Blockchain Papers

Zhengwei Ren, Guangxin He, Rongwei Yu, Yan Tong · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

N. P. Larionov, Yury Yanovich

Bitcoin uses an unspent transaction output (UTXO) model for coin circulation, which is similar to the banknotes. The transaction history is publicly available and allows to trace cryptocurrency flows. Different users merge transactions into a single bigger one to tangle flows. The merged transaction is called a shared send mixer (SSM). One can try to find the original subtransactions–solve an untangling problem. Based on the number of untanglings and their size, one extracts additional information about coin circulation. Theoretical analysis of the untangling problem is known from the literature. The paper aims to collect statistics of the SSM usage by transaction type for Bitcoin blockchain. We propose an algorithm to solve the problem, prove its correctness, and provide a source code. We applied the algorithm to the Bitcoin historical data. 15% transactions are SSM, and 90% of them allow unique untangling. The future work is an algorithm application to other UTXO systems and the results adaptation to an address grouping.

Michal Jirásek

No abstract is available for this record.

Natsuki Fujiwara, Shohei Yokoyama

Our proposed method utilizes blockchain technology to safeguard the ownership of specific regions within image data. In our approach, diverse values could be assigned to each region based on its importance, and only users with ownership rights can access these designated regions. This ensures the protection of ownership rights for individuals in any given region of an image. Identified regions are individually encrypted using an XOR cipher, and a corresponding key image is generated for decryption, thereby preserving the privacy of the encrypted region. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are employed to protect the key image and manage the ownership of each object in the image data. The NFT for the key image is generated by the key holder (who possesses the entire image), and the ownership NFT is acquired by the user who needs access to the key NFT. Furthermore, the ownership NFT and the key NFT are verified for a match by the judgment function, and only upon successful validation, the NFT is displayed on the screen. This method enables different values to be assigned to various parts of an image, facilitating the transfer and sharing of ownership. Additionally, the original image?s owner can benefit financially based on the value of the image, thus enhancing the overall security of image data.

Ye Tao, Ehsan Javanmardi, Pengfei Lin, Jin Nakazato · 7 authors

Cooperative perception is crucial for connected automated vehicles in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs); however, ensuring the authenticity of perception data remains a challenge as the vehicles cannot verify events that they do not witness independently. Various studies have been conducted on establishing the authenticity of data, such as trust-based statistical methods and plausibility-based methods. However, these methods are limited as they require prior knowledge such as previous sender behaviors or predefined rules to evaluate the authenticity. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a novel approach called zero-knowledge Proof of Traffic (zk-PoT), which involves generating cryptographic proofs to the traffic observations. Multiple independent proofs regarding the same vehicle can be deterministically cross-verified by any receivers without relying on ground truth, probabilistic, or plausibility evaluations. Additionally, no private information is compromised during the entire procedure. A full on-board unit software stack that reflects the behavior of zk-PoT is implemented within a specifically designed simulator called Flowsim. A comprehensive experimental analysis is then conducted using synthesized city-scale simulations, which demonstrates that zk-PoT’s cross-verification ratio ranges between 80 % to 96 %, and 90 % of the verification is achieved in 5 s, with a protocol overhead of approximately 25 %. Furthermore, the analyses of various attacks indicate that most of the attacks could be prevented, and some, such as collusion attacks, can be mitigated. The proposed approach can be incorporated into existing works, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ITS standards, without disrupting the backward compatibility.

Sachi Chaudhary, Shail N. Shah, Riya Kakkar, Rajesh Gupta · 8 authors

Purpose: With the advancement and modernization of Information and Communication Technology, electronic voting (e-voting) has been adopted across the globe for conducting a secure and efficient voting procedure. However, e-voting can be easily exposed to various malicious attacks such as denial-of-service, malware, insider, compromised credentials, etc., that can risk the voter’s privacy and affect the final voting results. Thus, we have considered the decentralized and immutable blockchain technology for completing the voting procedure securely. Nevertheless, many researchers have considered blockchain to mitigate the security and privacy issues of the voting procedure, but they ignored the aspect of cost-efficiency, latency, and response time while voting. Method: The idea of the proposed mechanism is to deploy and implement the smart contract in the Remix Integrated Development Environment (IDE) involving number of voters electing the candidate with various functionalities. Moreover, we considered the amalgamation of blockchain and IPFS to overcome the data storage cost issues of blockchain for voters and candidates communicating through 5G wireless network. The 5G network, with its low latency, high availability, and high reliability facilitates high data rate and reliable communication between voters and candidates to complete the voting procedure efficiently. Results: The deployed smart contract of the proposed voting mechanism highlight various functionalities required for electing the candidate by the voters. Moreover, the deployed smart contract is evaluated and analyzed considering various performance metrics such as gas consumption analysis for smart contract functions and number of voters, cost analysis for smart contract functions, bit error rate, and storage cost comparison with the traditional scheme. We have also verified the security of the proposed voting mechanism using Echidna security tool which shows the election of candidate without any threat. Conclusion: Finally, we have presented a blockchain-based voting mechanism in which IPFS and 5G is employed to avail the cost-efficient, reliable, and secure candidate election by the voters. Moreover, the voters and candidates can communicate with lower response time and high reliability using 5G network so that smart contract consisting of all the functionalities related to the candidate election can be executed efficiently in the Remix IDE.

Maria-Victoria Vladucu, Ziqian Dong, Jorge Medina, Roberto Rojas‐Cessa

The utilization of electronic voting systems for the election of public offices is becoming widespread globally. This trend can be attributed to the benefits provided by these systems, including remote voting capabilities and accelerated vote counting. Furthermore, electronic voting systems offer improved privacy and enhanced protection against voting bias. Blockchain technology enhances the robustness of the voting process through its immutable vote storage mechanism, thereby reducing the threat of vote tampering and safeguarding the legitimacy of elections. This technology has been adopted by countries such as Germany, Russia, Estonia, and Switzerland for use in their e-voting systems. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the blockchain-based e-voting systems currently being implemented by various countries and companies and proposed for academic research. Additionally, this study analyzes the challenges faced by blockchain e-voting systems and identifies areas for future research to enhance the trustworthiness of such systems.

Sumit Kumar Rana, Arun Kumar Rana, Sanjeev Rana, Vishnu Sharma · 7 authors

Modern legal proceedings heavily rely on digital evidence as a basis for decisions in a variety of contexts, including criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. However, factors like data alteration, unauthorised access, or flaws in centralised storage can threaten the security and integrity of digital evidence. We suggest a decentralised methodology for using smart contracts to safeguard digital evidence in order to overcome these issues. The decentralised model makes use of smart contracts and blockchain technology to guarantee the integrity, transparency, and immutability of digital evidence. The approach does not require a centralised authority because it makes use of a distributed ledger, which lowers the possibility of data loss or manipulation. Multiple parties participating in the evidence lifecycle can build confidence and accountability thanks to smart contracts’ programmable rules and automated enforcement mechanisms. In our study, we show the decentralised model’s architecture and describe its essential elements, such as the blockchain network, smart contracts, and decentralised storage. We go over the advantages of employing this architecture, including enhanced auditability, decreased dependency on centralised institutions, and increased data security. Additionally, we discuss potential difficulties and constraints, like scalability and interoperability. We run a few simulations and experiments to test the suggested model’s viability and effectiveness while comparing it to conventional centralised methods. The outcomes show that our decentralised paradigm offers improved security for digital evidence, guaranteeing its reliability, usability, and tamper-proofness. We also go through how the model is used in actual legal systems, law enforcement organisations, and digital forensics investigations.

