Hamed Balogun | University of Ilorin (original) (raw)
Papers by Hamed Balogun
2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
Social media users often find it difficult to make appropriate access control decisions which gov... more Social media users often find it difficult to make appropriate access control decisions which govern how they share their information with a potentially large audience on these platforms. Community detection algorithms have been previously put forth as a solution which can help users by automatically partitioning their friend network. These partitions can then be used by the user as a basis for making access control decisions. Previous works which leverage communities for enhancing access control mechanisms assume that members of the same community will have the same access to a user's content, but whether or to what extent this assumption is correct is a lingering question. In this paper, we empirically evaluate a goodness of fit between the communities created by implementing 8 community detection algorithms on the friend networks of users and the access control decisions made by them during a user study. We also analyze whether personal characteristics of the users or the nature of the content play a role in the performance of the algorithms. The results indicate that community detection algorithms may be useful for creating default access control policies for users who exhibit a relatively more static access control behaviour. For users showing great variation in their access control decisions across the board (both in terms of number and actual members), we found that community detection algorithms performed poorly.
Lancaster University, Jul 30, 2021
The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain ... more The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain acceptance and wide traction in research and practice within academia and the industry because of its promise in decentralised and distributed computing. Notably, the meteoric rise in the value and number of cryptocurrencies since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 have ushered in newer innovations and interventions that addressed some of the prominent issues that affect these platforms. Despite the increased privacy, security, scalability, and energy-saving capabilities of new consensus protocols in newer systems, the development and management of blockchains, mostly, do not reflect the decentralisation principle despite blockchains being decentralised and distributed in their architecture. The concept of treasury has been identified as a tool to address this problem. We explore the idea of blockchain treasury systems within literature and practice, especially with relation to funding and decision-making power towards blockchain development and maintenance. Consequently, we propose a taxonomy for treasury models within cryptocurrencies.
2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), 2018
Blockchain technology has pioneered a new consensus approach to building a distributed public led... more Blockchain technology has pioneered a new consensus approach to building a distributed public ledger globally. A key feature expected from cryptocurrencies and blockchain systems is the absence of a centralized control over the operation process. That is, blockchain solutions should neither rely on "trusted parties or powerful minority" for their operations, nor introduce such centralisation tendencies into blockchain systems. On the other hand, real-world blockchain systems require steady funding for continuous development and maintenance of the systems. Given that blockchain systems are decentralized systems, their maintenance and developmental funding should also be void of centralization risks. Therefore, secure and "community-inclusive" long-term sustainability of funding is critical for the health of blockchain platforms. In this work, for the first time, we provide a systematic exposition of blockchain development funding, planning, management, and disbursement mechanisms aka "treasury systems" (for cryptocurrencies and blockchain systems). Drawing from existing literature, we identify and categorise various treasury models, thereby enabling an exploration of their properties, benefits and drawbacks. Particularly, we perform an evaluation of real-world cryptocurrency treasury system of top cryptocurrencies e.g., Dash governance system, and ZCash Foundation. Finally, we briefly discuss desired properties of decentralised treasury systems and provide suggestions for improvement or alternative solutions to existing systems or implementations.
The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain ... more The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain acceptance and wide traction in research and practice within academia and the industry because of its promise in decentralised and distributed computing. Notably, the meteoric rise in the value and number of cryptocurrencies since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 have ushered in newer innovations and interventions that addressed some of the prominent issues that affect these platforms. Despite the increased privacy, security, scalability, and energy-saving capabilities of new consensus protocols in newer systems, the development and management of blockchains, mostly, do not reflect the decentralisation principle despite blockchains being decentralised and distributed in their architecture. The concept of treasury has been identified as a tool to address this problem. We explore the idea of blockchain treasury systems within literature and practice, especially with relation to funding and ...
2016 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, 2016
There is ample evidence which shows that social media users struggle to make appropriate access c... more There is ample evidence which shows that social media users struggle to make appropriate access control decisions while disclosing their information and smarter mechanisms are needed to assist them. Using profile information to ascertain similarity between users and provide suggestions to them during the process of making access control decisions has been put forth as a possible solution to this problem. This paper presents an empirical study aimed at identifying the minimal subset of attributes which are most suitable for being used to create profile vectors for the purpose of predicting access control decisions. We begin with an exhaustive list of 30 profile attributes and identify a subset of 2 profile attributes which are shown to be sufficient in obtaining similarity between profiles and predicting access control decisions with the same accuracy as previous models. We demonstrate that using this pair of attributes will help mitigate the challenges encountered by similarity based access control mechanisms.
Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2019
A treasury system is a community-controlled and decentralized collaborative decision-making mecha... more A treasury system is a community-controlled and decentralized collaborative decision-making mechanism for sustainable funding of blockchain development and maintenance. During each treasury period, project proposals are submitted, discussed, and voted for; top-ranked projects are funded from the treasury. The Dash governance system is a real-world example of such kind of systems. In this work, we, for the first time, provide a rigorous study of the treasury system. We modelled, designed, and implemented a provably secure treasury system that is compatible with most existing blockchain infrastructures, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. More specifically, the proposed treasury system supports liquid democracy/delegative voting for better collaborative intelligence. Namely, the stake holders can either vote directly on the proposed projects or delegate their votes to experts. Its core component is a distributed universally composable secure end-to-end verifiable voting protocol. The integrity of the treasury voting decisions is guaranteed even when all the voting committee members are corrupted. To further improve efficiency, we proposed the world's first honest verifier zero-knowledge proof for unit vector encryption with logarithmic size communication. This partial result may be of independent interest to other cryptographic protocols. A pilot system is implemented in Scala over the Scorex 2.0 framework, and its benchmark results indicate that the proposed system can support tens of thousands of treasury participants with high efficiency.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
Social media users often find it difficult to make appropriate access control decisions which gov... more Social media users often find it difficult to make appropriate access control decisions which govern how they share their information with a potentially large audience on these platforms. Community detection algorithms have been previously put forth as a solution which can help users by automatically partitioning their friend network. These partitions can then be used by the user as a basis for making access control decisions. Previous works which leverage communities for enhancing access control mechanisms assume that members of the same community will have the same access to a user's content, but whether or to what extent this assumption is correct is a lingering question. In this paper, we empirically evaluate a goodness of fit between the communities created by implementing 8 community detection algorithms on the friend networks of users and the access control decisions made by them during a user study. We also analyze whether personal characteristics of the users or the nature of the content play a role in the performance of the algorithms. The results indicate that community detection algorithms may be useful for creating default access control policies for users who exhibit a relatively more static access control behaviour. For users showing great variation in their access control decisions across the board (both in terms of number and actual members), we found that community detection algorithms performed poorly.
