A smart contract is a self-executing program on a blockchain to ensure an immutable and transparent agreement without the involvement of intermediaries. Despite its growing popularity for many blockchain platforms like Ethereum, no technical means is available even when a smart contract requires to be protected from being copied. One promising direction to claim a software ownership is software watermarking. However, applying existing software watermarking techniques is challenging because of the unique properties of a smart contract, such as a code size constraint, non-free execution cost, and no support for dynamic allocation under a virtual machine environment. This paper introduces a novel software watermarking scheme, dubbed Smartmark, aiming to protect the ownership of a smart contract against a pirate activity. Smartmark builds the control flow graph of a target contract runtime bytecode, and locates a collection of bytes that are randomly elected for representing a watermark. We implement a full-fledged prototype for Ethereum, applying Smartmark to 27,824 unique smart contract bytecodes. Our empirical results demonstrate that Smartmark can effectively embed a watermark into a smart contract and verify its presence, meeting the requirements of credibility and imperceptibility while incurring an acceptable performance degradation. Besides, our security analysis shows that Smartmark is resilient against viable watermarking corruption attacks; e.g., a large number of dummy opcodes are needed to disable a watermark effectively, resulting in producing an illegitimate smart contract clone that is not economical.
Lewis Golightly, Paolo Modesti, Rémi Garcia, Victor Chang
Access Control is a crucial defense mechanism organizations can deploy to meet modern cybersecurity needs and legal compliance with data privacy. The aim is to prevent unauthorized users and systems from accessing protected resources in a way that exceeds their permissions. The present survey aims to summarize state-of-the-art Access Control techniques, presenting recent research trends in this area. Moreover, as the cyber-attack landscape and zero-trust networking challenges require organizations to consider their Information Security management strategies carefully, in this study, we present a review of contemporary Access Control techniques and technologies being discussed in the literature and the various innovations and evolution of the technology. We also discuss adopting and applying different Access Control techniques and technologies in four upcoming and crucial domains: Cloud Computing, Blockchain, the Internet of Things, and Software-Defined Networking. Finally, we discuss the business adoption strategies for Access Control and how the technology can be integrated into a cybersecurity and network architecture strategy.
This research study focuses primarily on Block-Chain-based voting systems, which facilitate participation in and administration of voting for voters, candidates, and officials. Because we used Block-Chain in the backend, which enables everyone to trace vote fraud, our system is incredibly safe. This paper approach any unique identification the Aadhar Card number or an OTP will be generated then user can utilise the voting system to cast his/her vote. A proposal for Bit-coin, a virtual currency system that is decided by a central authority for producing money, transferring ownership, and validating transactions, included the peer-to-peer network in a Block-Chain system, the ledger is duplicated across several, identical databases which is hosted and updated by a different process and all other nodes are updated concurrently if changes made to one node and a transaction occurs, the records of the values and assets are permanently exchanged, Only the user and the system need to be verified no other authentication required. If any transaction carried out on a block chain-based system would be settled in a matter of seconds while still being safe, verifiable, and transparent. Although block-chain technology is the foundation for Bitcoin and other digital currencies but also it may be applied widely to greatly reduce difficulties in many other sectors, Voting is the sector that is battling from a lack of security, centralized-authority, management-issues, and many more despite the fact that transactions are kept in a distributed and safe fashion.
Seyed M. Hosseini, Joaquim Ferreira, Paulo Bartolomeu
The popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) has caused a rapid increase in connected entities and exposed its lack of adequate Identity Management (IdM). Traditional IdM systems are highly dependent on central authorities; any failure can potentially compromise the entire system. To eliminate the drawback of central authorities and evolve IdM systems to meet increasingly stringent security requirements, the Decentralized Identification approach has been proposed. This approach often relies on blockchain technology to provide a secure and tamper-proof method of managing and verifying identities. Therefore, this article investigates the capabilities of blockchain-based decentralized identification for the IoT domain, with an emphasis on the heterogeneity of online devices. It describes a number of features and specifications of decentralized identification with a specific focus on Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a model in which entities own their identities. The article concludes with a discussion of technical aspects as well as potential obstacles and constraints to the implementation of decentralized identification in the context of the Internet of Things.
