Identity management has been ripe for disruption over the past few years due to recurring incidents of data breaches that have led to personal information leaks and identity theft. The rise of blockchain technology has paved the way for the development of self-sovereign identity (SSI)—a new class of user-controlled resilient identity management systems that are enabled by distributed ledger technology. This paper examines how SSI management can be used in a public transportation sector that spans different operators in multiple countries. Specifically, the paper explores how a blockchain-based decentralized identity management system can draw on the SSI framework to provide high-level security and transparency for all involved parties in public transportation ecosystems. Accordingly, building on analyses of the existing public transportation ticketing solutions, we elicited requirements of a comparable system based on the SSI principles. Next, we developed a low-fidelity prototype to showcase how passengers can utilize standardized travel credentials that are valid across different transportation networks in Europe. The proposed system eliminates the need for multiple travel cards (i.e., one for each transportation provider) and empowers individuals to have better control over the use of their identities while they utilize interoperable ticketing systems across Europe. Overall, building on the public transportation case, we offer a proof-of-concept that shows how individuals can better manage their identity credentials via the SSI framework.
In this study, we overview the problems associated with the usability of cryptocurrency wallets, such as those used by ZCash, for end-users. The concept of "holistic privacy," where information leaks in one part of a system can violate the privacy expectations of different parts of the system, is introduced as a requirement. To test this requirement with real-world software, we did a 60 person task-based evaluation of the usability of a ZCash cryptocurrency wallet by having users install and try to both send and receive anonymized ZCash transactions, as well as install a VPN and Tor. While the initial wallet installation was difficult, we found even a larger amount of difficulty integrating the ZCash wallet into network-level protection like VPNs or Tor, so only a quarter of users could complete a real-world purchase using the wallet.
In a corpus of 45,821 app reviews of the top five mobile cryptocurrency wallets, we identified and qualitatively analyzed 6,859 reviews pertaining to the user experience (UX) with those wallets. Our analysis suggests that both new and experienced users struggle with general and domain-specific UX issues that, aside from frustration and disengagement, might lead to dangerous errors and irreversible monetary losses. We reveal shortcomings of current wallet UX as well as users’ misconceptions, some of which can be traced back to a reliance on their understanding of conventional payment systems. For example, some users believed that transactions were free, reversible, and could be canceled anytime, which is not the case in reality. Correspondingly, these beliefs often resulted in unmet expectations. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations on how to design cryptocurrency wallets that both alleviate the identified issues and counteract some of the misconceptions in order to better support newcomers.
N. Suganthi, Gokul Sridharan, E Shravanth, K. Veena
Abstract: Democratic rule is based on safe and open electoral systems that can preserve their authenticity. The conventional voting processes are hampered significantly by electoral fraud and security breaches as well as centralized management and inefficiencies in auditability and accessibility. The issues of electoral systems reduce public trust along with lowering the credibility of election results. This paper introduces a new three-tier blockchain-based e-voting system designed to enhance voter privacy alongside system scalability and end-to-end verifiability to restore trust in electoral processes. Voter verification at Layer 1 (Identity Verification) combines Decentralized Identity (DID) with Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and multimodal biometric techniques involving fingerprint scanning, facial recognition technology, and voice analysis. The system enables only the participation of valid voters while also protecting their private data and fulfilling different user needs. The system's Layer 2 (Vote Casting & Secure Storage) employs a hybrid consensus algorithm combining Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) and Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) to store votes securely while reducing energy consumption. The system leverages Triple-Blind Signatures to provide complete voter anonymity by decoupling voter identities from their votes as well as any accompanying metadata. Lattice-based post-quantum cryptography is employed to encrypt votes which are distributed across sharded blockchain subnets for enhanced performance without sacrificing fault tolerance. The system accumulates votes via Merkle roots and verifies them via zk-SNARKs in Layer 3 (Result Processing & Transparency) that allows public observation without compromising voter privacy. A Live Audit Dashboard provides voters with the capability to check their vote in real time which facilitates transparent and accountable voting processes. The suggested system attains a secure and open electronic voting process using sophisticated cryptographic protocols in a decentralized setup compliant with international requirements while enabling digital democratic participation.
