InfoTech in a Global Economy. Review of the article

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Blockchain in eCommerce: A Special Issue of the ACM

Transactions on Internet of Things

SABAH MOHAMMED and JINAN FIAIDHI, Lakehead University, Canada

CARLOS RAMOS, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal

TAI-HOON KIM, Sungshin W. University, South Korea

WAI CHI FANG, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, ROC

TAREK ABDELZAHER, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

As blockchain technology is becoming a driving force in the global economy, it is also gaining critical acclaim

in the e-commerce industry. Both the blockchain and e-commerce are inseparable as they involve transac-

tions. Blockchain protect transactions and e-commerce activities rely on them. Blockchain technology enables

a decentralized marketplace to support important business activities like secure payments, managing the sup-

ply chain and reducing the fraud to mention few. In this special issue editorial we are introducing 11 research

articles in this hot area of research that were selected by our reviewers from over than 250 submissions.

CCS Concepts: • Networks → Network properties; Network privacy and anonymity; • Security and

privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; Privacy protections; • Social and

professional topics → Professional topics; Computing and business; Automation;

Additional Key Words and Phrases: Blockchain, distributed marketplace, supply chain, eCommerce services,

B2B and B2C applications, business protection

ACM Reference format:

Sabah Mohammed, Jinan Fiaidhi, Carlos Ramos, Tai-Hoon Kim, Wai Chi Fang, and Tarek Abdelzaher. 2021.

Blockchain in eCommerce: A Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet of Things. ACM Trans. In-

ternet Technol. 21, 1, Article 4 (January 2021), 5 pages.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3445788

Blockchain technology should be considered the most disruptive technology invention of the fourth industrial revolution. The world has never seen a technology as powerful as blockchain technology, and it could potentially impact all sectors of the economy completely while trans- forming it through top-notch efficiency. Blockchain is a natural fit for eCommerce, since it was designed for storing transactional data. However, this data does not need to be financial. It can

Authors’ addresses: S. Mohammed and J. Fiaidhi, Department of Computer Science, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road,

Thunder Bay, Ontario P7B 5E1, Canada; emails: {sabah.mohammed, jfiaidhi}@lakeheadu.ca; C. Ramos, Polytechnic In-

stitute of Porto, 4150-755 Porto, Portugal; email: [email protected]; T.-H. Kim, Sungshin Women’s University Graduate

School, Donamsujeong Campus (02844) 2, Bomun-ro 34da-gil, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea; email: [email protected];

W. C. Fang, Department of Electronics Egineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta Hsueh Road, Hsinchu, Taiwan

300, ROC; email: [email protected]; T. Abdelzaher, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana

Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; email: [email protected].

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee

provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and

the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.

Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires

prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

1533-5399/2021/01-ART4 $15.00

https://doi.org/10.1145/3445788

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 21, No. 1, Article 4. Publication date: January 2021.

4:2 S. Mohammed et al.

Fig. 1. Blockchain applications in eCommerce.

be any distinct action that requires an immutable record, including actions related to payment and order fulfillment. The applications of using blockchain in eCommerce are endless, including Alternative Payment Methods, Faster Transactions, More Secure Payments, and Improved Order Fulfillment. Figure 1 illustrates some of the key benefits of blockchain for eCommerce applications.

The push towards a larger eCommerce market is anticipated to reach $4.8T by 2021 with a 276.9% increase in worldwide (borderless) eCommerce sales over the most-recently tracked pe- riod. According to Jacqueline Renfrow [1], retailers using eCommerce to sell goods across borders experience 50% more fraud than those who only conduct business domestically. Other challenges of having borderless eCommerce are:

• Regulatory issues • Payment methods and payment processing • Logistics and reverse logistics • Organizational readiness

Blockchain is seen as a step to solving these challenges. It has been used to prevent the account takeover problem that costs major industries over than $50 due to fraud. Fraudsters can imper- sonate legitimate account holders and take over their accounts; however, blockchain uses the dis- tributed ledger technology to create trusted identities where multiple trusted parties must be able to verify another party. Moreover, blockchain provides huge advantages for enforcing effective supply-chain management through supporting essential services such as tracking goods, manag- ing payment, reconciling and verifying inventory, facilitating purchases, issuing invoices and bills of lading as well as shipments and electronic receipts. By creating tamper-proof master ledgers and smart contracts between trading parties, blockchain has become one of the popular mechanisms to facilitate eCommerce services and protect it from fraud. The other advantages of enforcing a blockchain system for eCommerce can include [2]:

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 21, No. 1, Article 4. Publication date: January 2021.