—In the second decade of the twenty-first century, blockchain is considered one of the most popular computer technologies. Blockchain is a zero-trust network, making it a potent tool for various services provided that people are ready to believe and invest in it. In the Ethereum world, the blockchain runs on smart contracts, self-executing applications that come at the cost of security. As technology is used increasingly, Election is facing new issues of trust and management. Therefore, E-voting systems are increasingly acceptable because they are more accurate, reliable, practical, and secure. This research purpose is to propose a decentralized elections application based on Ethereum; the application was developed using the Truffle development framework. The actions of the software were written into an Ethereum smart contract, which was then deployed on the Ethereum network. A web interface had been used to read the user's vote before it was broadcast to the Ethereum network through the web3.js API. The ganache was utilized as the Ethereum client. Metalmark was used as a wallet on a website, and the remix was used to deploy the smart contract on the main network, the results of implementing the proposed system show that the cost of each transaction is not stable, its increases with the increase the network load, and the throughput ends up at 14 transactions per second.
Kai Wang, Maike Tong, Changhao Wu, Jun Pang · 7 authors
The development of clustering heuristics has demonstrated that Bitcoin is not completely anonymous. Currently, existing clustering heuristics only consider confirmed transactions recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain. However, unconfirmed transactions in the mempool have yet to be utilized to improve the performance of the clustering heuristics. In this paper, we bridge this gap by combining unconfirmed and confirmed transactions for clustering Bitcoin addresses effectively. First, we present a data collection system for capturing unconfirmed transactions. Two case studies are performed to show the presence of user behaviors in unconfirmed transactions not present in confirmed transactions. Next, we apply the state-of-the-art clustering heuristics to unconfirmed transactions, and the clustering results can reduce the number of entities after applying, for example, the co-spend heuristics in confirmed transactions by 2.3%. Finally, we propose three novel clustering heuristics to capture specific behavior patterns in unconfirmed transactions, which further reduce the number of entities after the application of the co-spend heuristics by 9.8%. Our results demonstrate the utility of unconfirmed transactions in address clustering and further shed light on the limitations of anonymity in cryptocurrencies. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to apply the unconfirmed transactions in Bitcoin to cluster addresses.
We provide a generic construction to turn any classical Zero-Knowledge (ZK) protocol into a composable (quantum) oblivious transfer (OT) protocol, mostly lifting the round-complexity properties and security guarantees (plain-model/statistical security/unstructured functions...) of the ZK protocol to the resulting OT protocol. Such a construction is unlikely to exist classically as Cryptomania is believed to be different from Minicrypt. In particular, by instantiating our construction using Non-Interactive ZK (NIZK), we provide the first round-optimal (2-message) quantum OT protocol secure in the random oracle model, and round-optimal extensions to string and k-out-of-n OT. At the heart of our construction lies a new method that allows us to prove properties on a received quantum state without revealing additional information on it, even in a non-interactive way, without public-key primitives, and/or with statistical guarantees when using an appropriate classical ZK protocol. We can notably prove that a state has been partially measured (with arbitrary constraints on the set of measured qubits), without revealing any additional information on this set. This notion can be seen as an analog of ZK to quantum states, and we expect it to be of independent interest as it extends complexity theory to quantum languages, as illustrated by the two new complexity classes we introduce, ZKstatesQIP and ZKstatesQMA.
Prince Silas Kwesi Oberko Prince Silas Kwesi Oberko, Tianang Yao Prince Silas Kwesi Oberko, Hu Xiong Tianang Yao, Saru Kumari Hu Xiong · 5 authors
<p>The smart energy system (SES) encourages data administration and information services developments, particularly smart grids. Presently, numerous SESs cloud environments are accessible to smart grids. Nonetheless, because of the semi-credible character of the SES cloud environments, achieving secured access, information storage, updates, deletion, tracing, and revocation of ill-disposed clients is a genuine concern. In this publication, an Ethereum blockchain-oriented secured access regulation design upholding traceability and revocability is offered for smart grids to resolve these problems. The blockchain implements unified identity verification and saves all public-keys, users&rsquo; attribute sets, and revocable lists. The system administrator creates system parameters and sends private-keys to users. The domain administrator prepares the domain&rsquo;s security and privacy-preservation policies and executes encryption procedures. If the attributes correspond with the access policy and the user&rsquo;s ID is unrevoked, they could acquire interim-decryption capabilities from the edge/cloud servers. Tracking malevolent users for revocation is applicable throughout all stages, ensuring the system is secured under Decisional-Bilinear-Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) complex theory and can withstand multi-attacks. Analysis revealed the size of the public/private keys to be shorter, contrary to relevant schemes. The overhead duration is less for generating the public-key, data encryption, and decryption phases. </p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
We present a Solidity smart contract implementation of the TAVS e-voting protocol. The Two Authorities Electronic Voting Scheme (TAVS) is a voting scheme that achieves universal verifiability with a reduced time-complexity both for the elector and the voting system. TAVS security derives from the RSA cryptosystem it employs, and the assumption of two entities that do not share information. We present a Solidity implementation which replaces one of these entities with an immutable smart contract in Ethereum based networks. By doing so, our implementation extends the security properties of TAVS and achieves a higher degree of resilience, verifiability, and availability. We open source the code of the implementation.
