Md. Fazlul Kader

Anik Islam, Md. Fazlul Kader, Md Mofijul Islam] et al.

In order to stay up to date with world issues and cutting-edge technol-ogies, the newspaper plays a crucial role. However, collecting news is not a very easy task. Currently, news publishers are collecting news from their correspond-ents through social networks, email, phone call, fax etc. and sometimes they buy news from the agencies. However, the existing news sharing networks may not provide security for data integrity and any third party may obstruct the regular flow of news sharing. Moreover, the existing news schemes are very vulnerable in case of disclosing the identity. Therefore, a universal platform is needed in the era of globalization where anyone can share and trade news from anywhere in the world securely, without the interference of third-party, and without disclosing the identity of an individual. Recently, blockchain has gained popularity because of its security mechanism over data, identity, etc. Blockchain enables a distrib-uted way of managing transactions where each participant of the network holds the same copy of the transactions. Therefore, with the help of pseudonymity, fault-tolerance, immutability and the distributed structure of blockchain, a scheme (termed as NEWSTRADCOIN) is presented in this paper in which not only news can be shared securely but also anyone can earn money by selling news. The proposed NEWSTRADCOIN can provide a universal platform where publishers can directly obtain news from news-gatherers in a secure way by main-taining data integrity, without experiencing the interference of a third-party, and without disclosing the identity of the news gatherer and publishers.

Anik Islam, Md. Fazlul Kader, Soo Young Shin

Existing education systems are facing a threat of question paper leaking (QPL) in the exam which jeopardizes the quality of education. Therefore, it is high time to think about a more secure and flexible question sharing system which can prevent QPL issue in the future education system. Blockchain enables a way of creating and storing transactions, contracts or anything that requires protection against tampering, accessing etc. This paper presents a new scheme for smart education, by utilizing the concept of blockchain, for question sharing. A two-phase encryption technique for encrypting question paper (QSP) is proposed. In the first phase, QSPs are encrypted using timestamp and in the second phase, previous encrypted QSPs are encrypted again using a timestamp, salt hash and hashes from previous QSPs. These encrypted QSPs are stored in the blockchain along with a smart contract which helps the user to unlock the selected QSP. An algorithm is also proposed for selecting a QSP for the exam which picks a QSP randomly. Moreover, a timestamp based lock is imposed on the scheme so that no one can decrypt the QSP before the allowed time. Finally, security is analyzed by proving different propositions and the superiority of the proposed scheme over existing schemes is proven through a comparative study based on the different features.