Alfred Daniel, Santhosh Rajendran, Pradish Pranam, Yosuva Berry · 7 authors

Blockchain may be an optimal solution when a detailed and transparent record of assets is necessary. It is imperative to manage and safeguard digital interactions or maintain a decentralized and shared system of records in applications, such as those used for electricity production, transmission, distribution, and consumption and those used for data sharing and secure payments. Such applications can benefit from blockchain technology to resolve these problems. In the proposed blockchain-based consumer electronics data sharing and safe payment framework, an innovative IoT meter detects monthly consumption and transmits the data to a decentralized application that is stored in the blockchain. This decentralized platform will generate the bill and provide incentives for legitimate consumers. Finally, the end-to-end latency and throughput were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach.

Seung Wook Jung

Due to the immutability of blockchain, many applications are emerging by providing trust to the trustless Internet. However, immutability becomes a weakness in some applications that require modification and deletion, such as personal information and SNS(Social Network Service), and cannot use blockchain technology. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a redactable blockchain scheme that can be used universally regardless of the consensus algorithms and blockchain types. In addition, without using a heavy cryptographic algorithm, and needing to re-mine, the proposed scheme can delete and modify content in the ledger, so it is efficient. Moreover, the proposed scheme can modify and delete at the transaction level. Additionally, the proposed scheme supports encryption for protecting the privacy and there is no need to save the original content after modification or deletion.

Mohamed Abdelrahman

Transaction records and other user information are stored in blocks that form a distributed ledger called blockchain. For blockchain to gain widespread adoption, it is crucial that user and transaction data be kept safe. This technology provides cryptographically safe and anonymous financial transactions among the user nodes of the network allowing the transactions to be evaluated and authorized by all the users in a transparent environment. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview and classification scheme for all cryptographic ideas currently used in blockchain. Moreover, the current security issues of blockchain are shown, and a future research objective is predicted.

Ayodeji Ibitoye, Halleluyah Oluwatobi Aworinde, Esther T. Adekunle

Originally, manual voting systems are surrounded with issues like results manipulation, errors and long result computation time, ineligible voters, void votes among others. Electronic voting system helped in overcoming the challenges with manual voting system, to engendered other problems of phishing, men in the middle attack alongside voter’s impersonation. By these challenges, the integrity of an election results in a distributed system has become another top concern for e-voting system based on reliability. To achieve an improved voters’ authentication and result validation with excellent user experience, here, a Facial Recognition Electronic Voting System that is power-driven by Blockchain Technology was developed. The entire election engineering activities are decentralised with improved security features to enhance transparency, verifiability, and accountability for each vote count. The self-service voting system was built by smart contract and implemented on the Ethereum network. The obtained reports and evaluations reflected a non-editable and self-sufficiently certifiable system for voting. It also has a competitive edge over fingerprint enabled e-voting system. Aside it’s excellent usability and general acceptance, the developed method discarded to a larger extend, intended fraudulent actions from election activities by eliminating the involvement of a middleman while facilitating privacy, convenience, eligibility and satisfactory voters’ right.

Md. Ahsan Habib, Kazi Md. Rokibul Alam, Yasuhiko Morimoto

Usually, a medical record (MR) contains the patients’ disease-oriented sensitive information. In addition, the MR needs to be shared among different bodies, e.g., diagnostic centres, hospitals, physicians, etc. Hence, retaining the privacy and integrity of MR is crucial. A blockchain based secure MR sharing system can manage these aspects properly. This paper proposes a blockchain based electronic (e-) MR sharing scheme that (i) considers the medical image and the text as the input, (ii) enriches the data privacy through a two-fold encryption mechanism consisting of an asymmetric cryptosystem and the dynamic DNA encoding, (iii) assures data integrity by storing the encrypted e-MR in the distinct block designated for each user in the blockchain, and (iv) eventually, enables authorized entities to regain the e-MR through decryption. Preliminary evaluations, analyses, comparisons with state-of-the-art works, etc., imply the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