In a world full of e-services that provide speed of implementation and comfort to customers and users and provide high-luxury features, whether in the world of stock's trading or e-government systems or others. However, any system can suffer from serious challenges such as security and privacy issues, so the existing infrastructure of e-Governance paves the way for a powerful underlying technology. Using Blockchain technology is a strong option to secure platforms and services. Therefore, a new framework that integrates Blockchain into any platform is proposed, especially in Saudi Arabia. This paper surveys research related to Blockchain technology and developments of its witch cut across both public and private sectors. The adoption and integration of e-governance is linked as a key point towards smart applications in the smart environment is discussed. For the improvement and development of any country, there is a need to connect technology-based services and products. These are the main points of an intelligent environment with e-governance in any area. This work refers to these views of e-governance and online services.
Security and trust are seen as the most important issues in electronic voting systems. Therefore, it is necessary to use cryptographic procedures to ensure anonymity, security, privacy, and reliability in these systems. In recent years, blockchain has become one of the most commonly used methods for securing data storage and transmission through decentralized applications. E-voting is one of these application areas. However, data manipulation is still seen as a major potential problem in e-voting systems. In theproposed model, administrators or miners are prevented from previewing election results which are normally accessible data due to the blockchain structure. A double-layer encryption model is proposed and tested to prevent manipulations that may occur with the election results. It is ensured that the election results can be counted after the participation of all stakeholders at the end. In this way, potential manipulations may be prevented during the election period. As a result of the model, the privacy of voters is ensured, no central authority is needed, and the recorded votes are kept in a distributed structure.
Digital evidence, such as evidence from CCTV and event data recorders, is highly valuable in criminal investigations, and is used as definitive evidence in trials. However, there are risks when digital evidence obtained during the investigation of a case is managed through a physical hard disk drive until it is submitted to the court. Previous studies have focused on the integrated management of digital evidence in a centralized system, but if a centralized system server is attacked, major operations and investigation information may be leaked. Therefore, there is a need to reliably manage digital evidence and investigation information using blockchain technology in a distributed system environment. However, when large amounts of data-such as evidence videos-are stored in a blockchain, the data that must be processed only within one block before being created increase, causing performance degradation. Therefore, we propose a two-level blockchain system that separates digital evidence into hot and cold blockchains. In the criminal investigation process, information that frequently changes is stored in the hot blockchain, and unchanging data such as videos are stored in the cold blockchain. To evaluate the system, we measured the storage and inquiry processing performance of digital crime evidence videos according to the different capacities in the two-level blockchain system.
Digital identity is an identity which involves from records and cultural capital, personal profiles created by interactions between individuals, commented “ I connect therefore I am” with expression, celebrity tag of Descartes “ I think therefore I am” by updating with social media platforms, in YouTube videos. A digital identity is comprised in time by users of technologies such as e-mail, text messaging, social media and so on electronic communication tools. Digital identity is defined in nine dimensions as digital access, digital law, digital communication, digital commerce, digital health, digital security, digital rights and digital responsibilities, digital literacy and digital ethic. The aim of this article is to reveal importance of digital identity concept and elements of digital identities and to explore roles of blockchain and artificial intelligence in development process of digital identities. This article is written as the theoretically. Therefore, in study has been used descriptive analysis method. Consequently, blockchain contributes increasing security measures of digital identity. In case artificial intelligence contributes development of digital identity with face recognition systems and algorithms. Moreover, digital identity got more secure thanks to blockchain systems while digital identities is defined more quickly and easily by means of developed technologies with artificial intelligence
Recent increases in security breaches and digital surveillance highlight the need for improved privacy and security, particularly over users’ personal data. Advances in cybersecurity and new legislation promise to improve data protection. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies provide novel opportunities for protecting user data through decentralized identity and other privacy mechanisms. These systems can allow users greater sovereignty through tools that enable them to own and control their own data. Artificial intelligence provides further possibilities for enhancing system and user security, enriching data sets, and supporting improved analytical models.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Ming Ding, Quoc‐Viet Pham, Pubudu N. Pathirana · 9 authors
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising paradigm to handle the massive volume of data generated from ubiquitous mobile devices for enabling intelligent services with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, AI techniques often require centralized data collection and training in a single entity, e.g., an MEC server, which is now becoming a weak point due to data privacy concerns and high data communication overheads. In this context, federated learning (FL) has been proposed to provide collaborative data training solutions, by coordinating multiple mobile devices to train a shared AI model without exposing their data, which enjoys considerable privacy enhancement. To improve the security and scalability of FL implementation, blockchain as a ledger technology is attractive for realizing decentralized FL training without the need for any central server. Particularly, the integration of FL and blockchain leads to a new paradigm, called FLchain, which potentially transforms intelligent MEC networks into decentralized, secure, and privacy-enhancing systems. This article presents an overview of the fundamental concepts and explores the opportunities of FLchain in MEC networks. We identify several main topics in FLchain design, including communication cost, resource allocation, incentive mechanism, security and privacy protection. The key solutions for FLchain design are provided, and the lessons learned as well as the outlooks are also discussed. Then, we investigate the applications of FLchain in popular MEC domains, such as edge data sharing, edge content caching and edge crowdsensing. Finally, important research challenges and future directions are also highlighted.
Lodovico Giaretta, Ioannis Savvidis, Thomas Marchioro, Šarūnas Girdzijauskas · 7 authors
We envision PDS<sup>2</sup>, a decentralized data marketplace in which consumers submit their tasks to be run within the platform, on the data of willing providers. The goal of PDS2is to ensure that users maintain full control on their data and do not compromise their privacy, while being rewarded for the value that their data generates. In order to achieve this, our marketplace architecture employs blockchain technology, privacy-preserving computation and decentralized machine learning. We then compare different potential solutions and identify the Ethereum blockchain, trusted execution environments and gossip learning as the most suitable for the implementation of PDS<sup>2</sup>. We also discuss the main open challenges that are left to tackle and possible directions for future work.
Riaz Ahmad Ziar, Syed Irfanullah, Wajid Ullah Khan, Abdus Salam
Blockchain technology provides several suitable characteristics such as immutability, decentralization and verifiable ledger. It records the transactions in a decentralized way and can be integrated into several fields like eHealth, e-Government and smart cities etc. However, blockchain has several privacy and security issues, one of them is the on-chain data privacy. To deal with this issue we provide a privacy-preserving solution for permission less blockchain to empower the user to take control of transaction data in the open ledger. This work focuses on designing and developing the peer-to-peer system using symmetric cryptography and ethereum smart contract. In this scheme, we create smart contracts for the interaction of the data provider, data consumer, and access control list. Data providers register authorized users in the access control list. Data consumers can check their validity in the access control list. After successful validation, data consumers can request the security key from data providers to access secret information. Based on successful validation, a smart contract that is created between the data provider and data consumer is executed to send a key to the data consumer for accessing the secret information. The smart contracts of this proposed model are modeled in solidity, and the performance of the contracts is assessed in the Ropsten test network.
Robert Karaszewski, Paweł Modrzyński, Joanna Modrzyńska
Blockchain technology is currently one of the trends considered to have a tremendous future ahead. It ensures data security, data sharing protection and automation development—elements that are of colossal importance in the era of cloud solutions, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) reality. Additionally, blockchain technology allows one to create new programmable ecosystems on an unprecedented scale. The implementation of blockchain technology leads not only to improving the flow of documents and data storage, as is the case with the creation of shared service centers (SSCs), but—as this paper shows—allows one to reduce the carbon footprint when servicing SSCs at a considerably higher organizational level at the same time. The example of an SSC in Elbląg, Poland, proves that cloud solutions enabling electronic documents flow and data storage combined with blockchain technology are tools essential for further SSCs development. Furthermore, such tools allow us not only to obtain economic effects (i.e., cost reduction), but also to achieve positive ecological effects (i.e., carbon footprint reduction).
