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Despite the extensive interest in cryptocurrencies over the past years, their application as a means of payment in e‐commerce and retail purchases continues to be much slower than anticipated. This paper investigates the underlying mechanisms and elements that drive consumer resistance in this space. Drawing upon the stimulus‐organism‐response paradigm and the innovation resistance theory, the paper explores how the characteristics of the current cryptocurrency landscape contribute to different factors associated with crypto‐payment rejection. Our findings from empirical and experimental studies reveal how ecosystem volatility and the lack of structural assurances for cryptocurrencies foster negative consumer perceptions, leading to resistance against crypto‐payment use. The paper develops new insights into the main predictors of consumer resistance to crypto‐payment, which is a precursor to the mainstream use of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, it sheds light on the interactions among context‐specific, psychological, and functional determinants of behavioral consumer response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's technological world, low-cost devices have become a mainstream technology in the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) systems. Short-distance communication methods, such as Bluetooth and ZigBee, are prevalent among IoT users and devices. The lack of a confidential channel, even in the initialization phase of communication between devices, causes growing security and privacy concerns. As a result, many authentic-channel-based protocols, which only use a one-time authenticated but not a confidential channel, have been designed to tackle this problem. Message authentication, recognition, classification, linking, and association protocols are the major categories of the authentic-channel-based ones. This paper formally defines different types of authentic-channel-based protocols and discusses their respective authenticity and privacy assurances. We propose a new formal model to consider the notion of unlinkability and classify the protocols designed based on one-time and authentic channels that only resist active adversaries. We prove the unlinkability level of the abstract constructions and some seminal instances. Finally, we propose two new and improved versions of a recently published linking message protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly becoming widespread in different areas such as healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. IoT networks comprise many diverse entities, including smart small devices for capturing sensitive information, which may be attainable targets for malicious parties. Thus security and privacy are of utmost importance. To protect the confidentiality of data handled by IoT devices, conventional cryptographic primitives have generally been used in various IoT security solutions. While these primitives provide just an acceptable level of security, they typically neither preserve privacy nor support advanced functionalities. Also, they overly count on trusted third parties because of some limitations by design. This multidisciplinary survey paper connects the dots and explains how some advanced cryptosystems can achieve ambitious goals. We begin by describing a multi-tiered heterogeneous IoT architecture that supports the cloud, edge, fog, and blockchain technologies and assumptions and capabilities for each layer. We then elucidate advanced encryption primitives, namely wildcarded, break-glass, proxy re-encryption, and registration-based encryption schemes, as well as IoT-friendly cryptographic accumulators. Our paper illustrates how they can augment the features mentioned above while simultaneously satisfying the architectural IoT requirements. We provide comparison tables and diverse IoT-based use cases for each advanced cryptosystem as well as a guideline for selecting the best one in different scenarios and depict how they can be integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of increasingly sophisticated quantum computers poses a long-term threat to current cryptographic infrastructure. This has spurred research into both quantum-resistant algorithms and how to safely transition real-world implementations and protocols to quantumresistant replacements. This transition is likely to be a gradual process due to both the complexity and cost associated with transitioning. One method to ease the transition is the use of classical-quantum hybrid schemes, which provide security against both classical and quantum adversaries. We present a new combiner for creating hybrid encryption schemes directly from traditional encryption schemes. Our construction is the only existing proposal in the literature with IND-CCA-security in the classical and quantum random oracle models, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite gaining consumer momentum and interest of Virtual Reality (VR) in the consumer marketplace, the literature has lagged in exploring the continuance usage behaviour and factors associated with the post-adoption. To build on this, the current research seeks to identify factors that support the continuance usage of current VR users. To examine this, we employ a mixed-method approach. In Study 1, we initially gathered a total of 3,205 actual purchasers (Amazon verified purchase) from the top 10 VR brands listed in Amazon.com, Through a nethnographic content analysis, the key determinants of post-adoption of VR devices emerged (i.e. perceived functional benefit, perceived discomfort, perceived focused immersion, temporal dissociation, perceived health risk, and task quality). In Study 2, hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling from 119 current VR users. The results demonstrate temporal dissociation and task quality were found to be the most significant antecedents affecting continuance usage. Theoretical and managerial implications are debated, as well as suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heterogeneous and decentralized nature of renewable energy sources is too much to handle for traditional and centralized IT grid infrastructure. Blockchain technology can address many of the associated challenges. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art technology layers of grid system infrastructure, a proposed future state using blockchain technology, and gap analysis. The paper also contributes a set of architectural requirements for a blockchain-enabled future state and a proposed hybrid architecture using blockchain technology, verifiable credentials, and smart contracts. This architecture can uniquely support the technology layers critical to renewable energies, including system architecture, registries, grid management, billing, privacy, and interoperability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we review the peer-to-peer blockchain transaction protocol, Dandelion, and develop an oracle-based model for its network and security. We formalize a series of security and functional criteria, such as unforgeability, non-repudiation, and immutability, into security experiments. In our model, we consider a quantum-capable adversary who seeks to undermine any of the security criteria while using oracles to simulate and interact with the Dandelion network. We then prove the security of Dandelion in our model with a series of (tight) security reductions as our main result. In addition, we prove that Dandelion is resistant to double-spending attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deng et al. (J Inf Secur Appl 47:120–124, 2019) recently proposed a quantum multiparty collaborative computation protocol that claims that the private information of trustful participants is secure against the distrustful ones. They also analyzed the security of their model against a malicious user and claimed that it is secure. However, our work shows that Deng et al.'s protocol is insecure against both inside and outside attacks. We suggest a modification to prevent both inside and outside attacks from getting any useful information. Also, the proposed modified version allows all participated users to compute the final statistics instead of just one user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Understanding a technology's patent landscape, including patent strategies, helps organizations position themselves regarding their innovation and provides insight about a technology's future direction. This study aims to provide an overview of the blockchain technology patenting trends and outlines an exploratory framework of patenting strategies for blockchain. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 3,234 registered patents are analyzed to determine the geographical distribution and identify key actors patenting around the globe. In addition, an empirical study consisting of multiple case studies in the form of ten in-depth interviews with owners/managers of organizations based in North America was conducted to understand organizations' strategies for patenting the blockchain technology. Findings: Several novel insights regarding the strategies are used for blockchain technology patenting. For example, the existence of strong anti-patent sentiment which results in a lack of patenting by start-up organizations or has led to a form of open source patenting strategy. Larger organizations appear to be patenting defensively, and small to medium organizations are primarily patenting to defend their competitive advantage. Practical implications: Start-up organizations harboring anti-patent sentiment should consider the open-source patenting strategy to ensure that the collaborative innovation network can continue. They should also consider collaborating with other actors within the network to have a competitive position in the market. Originality/value: To the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first to conduct an empirical study with organizations currently using the blockchain technology to understand patenting strategies used for blockchain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain Technology Symposium 2021 (BTS' 21) is a forum where academic researchers, industry professionals, and decision makers came together to present recent advancements, discuss adoption barriers, tackle common challenges, and explore future roadmaps surrounding blockchain and its related technologies such as consensus algorithms, smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and distributed ledger technologies generally. As a follow-up to BTS'18 & BTS '20, which were hosted by Ryerson University and The Fields Institute, and by popular demand, BTS 2021 gathered a diverse audience from academia, industry, and policy makers to engage in a dialogue around crucial topics in the adoption of blockchain technology, with the aim of crossfertilizing ideas from these communities to address the challenges and seize the opportunities brought forward by this promising technology. BTS'21 featured multidisciplinary and multisectoral talks and presentations on four major themes: (1) decentralized finance (DeFi), (2) decentralized identity, (3) decentralized health and (4) decentralized supply chain management. This article provides reflections on some of the key insights found in the BTS'21 presentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum key agreement enables remote participants to fairly establish a secure shared key based on their private inputs. In the circular-type multiparty quantum key agreement mode, two or more malicious participants can collude together to steal private inputs of honest participants or to generate the final key alone. In this work, we focus on a powerful collusive attack strategy in which two or more malicious participants in particular positions, can learn sensitive information or generate the final key alone without revealing their malicious behaviour. Many of the current circular-type multiparty quantum key agreement protocols are not secure against this collusive attack strategy. As an example, we analyze the security of a recently proposed multiparty key agreement protocol to show the vulnerability of existing circular-type multiparty quantum key agreement protocols against this collusive attack. Moreover, we design a general secure multiparty key agreement model that would remove this vulnerability from such circular-type key agreement protocols and describe the necessary steps to implement this model. The proposed model is general and does not depend on the specific physical implementation of the quantum key agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the problem of double-ending fraud in real estate transactions – a type of transactional fraud wherein agents handling real estate transactions unfairly benefit (e.g., by simultaneously representing both the buy and sell side of a real estate transaction in a manner that unfairly boosts the commission they receive, or colluding to increase their commission in a real estate transaction at the expense of the buyer and/or seller of the real property). The paper proposes a unique blockchain solution design that leverages blockchain's properties of transparency and ability to create tamper-resistant audit trails to reduce opportunities for double-ending fraud and increase real estate market participants' trust in the handling of their transactions. The paper discusses the implementation of a prototype of the solution based on hyperledger fabric and sails; it presents the results of an agent-based modelling simulation validating that the inherent transparency of the proposed design offers optimal allocation for both sellers and buyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain technology presents significant potential along with risk. The blockchain technology transformation framework informs decision makers on how blockchain fits in their processes, what data will be in the transactions, and who the participants will be, allowing users to lower risks and increase their chances for a successful blockchain solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invention and implementation of smart connected cars will change the way how the transportation networks in cities around the world operate. This technological shift will not happen instantaneously—for many years, both human-driven and smart connected vehicles will coexist. In this paper, using a multiagent simulation framework, we model a complex urban transportation system that involves heterogeneous participants. Vehicles are assigned into two groups: the first one consists of smart cars and the second one involves regular ones. Vehicles in the former group are capable of rerouting in response to changes in the observed traffic while regular ones rely on historical information only. The goal of the paper is to analyze the effect of changing smart cars penetration on system characteristics, in particular, the total travelling time. The smart car routing algorithm proposed in this paper reduced travelling time up to 30%. Analysis has shown that the behaviour of the system and optimal configuration of underlying algorithms change dynamically with smart vehicles penetration level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a feasible and efficient dynamic multiparty quantum private comparison protocol that is fully secure against participant attacks. In the proposed scheme, two almost-dishonest third parties generate two random keys and send them to all participants. Every participant independently encrypts their private information with the encryption keys and sends it to the third parties. The third parties can analyze the equality of all or some participants' secrets without gaining access to the secret information. New participants can dynamically join the protocol without the need for any additional conditions in the protocol. We provide detailed correctness and security analysis of the proposed protocol. Our security analysis of the proposed protocol against both inside and outside attacks proves that attackers cannot extract any secret information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iterated attacks are comprised of iterating adversaries who can make d plaintext queries, in each iteration to compute a bit, and are trying to distinguish between a random cipher C and the perfect cipher C based on all bits. Vaudenay showed that a 2 d-decorrelated cipher resists to iterated attacks of order d when iterations have almost no common queries. Then, he first asked what the necessary conditions are for a cipher to resist a non-adaptive iterated attack of order d. I.e., whether decorrelation of order 2 d − 1 could be sufficient. Secondly, he speculated that repeating a plaintext query in different iterations does not provide any advantage to a non-adaptive distinguisher. We close here these two long-standing open problems negatively. For those questions, we provide two counter-intuitive examples.W e also deal with adaptive iterated adversaries who can make both plaintext and ciphertext queries in which the future queries are dependent on the past queries. We show that decorrelation of order 2 d protects against these attacks of order d. We also study the generalization of these distinguishers for iterations making non-binary outcomes. Finally, we measure the resistance against two well-known statistical distinguishers, namely, differential-linear and boomerang distinguishers and show that 4-decorrelation degree protects against these attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will construct a lattice-based public-key cryptosystem using non-commutative quaternion algebra, and since its lattice does not fully fit within Circular and Convolutional Modular Lattice (CCML), we prove it is arguably more secure than the existing lattice-based cryptosystems such as NTRU. As in NTRU, the proposed public-key cryptosystem relies for its inherent security on the intractability of finding the shortest vector in a certain non-convolutional modular lattice, yet it is efficient and cost effective, contrary to cryptosystems such as RSA or ECC. The detailed specification of the proposed cryptosystem, including the underlying algebraic structure, key generation, encryption and decryption process and also the issues regarding key security, message security, and probability of successful decryption are explained. We will further show, based on the existing results for lattice-reduction algorithms, that the proposed cryptosystem with a dimension of 41 will have a security equal to NTRU-167. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate unconditional security for message authentication protocols that are designed using two-channel cryptography. (Two-channel cryptography employs a broadband, insecure wireless channel and an authenticated, narrow-band manual channel at the same time.) We study both noninteractive message authentication protocols (NIMAPs) and interactive message authentication protocols (IMAPs) in this setting. First, we provide a new proof of nonexistence of nontrivial unconditionally secure NIMAPs. This proof consists of a combinatorial counting argument and is much shorter than the previous proof by Wang and Safavi-Naini, which was based on probability distribution arguments. We also prove a new result which holds in a weakened attack model. Further, we propose a generalization of an unconditionally secure 3-round IMAP due to Naor, Segev and Smith. The IMAP is based on two ϵ-Δ universal hash families. With a careful choice of parameters, our scheme improves that of Naor et al. Our scheme is very close to optimal for most parameter situations of practical interest. Finally, a variation of the 3-round IMAP is presented, in which only one hash family is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an Interactive Message Authentication Protocol (IMAP) using two channels; an insecure broadband channel and an authenticated narrow-band channel. We consider the problem in the context of ad hoc networks, where it is assumed that there is neither a secret key shared among the two parties, nor a public-key infrastructure in place. The security of our IMAP is based on the existence of Interactive-Collision Resistant (ICR) hash functions, a new notion of hash function security. Our IMAP is based on the computational assumption that ICR hash functions exist. It performs better than message authentication protocols that are based on computational assumptions. That is, while achieving the same level of security, the amount of information sent over the authenticated channel in our IMAP is smaller than the most secure IMAP and Non-interactive Message Authentication Protocol (NIMAP) in the literature. In other words, if we send the same amount of information over the authenticated channel, we can allow much stronger adversaries compared to the existing protocols in the literature. Moreover, our IMAP benefits from a simple structure and works under fewer security assumptions compared to other IMAPs in the literature. The efficient and easy-to-use structure of our IMAP makes it very practical in real world ad hoc network scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global supply chain is a network of interconnected processes that create, use, and exchange records, but which were not designed to interact with one another. As such, the key to unlocking the full potential of supply chain management (SCM) technologies is achieving interoperability across participating records systems and networks. We review existing research and solutions using distributed ledger technology (DLT) and provide a survey of its current state of practice. We additionally propose a holistic solution: a DLT-based interoperable future state that could enable the interoperable, efficient, reliable, and secure exchange of records with integrity. Finally, we provide a gap analysis between our proposed future state and the current state, which also serves as a gap analysis for many fractional DLT-based SCM solutions and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]