Sora Suegami

Privacy protection for smart contracts is currently inadequate. Existing solutions for privacy-preserving smart contracts either support only a limited class of smart contracts or rely on noncryptographic assumptions. We propose a cryptographic obfuscation scheme for smart contracts based on existing blockchain mechanisms, standard cryptographic assumptions, and witness encryption. In the proposed scheme, an obfuscated smart contract does not reveal its algorithm and hardcoded secrets and preserves encrypted states. Any user can provide it with encrypted inputs and allow an untrusted third party to execute it. Although multiparty computation (MPC) among dynamically changing users is necessary, its privacy is protected if at least one user is honest. If the MPC does not finish within a period of time, anyone can cancel and restart it. The proposed scheme also supports decentralized obfuscation where even the participants of the obfuscation process cannot learn secrets in the obfuscated smart contract unless all of them are malicious. As its applications, we present a new trustless bitcoin bridge mechanism that exposes no secret key and privacy-preserving anti-money laundering built into smart contracts.

Keigo Kimura, Mitsuyoshi Imamura, Kazumasa Omote

With the recent proliferation of blockchains, identifying security risks to them has become an important issue. Among the various types of cyberattacks against blockchains, the blockchain poisoning attack involves the storing of malicious data in the blockchain to compromise it. One scenario is an attack that distributes forgeries of digital content traded and managed using Non-Fungible Token (NFT) on the blockchain. Currently, concomitant with the growing interest in NFT-based content trading, blockchain poisoning attacks on NFT trading and their effects have also increased. In this study, we examined the issues that may lead to attacks in the process from generation to distribution of digital content using NFT from the viewpoint of flexibility and interoperability of the content. Consequently, we discovered that there are two types of attack risks in NFT trading using malicious content: fake attacks and reuse attacks. As a countermeasure against these attacks, we propose a method for verifying the authenticity of the content itself using a decentralized scheme. The proposed method ensures the confidentiality of contents by using deep learning as an irreversible transformation operation in the distributed scheme and for privacy protection.

Erhan Ustaoğlu, Selçuk KIRAN, Mahmut Bağcı, İlkim Ecem Emre

Çalışma, NFT (Non-FungibleToken) kavramı ile bu kavramın üzerine kurulu olduğu teknoloji ve kullanım alanlarını araştırmaktadır. Bu araştırmada ilk olarak NFT’nin dayandığı blokzincir teknolojisi incelenmekte ve çalışma biçimi açıklanmaktadır. Ardından bu teknolojinin özellikleri ve popüler kripto paralar dışındaki kullanım alanları irdelenmiştir. Daha sonra NFT’yi bir standart olarak tanımlayan Ethereum platformu araştırılmış ve yine bu platform üzerinde tanımlanan akıllı sözleşmeler açıklanmıştır. Ayrıca NFT kategorileri incelenmiş, dijital sanat alanı ve diğer kategorilerde önerilen uygulamalar için bir literatür taraması yapılmıştır. Ek olarak, oluşturulan sözlük yardımıyla bu alanda kullanılan kavramların Türkçe karşılıklarına dair önerilerde bulunulmuştur. Başta sanat, koleksiyon ve oyun kategorisinde olmak üzere birçok alanda NFT uygulamaları mevcuttur. NFT’lerin özellikle tedarik zincirleri ve nesnelerin interneti alanlarında yaygın olarak kullanım alanı bulacağı öngörülmektedir. Bu çalışma, NFT kavramını, teknolojisini ve kullanım alanlarını bir bütün olarak ele almakta ve açıklamaktadır.