This paper outlines an approach for IEEE to take leadership for digital privacy to align many existing IEEE Societies and efforts in the areas of computer systems & applications security, organizational & global architectures, policy-supporting legislation, originating new standards, integrating compliance into technologies, and helping design decision-board infrastructures for governance bodies. Much of the current emphasis on evolving privacy technologies centers on big corporate enterprises and institutions, causing the industry to support corporate assets protection mainly. Fostering technology to empower individual privacy-enabling tools has lagged, and personal privacy has diminished because corporate big data applications have made sizable investments into exploiting private data. As one of the largest individual-member-based organizations, IEEE is urged to develop a collaborative approach for digital privacy with privacy-enabling technologies to benefit its members. The recommendations outlined define a prospective course that could result in future global individualized privacy capabilities which employ a combination of synergistic technologies such as distributed ledgers, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure distributed multi-party computation, zero-trust architectures, proof-of-origin of data, software, or other techniques. Such an effort would involve community engagement and outreach, academic peer-review events, the establishment of governance bodies, coordination & expansion of existing standards, and the development of publicly-accessible prototypes. Collaboration with other IEEE-sponsored efforts for transactive energy systems, confidentiality and security of healthcare records and devices, and other IEEE-funded projects will help magnify digital privacy investments already in progress in these applications of emerging technologies.
With the development of smart city, the cooperation between government sectors is becoming more and more frequent, breaking the information island and big data sharing has become an inevitable trend. The traditional way of government data sharing is mainly based on one unified data center, which has high construction cost and maintenance cost, and fails to fully consider the sectoral interests, authority, security and traceability, so there are still many barriers in government data sharing. Taking advantage of the features of blockchain technology, such as distributed ledger, smart contract, data trust and traceability, this paper proposes an application model of government data sharing based on blockchain, which uses a unified data sharing model and autonomous authority management to provide efficient and safe bus service for distributed government big data sharing.
This paper addresses the scalability in the cost of smart contracts, which prevent illegal resource access (control access) in the Internet of Things. In previous studies, smart contracts have been used to avoid having a single point of failure, while maintaining tamper resistance. However, a high cost (called gas) is necessary when the number of subject-object pairs becomes large. In order to reduce cost, this paper proposes an access control method using smart contracts with a hierarchical name space. The proposed method scales well in terms of cost-decisive factors, namely, the complexity of functions and the number of smart contracts, leading to scalability in cost.
Voting is one of the most fundamental aspects of democracy. Over the past few decades, voting methods around the world have expanded from traditional paper ballot systems to electronic voting (e-voting), in which votes are written directly to computer memory. Like any computer system, voting machines are susceptible to technical vulnerabilities that open up opportunities for hackers to tamper with votes, causing the use of electronic voting technology to raise concerns about ballot security. We describe how electronic voting can be supported by blockchain technology to ensure voter secrecy, vote correctness, and equal voting rights. In this paper, we present a system using two separate blockchains, each with separate transactions and consensus algorithms. We describe a prototype implementation that validates our ideas by executing several proof-of-concept simulations of a range of voting scenarios.
Chenhao Xu, Jiaqi Ge, Yong Li, Yao Deng · 8 authors
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of a shared model on edge devices while maintaining data privacy. FL is effective when dealing with independent and identically distributed (iid) datasets, but struggles with non-iid datasets. Various personalized approaches have been proposed, but such approaches fail to handle underlying shifts in data distribution, such as data distribution skew commonly observed in real-world scenarios (e.g., driver behavior in smart transportation systems changing across time and location). Additionally, trust concerns among unacquainted devices and security concerns with the centralized aggregator pose additional challenges. To address these challenges, this paper presents a dynamically optimized personal deep learning scheme based on blockchain and federated learning. Specifically, the innovative smart contract implemented in the blockchain allows distributed edge devices to reach a consensus on the optimal weights of personalized models. Experimental evaluations using multiple models and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence compared to traditional federated and personalized learning approaches.
Contact tracing mobile applications have been emerging as potentially automating surveillance technology to help stem the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) by tracking individuals and those they come into exposure with. The avalanche of these apps left the software security researchers’ with concerns about vulnerabilities in hastily written software. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has motivated the recent interest of leveraging blockchain for healthcare-related scenarios, including proposing and developing blockchain-based contact tracing apps. Utilizing the cryptographic concepts of blockchain to secure the collected data could help in winning the level of public engagement required to fight the spread of COVID-19. But will blockchain be a panacea to all the challenges accompanying these apps? Motivated by answering this question and following a twofold process, this paper: (i) explores the current landscape of contact tracing mobile apps, (ii) examines how blockchain technology can contribute positively to this landscape, and (iii) reports on the technical and social challenges that still accompany the deployment of blockchain-based contact tracing apps.