Blockchain in eCommerce: A Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet of Things 4:3

• Transparency and collaboration. Blockchain is a solid mechanism for documenting a transaction across the supply chain and sharing it with stakeholders. The system works without a central repository or single administrator.

• Inventory data management. Blockchain has great potential to handle inventory data across systems and stakeholders.

• Scalability and availability. Blockchain 2.0 is solving the scalability issues for writing transactions. Anyone worldwide can access the decentralized datasets.

• Security and privacy. Establishing a trust network depends on the system as an interme- diary to establish point-to-point sharing and bookkeeping of the exchanged data. A node does not have to reveal the physical identity of the person or organization, and the payload can have a digital signature with private cryptographic keys.

• Customer–provider relationship contract. This contract links two nodes in the system, where one node stores and manages records for the other. This relationship could exist between a particular retailer and a customer but extends to cover any pair-wise data stew- ardship interaction.

• Summary contract. This serves as a trail of breadcrumbs, where each participant in the system can locate a summary of their relationships with other participants. The summary contract encodes a list of references to customer–provider relationship contracts, showing current and previous engagements with other nodes on the system. Each relationship also stores a “status” variable, indicating when the relationship was established and whether it has been approved by the customer.

• Reduced transaction costs. The use of near-real-time processing would make the system more efficient.

In This Issue

This special issue addresses the issues on blockchain implementation in eCommerce in terms of problems related to payments, supply chain management, data security, transparent marketplace, retailers’ satisfaction, efficient management systems, consumers’ satisfaction, new blockchain business model, and other related platforms. We received overwhelming submissions that ex- ceeded 250 articles and accepted only 11 submissions. We hope that the ideas and guidelines presented in this special issue will provide a valuable resource for educators and eCommerce spe- cialists embarking on blockchain and stimulate further research in this area.

The first article by Shuiguang Deng et al. analyzes the challenges that current eCommerce is facing and introduces a new scenario of eCommerce enabled by blockchain. A framework is pro- posed in this scenario for offloading mining tasks onto the edge server based on mobile edge computing. Then the offloading issue is modeled as a multi-constrained optimization problem and evolutionary algorithms are utilized and re-designed as solvers.

Zibin Zheng et al. propose a detecting method based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and autoencoder to precisely distinguish phishing accounts. They take the GCN as an encoder and the inner product of its output as a decoder to approximate the adjacency matrix, thereby obtain- ing embeddings of the nodes. The key of the proposed model is to capture the structural relation- ships between node features from the convolution on the graph unsupervised. In the transaction network, due to the anonymity of the account, feature-engineering capabilities are limited, and the idea of combining structural features from the topological graph is more like an extension of it.

In their article, Jin Wang et al. propose a new and effective sensor data integrity auditing mecha- nism based on bilinear pair accumulator, which can be well adapted to the edge-computing frame- work. Using the scheme, the verifier confirms that the operation is independent of the number of

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data blocks during data integrity verification, and its computational complexity is constant. This scheme minimizes the burden and cost of the verification process to the greatest extent, which makes it possible to perform data verification effectively on low-power-consumption devices. Therefore, this scheme is very suitable for the edge computing framework that they proposed, because the edge computing capacity of the framework as a verifier is very limited.

The fourth article, by Xiaoxian Yang et al., designs the C-PBFT algorithm for the integra- tion of the supply chain and blockchain to build a secure, private, and efficient supply chain for eCommerce. After analyzing the weaknesses of the supply chain and the superiority of blockchain, they propose a new way to combine the two based on the PBTF. Then, they introduce the details of the framework for the integration of the supply chain and blockchain, including the structure of the supply chain and the construction of the two-layer blockchain. On this foundation, they describe the operating process for the integration of the supply chain and blockchain, including peer classification, reputation assessment, and consensus algorithm.

The article entitled “The Cloud-Edge Based Dynamic Reconfiguration to Service Workflow for Mobile eCommerce Environments: A QoS Prediction Perspective,” by Honghao Gao et al., focuses on the characteristics of cloud-edge services and proposes a dynamic reconfiguration method. The approach considers the limited resource storage of edge-end mobile devices. Moreover, the QoS is predicted using LSTM to maintain the stability of the service composition, which effectively avoids the risk of service failure. The approach better meets the development needs of mobile services composition, thereby contributing to the development of eCommerce.

The authors Rui Zhang et al. propose a reputation system with transaction and consensus incen- tives, called RTChain, for eCommerce blockchain. In RTChain, both the consensus behavior and transaction behavior of a node will affect its reputation score with an incentive mechanism. They have improved the consensus mechanism to satisfy the high throughput requirement of eCom- merce. Moreover, RTChain is secure against most of the existing attacks such as flash attacks, self- mining attacks, eclipse attacks, and double-spending attacks and allows nodes that participate in the consensus to fail no more than one-third of the total reputation.

The seventh article, by Mucheol Kim et al., proposes an intelligent mediator-based enhanced smart contract for privacy protection. The proposed intelligent mediator method performs trans- action mediation, authorization, and record management. The transaction mediation technology utilizes an intelligent mediator to verify differential information rights and automatically organize transactions between users during the construction of the contracts. Authorization verifies differ- ential data entitlements through intelligent mediators for verification of privacy disclosure and automatically organizes transaction data in smart contracts. Records management constitutes a system that automatically manages records of personal information utilization through intelligent mediators.

In their study, Yangsun Lee et al. propose a personal portfolio multifactor authentication system using blockchain that can manage education-related data through a distributed ledger without a central authority while providing transparency, reliability, and integrity. The blockchain network infrastructure and authentication server of the system was implemented using the Hyperledger Fabric framework and Docker, which is a software virtualization platform. In addition, when reg- istering and updating learner information with the configured peer, a chain code was stored in the ledger of all peers participating in the channel, and a block was generated.

Yi Jin et al. propose an account guarantee scheme to realize feasible supervision for exist- ing anonymous blockchain networks with lower storage costs. Users are able to guarantee anonymous accounts with account guarantee key pairs generated from certificated polynomial functions, which inherently maintain one-to-n mapping certifications. Single or limited account guarantee key pairs do not leak privacy. Victims are able to request TCs to screen a cheater or

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disclose a cheater with enough fraud transactions by themselves. Detailed security and privacy analysis showed that the account guarantee scheme preserves user privacy and realizes feasible supervision.

In their article, Rui Tang et al. propose a new supply-chain system based on IoT and manage- ment frameworks, then design an access control framework to implement distributed and trustless access control. The register module is mainly responsible for information registration and has a registration policy that is maintained by all of the companies in a supply chain. Besides, the mod- ule also provides a revocation and update function. The inspection module focuses on judging misbehavior and monitors the actions of subjects. In the event of any misoperation, the subjects are penalized.

Shaohua Wan et al. propose CBDSS, a Consortium Blockchain-based Distributed Secure Search Scheme over encrypted data in an eCommerce environment. By integrating the blockchain and searchable encryption model, sensitive data can be effectively protected. The consortium blockchain can ensure that only authorized nodes can join the system. To fairly assign nodes for the search tasks, they develop an endorsement strategy in which two agent roles are set up to divide and match the search tasks with the virtual resources according to the load capacity of each node.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the many reviewers who participated in this special issue; the final set of articles has benefited from the constructive feedback. We also thank the ACM TOIT editor-in-chief (Professor Ling Liu) for her support, encouragement, and help.

REFERENCES

[1] Jacqueline Renfrow. 2017. Top 5 challenges of cross-border e-commerce. Fierceretail Blog, 2017. Retrieved from https://

www.fierceretail.com/digital/top-5-challenges-cross-border-e-commerce.

[2] Jinan Fiaidhi, Sabah Mohammed, and Sami Mohammed. 2018. EDI with blockchain as an enabler for extreme automa-

tion. IEEE IT Prof. 20, 4 (2018), 66–72.

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