Asahi Cantu, Jiahui Geng, Chunming Rong

Today, the global economy is dependent on the Internet and computational resources. Although they are tightly interconnected, it is difficult to evaluate their degree of interdependence. Keeping up with the pace of technology can be a challenging task, mainly when updating the hardware and software infrastructure. Every day, corporations and governments are faced with this issue; most have been victims of cyber attacks, security breaches, and data leaks. The consequences are significant in monetary losses; damage remediation is unattainable, even impossible, in certain circumstances. The repercussions might include reputational damage, legal responsibility, and threats to national security (when attacks are carried out against critical infrastructures to control the resources of a country), to name a few. Similarly, data has become such an integral part of many industries that it is one of the most critical targets for attackers that often is encrypted by ransomware, stolen, or corrupted. Without data, many companies are not able to continue operating as they do. The combination of all these factors complicates the ability of organizations to cooperate, trust, and share information in efforts to research and develop solutions for industry and government.This work proposes a Blockchain-based infrastructure solution provided by “Hyperledger Fabric” technology for companies to securely transmit and share information using the latest encryption and data storage technologies operating on the model of distributed systems and smart contracts. By presenting unique digital assets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), the infrastructure is able to trust the integrity of the data, while protecting it from counterfeiting. Through the use of a Blockchain-based file storage system known as IPFS, and by connecting all the relevant elements together through a web-based application, it is possible to demonstrate that the implementation of such systems is feasible, highly scalable and a useful tool that many organizations can utilize to create new work systems and worktflows for digital asset management.

Bismark Tei Asare

High profile cybersecurity attacks on networks and the occurrences of critical security breaches on existing wireless sensor networks grow by the day. The distributed ledger technology provided for by blockchainwith all its benefits has shown great industrial prospects in the face of the rampant occurrences of cyber thefts of critical data from compromised networks. The centralized identity model relies on centralized authentication mechanisms that create a single point of failure for such database systems. Again, thecentralized data is a honeypot for cyber-attacks.Blockchain as a database structure adopts an authentication mechanism that depends on the distributed ledger technology to eliminate the incidences of single point of failure.Although Blockchain holds security benefits for ensuring enhanced privacy and confidentiality for stored data, the computational overhead in classical blockchain technology makes it a challenge for full use in a network where its devices are resource constrained. In this thesis, solutions have been proposed to solve the aforementioned problems. The main contributions of the PhD thesis are the following: the proposal of a blockchain-based architecture for IoT security, the proposal of cryptographic approaches for securityreinforcement in blockchain-based architectures, and the elaboration of a model based on a formal approach, namely Petri nets, for simulation, analysis and verification of blockchain-based architectures for IoT.

Suliman Aladhadh, Huda Alwabli, Tarek Moulahi, Muneerah Al Asqah

Recently, blockchain technology has appeared as a powerful decentralized tool for data integrity protection. The use of smart contracts in blockchain helped to provide a secure environment for developing peer-to-peer applications. Blockchain has been used by the research community as a tool for protection against attacks. The blockchain itself can be the objective of many cyberthreats. In the literature, there are few research works aimed to protect the blockchain against cyberthreats adopting, in most cases, statistical schemes based on smart contracts and causing deployment and runtime overheads. Although, the power of machine learning tools there is insufficient use of these techniques to protect blockchain against attacks. For that reason, we aim, in this paper, to propose a new framework called BChainGuard for cyberthreat detection in blockchain. Our framework’s main goal is to distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior of the traffic linked to the blockchain network. In BChainGuard, the execution of the classification technique will be local. Next, we embed only the decision function as a smart contract. The experimental result shows encouraging results with an accuracy of detection of around 95% using SVM and 98.02% using MLP with a low runtime and overhead in terms of consumed gas.

Rajkumar Gaur, Shiva Prakash, Sanjay Kumar, Kumar Abhishek · 6 authors

Nowadays, finding genetic components and determining the likelihood that treatment would be helpful for patients are the key issues in the medical field. Medical data storage in a centralized system is complex. Data storage, on the other hand, has recently been distributed electronically in a cloud-based system, allowing access to the data at any time through a cloud server or blockchain-based ledger system. The blockchain is essential to managing safe and decentralized transactions in cryptography systems such as bitcoin and Ethereum. The blockchain stores information in different blocks, each of which has a set capacity. Data processing and storage are more effective and better for data management when blockchain and machine learning are integrated. Therefore, we have proposed a machine-learning-blockchain-based smart-contract system that improves security, reduces consumption, and can be trusted for real-time medical applications. The accuracy and computation performance of the IoHT system are safely improved by our system.