M. Thirumaran, S. Tiroumalmouroughane, M. Sathish Kanna
In large democracy like India with about 83.4 crore voters it is estimated that about 50,000 crore rupees is spent on election and it takes about 6 weeks to conduct election. So the approach of election followed in India is costly both in terms of time and money. In order to reduce the cost of time and money, in last few decades numerous methods have already been developed and one of them is to use online voting system that providers the comfort of voting from remote location. But traditional online system has its own drawbacks like data tampering, privacy breach, etc. Blockchain technology is proposed, that incorporates cryptographic properties. Blockchain technology is simply defined as a decentralized, distributed ledger that maintains the provenance of a digital asset and is considered to be utmost secure. To avoid single point of failure, two step authentication process is used which include OTP verification and Biometric authentication. To ensure the anonymity of the votes, Identity-based ring signature scheme is used.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Shaik Abdul Ahad, Sarthak Sangra, Jitender Saini, R. Deepa
Due to the increase in the use of internet web applications in today's world, multiple new ways have been brought in to change existing methods to make them hassle-free and efficient.E-Voting systems are one new change that has been brought over and is also being used in multiple countries as it is both cost and time-efficient when compared to the traditional voting systems. For an E-voting system the user, who in this case is the voter, requires a web browser and server for the user's verification and authentication. Usually, the voter can access a centralized database where he casts his vote and the result for the vote that has been cast is also not shown. Other security issues are also encountered when one uses a centralized database as data manipulation remains a possibility.The main focus of this paper is to develop an E-voting system that is made on a blockchain with a decentralized model to ensure that the whole process is reliable, efficient, flexible, and most importantly transparent.
Abstract As an electronic form of traditional voting, electronic voting is becoming more and more popular in today’s information society. Most of the existing electronic voting protocols need a trusted center to calculate the voting result, but the requirement of a trusted center is often unrealistic and prone to single point of failure. In this regard, the decentralized electronic voting protocols based on blockchain have been proposed. Unfortunately, most existing blockchain-based voting protocols fail to ensure anonymity, legitimacy, and correctness of counting. Besides, they do not satisfy robustness, i.e., the voting result cannot be counted in the event of voter abstention. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel blockchain-based self-tallying voting protocol, where the group signature and zero-knowledge proof are utilized in a way that the voter can securely distribute anonymous and unlinkable electronic ballots, thereby guaranteeing complete anonymity and legitimacy. Meanwhile, a novel signcryption algorithm is designed by combining distributed ElGamal encryption and Paillier encryption algorithms, which enhances the computational efficiency of voting results while supporting robustness. The security proof shows that our protocol ensures the confidentiality of ballots, complete anonymity, legitimacy, fairness, dispute-freeness and resistance against multi-voting. In addition, our protocol satisfies robustness, i.e., voting result can be correctly calculated and verified even if some voters abstain from voting. Finally, extensive experiments show that our protocol greatly reduces the computational cost and communication overhead, and is more practical than existing self-tallying voting protocols.
The connected or smart environment is the integration of smart devices (sensors, IoT devices, or actuator) into the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, in which a large number of devices are connected, monitoring the physical environment and processes and transmitting into the centralized database for advanced analytics and analysis. This integrated and connected setup allows greater levels of automation of smart systems than is possible with just the Internet. While delivering services to the different processes and application within connected smart systems, these IoT devices perform an impeccably large number of device-to-device communications that allow them to access the selected subsets of device information and data. The sensitive and private nature of these data renders the smart infrastructure vulnerable to copious attacks which threat agents exploit for cyberattacks which not only affect critical services but probably bring threat to people’s lives. Hence, advanced measures need to be taken for securing smart environments, such as dynamic access control, advanced network screening, and monitoring behavioural anomalies. In this paper, we have discussed the essential cyberthreats and vulnerabilities in smart environments and proposed ZAIB (Zero-Trust and ABAC for IoT using Blockchain), a novel secure framework that monitors and facilitates device-to-device communications with different levels of access-controlled mechanisms based on environmental parameters and device behaviour. It is protected by zero-trust architecture and provides dynamic behavioural analysis of IoT devices by calculating device trust levels for each request. ZAIB enforces variable policies specifically generated for each scenario by using attribute-based access control (ABAC). We have used blockchain to ensure anonymous device and user registrations and immutable activity logs. All the attributes, trust level histories, and data generated by IoT devices are protected using IPFS. Finally, a security evaluation shows that ZAIB satisfies the needs of active defence and end-to-end security enforcement of data, users, and services involved in a smart grid network.