Célio Márcio Soares Ferreira, Charles Tim Batista Garrocho, Ricardo Oliveira, Jorge Sá Silva · 5 authors
The advent of 5G will bring a massive adoption of IoT devices across our society. IoT Applications (IoT Apps) will be the primary data collection base. This scenario leads to unprecedented scalability and security challenges, with one of the first areas for these applications being Smart Cities (SC). IoT devices in new network paradigms, such as Edge Computing and Fog Computing, will collect data from urban environments, providing real-time management information. One of these challenges is ensuring that the data sent from Edge Computing are reliable. Blockchain has been a technology that has gained the spotlight in recent years, due to its robust security in fintech and cryptocurrencies. Its strong encryption and distributed and decentralized network make it potential for this challenge. Using Blockchain with IoT makes it possible for SC applications to have security information distributed, which makes it possible to shield against Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS). IoT devices in an SC can have a long life, which increases the chance of having security holes caused by outdated firmware. Adding a layer of identification and verification of attributes and signature of messages coming from IoT devices by Smart Contracts can bring confidence in the content. SC Apps that extract data from legacy and outdated appliances, installed in inaccessible, unknown, and often untrusted urban environments can benefit from this work. Our work's main contribution is the development of API Gateways to be used in IoT devices and network gateway to sign, identify, and authorize messages. For this, keys and essential characteristics of the devices previously registered in Blockchain are used. We will discuss the importance of this implementation while considering the SC and present a testbed that is composed of Blockchain Ethereum and real IoT devices. We analyze the transfer time, memory, and CPU impacts during the sending and processing of these messages. The messages are signed, identified, and validated by our API Gateways and only then collected for an IoT data management application.
Cryptocurrencies redefined how money can be stored and transferred among\nusers. However, independent of the amount being sent, public blockchain-based\ncryptocurrencies suffer from high transaction waiting times and fees. These\ndrawbacks hinder the wide use of cryptocurrencies by masses. To address these\nchallenges, payment channel network concept is touted as the most viable\nsolution to be used for micro-payments. The idea is exchanging the ownership of\nmoney by keeping the state of the accounts locally. The users inform the\nblockchain rarely, which decreases the load on the blockchain. Specifically,\npayment channel networks can provide transaction approvals in seconds by\ncharging a nominal fee proportional to the payment amount. Such attraction on\npayment channel networks inspired many recent studies which focus on how to\ndesign them and allocate channels such that the transactions will be secure and\nefficient. However, as payment channel networks are emerging and reaching large\nnumber of users, privacy issues are becoming more relevant that raise concerns\nabout exposing not only individual habits but also businesses' revenues. In\nthis paper, we first propose a categorization of the existing payment networks\nformed on top of blockchain-backed cryptocurrencies. After discussing several\nemerging attacks on user/business privacy in these payment channel networks, we\nqualitatively evaluate them based on a number of privacy metrics that relate to\nour case. Based on the discussions on the strengths and weaknesses of the\napproaches, we offer possible directions for research for the future of privacy\nbased payment channel networks.\n
Cryptocurrencies redefined how money can be stored and transferred among users. However, independent of the amount being sent, public blockchain-based cryptocurrencies suffer from high transaction waiting times and fees. These drawbacks hinder the wide use of cryptocurrencies by masses. To address these challenges, payment channel network concept is touted as the most viable solution to be used for micro-payments. The idea is exchanging the ownership of money by keeping the state of the accounts locally. The users inform the blockchain rarely, which decreases the load on the blockchain. Specifically, payment channel networks can provide transaction approvals in seconds by charging a nominal fee proportional to the payment amount. Such attraction on payment channel networks inspired many recent studies which focus on how to design them and allocate channels such that the transactions will be secure and efficient. However, as payment channel networks are emerging and reaching large number of users, privacy issues are becoming more relevant that raise concerns about exposing not only individual habits but also businesses' revenues. In this paper, we first propose a categorization of the existing payment networks formed on top of blockchain-backed cryptocurrencies. After discussing several emerging attacks on user/business privacy in these payment channel networks, we qualitatively evaluate them based on a number of privacy metrics that relate to our case. Based on the discussions on the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, we offer possible directions for research for the future of privacy based payment channel networks.