Pragya Jain, Sunandani Gupta, Sunandani Gupta, Sneha Shelke

Normal cash has developed and appears numerous downsides such as inaccessibility. It is inclined to burglary and is intensely directed by government offices. Cryptocurrencies have risen as a egotistic money related framework. They depend upon secure disseminated ledger data structure. Mining plays a critical portion in this framework [1]. Basically, our cryptocurrency could be a conveyed database that keeps up tamper-proof information structure pieces containing his bunches of person exchanges. Blockchain innovation can be a widely emerging approach to data innovations. Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has made several considerations since it was one of its earliest implementations. They discuss the key elements driving the development of sophisticated cryptocurrencies alongside Ethereum, a blockchain implementation with a focus on informed contracts [1]. In its most basic form, our cryptocurrency may be thought of as a distributed database that keeps track of tamper-proof data structure blocks comprising batchesof individual transactions [1].

Kuo‐Hui Yeh, Guan-Yan Yang, Chanapha Butpheng, Lin-Fa Lee · 5 authors

Blockchain technology has recently attracted tremendous interest due to its potential to revolutionize the industry by achieving decentralization while increasing the number of data sources, transparency, reliability, auditability, and trustworthiness. However, one of the major barriers to the widespread adoption of blockchain applications is the lack of mutual consensus and management across blockchains. Cross-blockchain consensus refers to one blockchain network reaching a consensus with another blockchain network to provide the ability to interact and share data. In this paper, we propose a secure management scheme with symmetric cross-blockchain communication and certificateless signature primitives, in which two heterogeneous blockchains are linked by a relay chain to simultaneously deliver cross-blockchain transaction security, achieve compatibility among various blockchains, and ensure the consistency of data exchanged, in practice. Additionally, our evaluation and security analysis shows the practicability and security of our proposed management scheme and demonstrates that a common test platform based on Ethereum can achieve acceptable computation costs.

Kyohei Shibano, Tohru Nakajima, Gento Mogi

The system proposed in this study uses zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to verify the traceability of wood recorded in a public blockchain. Wood is a byproduct of several states, ranging from standing trees to logs, lumber, and wood products (hereinafter ``wood objects''). The advantage of using the blockchain for record keeping is that participants can freely record the information at their discretion, without any restrictions. However, the openness of the blockchain may allow a malicious third party to introduce disinformation. In this study, we employ ZKP and near-field communication (NFC) chips to eliminate the possibility of disinformation introduction. ZKP is used to prove/validate changes in the state of wood objects, and the unique nonce associated with that state is encrypted and recorded on an NFC chip. The nonce is concealed and id of the wood object is defined as hash value of this nonce. We developed a prototype system based on an Android application and an Ethereum smart contract. We confirm that wood traceability and verification can be performed using the prototype system.

Gousia Habib, Sparsh Sharma, Sara Ibrahim, Imtiaz Ahmad · 6 authors

The real-world use cases of blockchain technology, such as faster cross-border payments, identity management, smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and supply chain–blockchain technology are here to stay and have become the next innovation, just like the Internet. There have been attempts to formulate digital money, but they have not been successful due to security and trust issues. However, blockchain needs no central authority, and its operations are controlled by the people who use it. Furthermore, it cannot be altered or forged, resulting in massive market hype and demand. Blockchain has moved past cryptocurrency and discovered implementations in other real-life applications; this is where we can expect blockchain technology to be simplified and not remain a complex concept. Blockchain technology’s desirable characteristics are decentralization, integrity, immutability, verification, fault tolerance, anonymity, audibility, and transparency. We first conduct a thorough analysis of blockchain technology in this paper, paying particular attention to its evolution, applications and benefits, the specifics of cryptography in terms of public key cryptography, and the challenges of blockchain in distributed transaction ledgers, as well as the extensive list of blockchain applications in the financial transaction system. This paper presents a detailed review of blockchain technology, the critical challenges faced, and its applications in different fields. Blockchain in the transaction system is explained in detail with a summary of different cryptocurrencies. Some of the suggested solutions are given in the overall study of the paper.