Lancaster University, Jul 30, 2021
The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain ... more The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain acceptance and wide traction in research and practice within academia and the industry because of its promise in decentralised and distributed computing. Notably, the meteoric rise in the value and number of cryptocurrencies since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 have ushered in newer innovations and interventions that addressed some of the prominent issues that affect these platforms. Despite the increased privacy, security, scalability, and energy-saving capabilities of new consensus protocols in newer systems, the development and management of blockchains, mostly, do not reflect the decentralisation principle despite blockchains being decentralised and distributed in their architecture. The concept of treasury has been identified as a tool to address this problem. We explore the idea of blockchain treasury systems within literature and practice, especially with relation to funding and decision-making power towards blockchain development and maintenance. Consequently, we propose a taxonomy for treasury models within cryptocurrencies.
2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), 2018
Blockchain technology has pioneered a new consensus approach to building a distributed public led... more Blockchain technology has pioneered a new consensus approach to building a distributed public ledger globally. A key feature expected from cryptocurrencies and blockchain systems is the absence of a centralized control over the operation process. That is, blockchain solutions should neither rely on "trusted parties or powerful minority" for their operations, nor introduce such centralisation tendencies into blockchain systems. On the other hand, real-world blockchain systems require steady funding for continuous development and maintenance of the systems. Given that blockchain systems are decentralized systems, their maintenance and developmental funding should also be void of centralization risks. Therefore, secure and "community-inclusive" long-term sustainability of funding is critical for the health of blockchain platforms. In this work, for the first time, we provide a systematic exposition of blockchain development funding, planning, management, and disbursement mechanisms aka "treasury systems" (for cryptocurrencies and blockchain systems). Drawing from existing literature, we identify and categorise various treasury models, thereby enabling an exploration of their properties, benefits and drawbacks. Particularly, we perform an evaluation of real-world cryptocurrency treasury system of top cryptocurrencies e.g., Dash governance system, and ZCash Foundation. Finally, we briefly discuss desired properties of decentralised treasury systems and provide suggestions for improvement or alternative solutions to existing systems or implementations.
The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain ... more The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain acceptance and wide traction in research and practice within academia and the industry because of its promise in decentralised and distributed computing. Notably, the meteoric rise in the value and number of cryptocurrencies since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 have ushered in newer innovations and interventions that addressed some of the prominent issues that affect these platforms. Despite the increased privacy, security, scalability, and energy-saving capabilities of new consensus protocols in newer systems, the development and management of blockchains, mostly, do not reflect the decentralisation principle despite blockchains being decentralised and distributed in their architecture. The concept of treasury has been identified as a tool to address this problem. We explore the idea of blockchain treasury systems within literature and practice, especially with relation to funding and ...
2016 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, 2016
There is ample evidence which shows that social media users struggle to make appropriate access c... more There is ample evidence which shows that social media users struggle to make appropriate access control decisions while disclosing their information and smarter mechanisms are needed to assist them. Using profile information to ascertain similarity between users and provide suggestions to them during the process of making access control decisions has been put forth as a possible solution to this problem. This paper presents an empirical study aimed at identifying the minimal subset of attributes which are most suitable for being used to create profile vectors for the purpose of predicting access control decisions. We begin with an exhaustive list of 30 profile attributes and identify a subset of 2 profile attributes which are shown to be sufficient in obtaining similarity between profiles and predicting access control decisions with the same accuracy as previous models. We demonstrate that using this pair of attributes will help mitigate the challenges encountered by similarity based access control mechanisms.
Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2019
A treasury system is a community-controlled and decentralized collaborative decision-making mecha... more A treasury system is a community-controlled and decentralized collaborative decision-making mechanism for sustainable funding of blockchain development and maintenance. During each treasury period, project proposals are submitted, discussed, and voted for; top-ranked projects are funded from the treasury. The Dash governance system is a real-world example of such kind of systems. In this work, we, for the first time, provide a rigorous study of the treasury system. We modelled, designed, and implemented a provably secure treasury system that is compatible with most existing blockchain infrastructures, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. More specifically, the proposed treasury system supports liquid democracy/delegative voting for better collaborative intelligence. Namely, the stake holders can either vote directly on the proposed projects or delegate their votes to experts. Its core component is a distributed universally composable secure end-to-end verifiable voting protocol. The integrity of the treasury voting decisions is guaranteed even when all the voting committee members are corrupted. To further improve efficiency, we proposed the world's first honest verifier zero-knowledge proof for unit vector encryption with logarithmic size communication. This partial result may be of independent interest to other cryptographic protocols. A pilot system is implemented in Scala over the Scorex 2.0 framework, and its benchmark results indicate that the proposed system can support tens of thousands of treasury participants with high efficiency.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing