into Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and trade using cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology uses a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) system to enable immutable, traceable, and safe trading. NFT’s use is currently restricted to fancy digital artwork, collectibles, games, etc., but its distinctive capabilities and platforms could be used for more real-world problems. This paper extends the DeFi applications with the real estate property assets as NFTs, examines the requirements of NFT-enabled property management and exchange system, and proposes a model for the same. We discuss the system design specifications and implementation approach extensively. The proposed model gives key components and direction for using NFTs in actual property management issues.Item DCGit: Decentralized Internet Hosting for Software Development(IEEE, 2023) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshGit 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.Item D-insta: A Decentralized Image Sharing Platform(Springer, 2023-03) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshDue to the covid-19 pandemic, people have moved toward digitization and using digital technologies in their daily life. For instance, photographers and artists use social media platforms or stock photo websites to showcase their art to people to get recognition and credit. Since social media platforms attract people more than stock photo websites, we consider incorporating the stock photo website features into the social media platforms. Currently, such platforms are running in a centralized fashion where their proprietary algorithms mask most of the content to which some users and advertisement posts are given more priority. Due to the centralization, such hidden algorithms create trust issues among the users along with other issues such as single point of failure, identity theft, etc. This causes genuine artists and photographers to lose their interest and motivation. Providing due credit to the authors and deserved recognition are significant concerns for photographers who share images on stock photo websites or social media platforms. In this paper, we propose a decentralized image-sharing platform/application utilizing blockchain and a distributed file storage system to address all these issues. The proposed platform leverages Ethereum-based smart contracts to maintain trust as deployed smart contracts are immutable, and the logic written in them is publicly available. We leverage a distributed file storage system to solve the blockchain scalability issue in terms of storage.Item Pub-SubMCS: A privacy-preserving publish–subscribe and blockchain-based mobile crowdsensing framework(Elsevier, 2023-09) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshThis paper proposes a privacy-preserving publish–subscribe-based decentralized framework for MCS systems named “Pub-SubMCS”. The framework allows data sharing, where requesters can subscribe to an existing data request (task) if their requirements match. Otherwise, they can create a new task with specific requirements on considered parameters. Incorporating the publish–subscribe (pub–sub) service model in a decentralized MCS system saves system entities’ sensing and computing resources and the cost of acquiring the data by the requesters. However, the pub–sub service model makes the curse of sensing issues more severe. Pub-SubMCS handles the curse of sensing issues by performing access control using smart contracts, which impose restrictions on data collectors (workers) to publish the data and identify and penalize the malicious workers early. To ensure data privacy and validation simultaneously over blockchain, we perform data transformation enabling the validation algorithm to run over transformed data and thus enhancing trust among the system entities. In particular, we use the normalization technique to transform data and the Pearson correlation coefficient measure to compare the similarity in the collected sensor data. Pub-SubMCS is implemented on the Ethereum blockchain, and solidity programming language is used to create smart contracts. The security analysis and experiment results show the proposed system’s scalability, usability, and feasibility. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the publish–subscribe model against the requester–worker model.Item Enhancing Mobile Crowdsensing Security: A Proof of Stake-Based Publisher Selection Algorithm to Combat Sybil Attacks in Blockchain-Assisted MCS Systems(Springer, 2024-04) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshIn a blockchain-assisted Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) System, individuals can generate as many blockchain identities as they desire, facilitating the execution of a Sybil attack. A Sybil attack can significantly impact such a system due to incorporating a reward mechanism and a majority-based data validation mechanism. An attacker can launch a Sybil attack with selfish or malicious intentions to maximize benefits from the system or to narrow down the reputation of the data requester (subscriber) and the system. Consequently, a Sybil attacker can discourage honest data collectors (publishers) and subscribers from participating, impeding the system’s potential success. In this paper, we propose a Sybil attack prevention cum avoidance mechanism to narrow down the effect of it in the blockchain-based MCS systems while maintaining the system’s requirements. The proposed mechanism incorporates a novel randomized publisher selection algorithm, leveraging the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) concept to render executing a Sybil attack costly and impractical. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.Item Enabling AI in Agriculture 4.0: A Blockchain-Based Mobile CrowdSensing Architecture(Springer, 2024-04) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshAgriculture 4.0 relies on extensive data for predictive services, necessitating effective data collection. Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS), with its cost-effectiveness and scalability, addresses this need but faces centralization limitations. Blockchain-based frameworks have been proposed to mitigate these issues but often focus solely on data collection, lacking a comprehensive end-to-end architecture for smart agriculture. Recent literature has explored the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, fog computing, and cloud computing capabilities to establish centralized end-to-end architectures. Nonetheless, these architectures come with their own set of centralized limitations. In the context of contemporary technologies, the integration of blockchain and digital twin (DT) holds the potential to revolutionize the field of smart agriculture. This paper introduces a holistic end-to-end, layered, and service-oriented architecture for Agriculture 4.0, integrating mobile crowdsensing, blockchain, and DT. Unlike existing architectures, this approach aims to overcome centralization limitations, leveraging the strengths of emerging technologies. The proposed architecture extends current capabilities for more efficient and secure Agriculture 4.0 practices. We deploy the suggested architecture onto the Ethereum blockchain, demonstrating its practicality through the obtained results.