Johnnatan Messias, Vabuk Pahari, B. Chandrasekaran, Krishna P. Gummadi · 5 authors
Abstract In permissionless blockchains, transaction issuers include a fee to incentivize miners to include their transactions. To accurately estimate this prioritization fee for a transaction, transaction issuers (or blockchain participants, mjohnme@mpi-sws.orgore generally) rely on two fundamental notions of transparency, namely contention and prioritization transparency. Contention transparency implies that participants are aware of every pending transaction that will contend with a given transaction for inclusion. Prioritization transparency states that the participants are aware of the transaction or prioritization fees paid by every such contending transaction. Neither of these notions of transparency holds well today. Private relay networks, for instance, allow users to send transactions privately to miners. Besides, users can offer fees to miners via either direct transfers to miners’ wallets or off-chain payments—neither of which are public. In this work, we characterize the lack of contention and prioritization transparency in Bitcoin and Ethereum resulting from such practices. We show that private relay networks are widely used and private transactions are quite prevalent. We show that the lack of transparency facilitates miners to collude and overcharge users who may use these private relay networks despite them offering little to no guarantees on transaction prioritization. The lack of these transparencies in blockchains has crucial implications for transaction issuers as well as the stability of blockchains. Finally, we make our data sets and scripts publicly available.
In crowdsourcing systems, requesters publish tasks, and interested workers provide answers to get rewards. Worker anonymity motivates participation since it protects their privacy. Anonymity with unlinkability is an enhanced version of anonymity because it makes it impossible to ``link'' workers across the tasks they participate in. Another core feature of crowdsourcing systems is worker quality which expresses a worker's trustworthiness and quantifies their historical performance. Notably, worker quality depends on the participation history, revealing information about it, while unlinkability aims to disassociate the workers' identities from their past activity. In this work, we present AVeCQ, the first crowdsourcing system that reconciles these properties, achieving enhanced anonymity and verifiable worker quality updates. AVeCQ relies on a suite of cryptographic tools, such as zero-knowledge proofs, to (i) guarantee workers' privacy, (ii) prove the correctness of worker quality scores and task answers, and (iii) commensurate payments. AVeCQ is developed modularly, where the requesters and workers communicate over a platform that supports pseudonymity, information logging, and payments. In order to compare AVeCQ with the state-of-the-art, we prototype it over Ethereum. AVeCQ outperforms the state-of-the-art in three popular crowdsourcing tasks (image annotation, average review, and Gallup polls). For instance, for an Average Review task with $5$ choices and $128$ participating workers AVeCQ is 40\% faster (including overhead to compute and verify the necessary proofs and blockchain transaction processing time) with the task's requester consuming 87\% fewer gas units.
Abstract The attack named Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) that takes place in the large blockchain network requires an efficient and robust attack detection and prevention mechanism for authenticated access. Blockchain is a distributed network in which the attacker tries to hack the network by utilizing all the resources with the application of enormous requests. Several methods like Rival Technique, filter modular approach and so on, were developed to detect and prevent the DDoS attack in the blockchain; still, detection accuracy is a challenging task. Hence, this research introduces an efficient technique using optimization‐based deep learning by considering the blockchain network and smart contract for the detection and prevention of DDoS attacks. Based on the user request, the traffic is analyzed, and the verification using the smart contract is made to find the authenticated user. After the verification, the response is provided for the authenticated user, and the suspicious traffic is utilized for the detection of DDoS attacks using the Poaching Raptor Optimization‐based deep neural network (Poaching Raptor‐based DNN), in which the classifier is tuned using the proposed optimization algorithm to reduce the training loss. The proposed algorithm is designed by hybridizing the habitual practice of the raptor by considering the concurring behavior, hunting style along with poaching behavior of the Lobo to enhance the detection accuracy. After the attack detection, the nonattacker is responded, and the attacker is prevented by entering the IP/MAC address in the logfile. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of recall, precision, FPR, and accuracy and obtained the values of 96.3%, 98.22%, 3.33%, and 95.12%, respectively.
शौनक साहू, प्रो. दिनेश कुमार तिवारी, Ankita Ankita, Brunda S P · 5 authors
Abstract: Electronic voting, or e-voting, has been used in various forms since the 1970s. B. Increase efficiency and reduce errors. However, wide adoption of such systems remains a challenge, especially in terms of improving resilience to potential failures. Blockchain is a disruptive technology of our time and promises to improve the overall resilience of electronic voting systems. The democratic system is fundamentally based on the right to vote that Allow individuals within the community to express their opinions. While voter turnout has declined in recent years, concerns about the integrity, security, and accessibility of the current voting system have increased. Electronic voting was introduced to address these concerns. However, it is not cost-effective and requires full oversight by a central authority. Blockchain is an emerging decentralized and decentralized technology that promises to improve many aspects of many industries. Extending e-voting to blockchain technology could be a solution to alleviating current concerns about e-voting. In this paper, I proposed a voting system that leverages the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts to achieve voter management and verifiable voting records.
With the advancement of cyber threats, blockchain technology has evolved to have a significant role in providing secure and reliable decentralized applications. One of these applications is a remote voting system that allow voters to participate in elections remotely. This work proposes a privacy-preserving e-voting system supporting score voting using blockchain technology. The main challenge with score voting compared to the regular yes/no voting approach is that a voter is allowed to assign a score from a defined range for each candidate. To preserve privacy, votes shall be encrypted before submission to the Blockchain, however, a malicious voter can modify the score value before encrypting it to manipulate the elections result for the favor of a certain candidate. To address this challenge, the proposed scheme allows voters to first prove that the submitted score lies in the predefined range before the vote is added to the Blockchain to ensure fairness of the election. The performance of our scheme is evaluated against a set of comprehensive experiments designed to determine optimal bounds for workload and transaction send rates and measure the impact of exceeding these bounds on critical performance metrics. The results of these simulations and their implications therefore indicate that the proposed scheme is secure while being able to handle up to 10,000 transactions at a time.
Vlad Dıaconıța, Anda Belciu, Maria Georgiana Stoica
In this study, we explore the challenges and potential solutions to blockchain-based voting. As a first step, we present a comparison of the relevant platforms for implementing smart contracts in decentralized applications (dApps). We analyze the top platforms, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, their architecture, and which are more reliable for developing smart contracts. The goal is to find a technology that offers various facilities to the developer and multiple functionalities and performance in the development of smart contracts in a field that has seen an incredible pace of innovation. Based on the findings from our research, we propose a framework based on blockchain technology and smart contracts for university-level voting based on blockchains.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Hung Du, Srikanth Thudumu, Sankhya Singh, Scott D. Barnett · 7 authors
The rapid growth of both the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) results in a high demand for AI applications in devices. To achieve high levels of accuracy, AI applications typically require a large amount of annotated data. Accessing such data is challenging in various applications such as healthcare, finance and information security. Federated learning (FL) is one of the strategies that was proposed to overcome this challenge. Specifically, FL enables the AI model in the centralized system to be trained without any prior knowledge of the information on the devices. Recent FLs have the disadvantage that they are dependent upon a centralized system, and thus are susceptible to single points of failure. This paper proposes a strategy that employs FL in a decentralized environment where devices can communicate with each other to increase the accuracy of the AI model in each device. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed strategy in the image classification task with the ResNet50 architecture and the CIFAR-10 dataset. The evaluation shows that the ResNet50 model trained in the decentralized environment can achieve comparable results to the model trained in the centralized environment.
Taotao Wang, Zibin Lin, Shengli Zhang, Long Shi · 6 authors
A decentralized identity system that can provide users with self-sovereign digital identities to facilitate complete control over their own data is paramount to Web 3.0. The account system on blockchain is an ideal archetype for realizing Web 3.0 decentralized identity. However, a disadvantage of such completely anonymous identity system is that users can create multiple accounts without authentication to obfuscate their activities on the blockchain. In particular, the current anonymous blockchain account system cannot accurately register the social relationships and interactions between real human users, given the amorphous mappings between users and blockchain identities. This work proposes zkBID, a zero-knowledge blockchain-account-based Web 3.0 decentralized identity scheme, to overcome endemic mistrust in blockchain account systems. zkBID links souls (blockchain accounts) to humans (users' personhood credentials) in a one-to-one manner to truly reflect the social relationships and interactions between humans on the blockchain. zkBID conceals the one-to-one relationships between blockchain accounts and users' personhood credentials for privacy protection using zero-knowledge proofs and linkable ring signatures. Thus, with zkBID, the users' blockchain accounts are credibly anonymous. Importantly, zkBID is fully decentralized: all user-related data are generated by users and verified by smart contracts on the blockchain. We implemented zkBID and built a blockchain test network for evaluation purposes. Our tests demonstrate the effectiveness of zkBID and suggest proper ways to configure zkBID system parameters.
Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohammad Nabiluzzaman Neloy, Md. Abdul Wahab, Sheikh Wasif, Abdulla All Noman · 8 authors
Abstract Traditional voting procedures are non‐remote, time‐consuming, and less secure. While the voter believes their vote was submitted successfully, the authority does not provide evidence that the vote was counted and tallied. In most cases, the anonymity of a voter is also not sure, as the voter's details are included in the ballot papers. Many voters consider this voting system untrustworthy and manipulative, discouraging them from voting, and consequently, an election loses a significant number of participants. Although the inclusion of electronic voting systems (EVS) has increased efficiency; however, it has raised concerns over security, legitimacy, and transparency. To mitigate these problems, blockchain technology has been leveraged and smart contract facilities with a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) to propose a remote voting system that makes the overall voting procedure transparent, semi‐decentralized, and secure. In addition, a system that aids in boosting the number of turnouts in an election through an incentivization policy for the voters have also developed. Through the proposed virtual campaigning feature, the authority can generate a decent amount of revenue, which downsizes the overall cost of an election. To reduce the associated cost of transactions using smart contracts, this system implements a hybrid storage system where only a few cardinal data are stored in the blockchain network.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Emmanuel Baldwin Mbaya, Emmanuel Adetiba, Joke A. Badejo, John S. Wejin · 9 authors
Cloud computing is a technology for efficiently using computing infrastructures and a business model for selling computing resources and services. However, intruders find such complex and distributed infrastructures appealing targets for cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks are severe threats that can jeopardize the quality of service provided to clients and compromise data integrity, confidentiality, and availability. Cyber-attacks are becoming more complex, making it more challenging to detect intrusions effectively. Due to the high traffic and increased malicious activities on the Internet, a single Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can be overwhelmed. Despite the various Deep Learning (DL) approaches that have been proposed as alternative solutions, there are still pertinent security issues to be addressed especially in federated cloud computing domains. This work proposes a Secure Federated Intrusion Detection Model Version 1 (SecFedIDM-V1) using blockchain technology and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The Cobourg Intrusion Detection Dataset (CIDDS) was acquired, pre-processed and split into 60:20:20, 70:15:15, and 80:10:10 for training, testing, and validation respectively to develop the proposed intrusion traffic classification component of the proposed model. The developed SecFedIDM-V1 was later deployed as a Python-based web application that captures network packets for classifying attacks into normal or an attack type. The attack packets are recorded in a Hyperledger Fabric (a private blockchain technology) to serve as a signature database to be used by other nodes in the network. From the evaluation results of the intrusion classifier, the 80:10:10 BiLSTM network performed better than GRU with a Precision of 0.99624, Recall of 0.99906, F1 Score of 0.99614, False Positive Rate (FPR) of 0.00094, False Negative Rate (FNR) of 0.00395 and True Positive Rate (TPR) of 0.99605. The SecFedIDM-V1 can be deployed alongside Firewalls in a federated cloud computing environment to reinforce the security of the infrastructure.
Tanzeel Zaidi, Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Umar Aftab, Hanan Aljuaid · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) connects many objects and allows continuous communication and data sharing has emerged as a revolutionary technology. However, expanding IoT devices has raised concerns regarding data security and access control. Traditional access control mechanisms face challenges in managing access rights, particularly in scenarios where multiple users with the same roles try to access several resources which may lead to conflicting roles. Additionally, there is also an overhead of system performance using traditional approaches. In existing studies, the main problem of conflict roles is not addressed or not even identified appropriately. This paper proposes a framework to address these challenges using blockchain technology and role-based access control with a smart contract implementation on the hyperledger fabric framework. The proposed methodology introduces a role management system that resolves conflicts based on predefined rules and user preferences. It employs a consensus mechanism to determine access permissions, ensuring fairness and accountability. The findings demonstrate that applying the suggested framework eliminates conflicting problems, improves system security and also provides better results in response times of twelve seconds on average for thirty-five concurrent user requests. It also provides a secure and transparent access control framework which improves response time and provides security based on roles.