Blockchain Papers

Shoji Kasahara

Bitcoin is one of popular cryptocurrencies widely used over the world, and its blockchain technology has attracted considerable attention. In Bitcoin system, it has been reported that transactions are prioritized according to transaction fees, and that transactions with high priorities are likely to be confirmed faster than those with low priorities. In this paper, we consider performance modeling of Bitcoin-blockchain system in order to characterize the transaction-confirmation time. We first introduce the Bitcoin system, focusing on proof-of-work, the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin blockchain. Then, we show some queueing models and its analytical results, discussing the implications and insights obtained from the queueing models.

Ujwal Patil, Prof. P. M. Chouragade

The technological advancements and a qualitative improvement in the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning leads to the creation of realistic-looking but phoney digital content known as deepfakes .These manipulated videos can quickly be shared via social media to spread fake news or disinformation which not only impacts those who are deceived it also harms social media sites by diminishing faith.These deepfake videos cannot be checked since there are no regulatory mechanisms in place .As a result these untrustworthy outlets will post whatever they wish causing confusion in society in some ways.Current solutions are unable to provide digital media history tracing and authentication it is essential to develop successful methods for detecting deepfake video as a result it is necessary to determine the source or origin of such deepfake footage.That’s why we are implementing blockchain techniques to trace back and determine the origin of digital media blockchain techniques helps in the effective recognition of deepfake video and calculating the trust factor of user.

Honglei Li, Weilian Xue

e-Auction improves the efficiency of bid transaction. However, the protection of bidders’ privacy, transaction fairness and verifiability, transaction data security, high cost of third-party auction center, and other issues have attracted more attention. According to the transaction process and basic principles of the sealed auction, we explored the problems existing in the current sealed-bid e-auction schemes. Based on the blockchain technology, we proposed a sealed-bid e-auction scheme with smart contract technology, Bulletproofs zero-knowledge proof protocols, and Pedersen commitment algorithm. The proposed scheme constructed an auction mechanism without the third-party auctioneer so as to restrict the behaviors of auction parties for the sake of auction security, reliability, fairness, and privacy protection. Compared with the related sealed e-auction schemes based on blockchain technologies in six metrics, we conducted the experiment to show that the proposed scheme protected the bid information from leakage well and successfully verified the winning bid price and the related bidder by all transaction participants without the third-party auctioneer.

Qin Wang, Rujia Li, Qi Wang, Shiping Chen

The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market is mushrooming in recent years. The concept of NFT originally comes from a token standard of Ethereum, aiming to distinguish each token with distinguishable signs. This type of token can be bound with virtual/digital properties as their unique identifications. With NFTs, all marked properties can be freely traded with customized values according to their ages, rarity, liquidity, etc. It has greatly stimulated the prosperity of the decentralized application (DApp) market. At the time of writing (May 2021), the total money used on completed NFT sales has reached $34,530,649.86$ USD. The thousandfold return on its increasing market draws huge attention worldwide. However, the development of the NFT ecosystem is still in its early stage, and the technologies of NFTs are pre-mature. Newcomers may get lost in their frenetic evolution due to the lack of systematic summaries. In this technical report, we explore the NFT ecosystems in several aspects. We start with an overview of state-of-the-art NFT solutions, then provide their technical components, protocols, standards, and desired proprieties. Afterward, we give a security evolution, with discussions on the perspectives of their design models, opportunities, and challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study on the current NFT ecosystems.

Yuanzhe Jin, Ziheng Dong, Xing Li

Bitcoin has emerged in 2008, and after decades of development, it has become the largest trading currency by far. The core of the blockchain is to ensure the anonymity of user transactions. As more and more analysis algorithms for blockchain transactions appear, the anonymity of the blockchain is increasingly threatened. We propose Tomen, an encryption application for the communication process in the bitcoin transaction process, combined with the encryption principle method of Tor. The goal is to achieve the application of the anonymization of bitcoin transaction communication.

Sung-Won Lee, Kwee-Bo Sim

Recently, to enhance the security of the Internet of Things (IoT), research on blockchain-based encryption algorithms has been actively conducted. However, because blockchains have complex structures and process large amounts of data, there are still many difficulties in using the conventional blockchain-based encryption algorithms in an IoT system that must have low power consumption and be ultra-lightweight. In this study, to address these problems (1) we simplified the conventional Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based blockchain structure, and (2) we proposed a new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) algorithm with enhanced security by periodically changing the secret key and initialization vector (IV) in the conventional AES-CBC encryption algorithm. Because the DAG, which is the conventional blockchain structure, randomly transmits data to multiple blocks, there may be overlapping blocks, and the quantity of transmitted data is not limited; thus, the time and power consumption for encryption and decryption increase. In this study, a simplified DAG was designed to address these problems so that packets can be transmitted only to three blocks, without overlapping. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed in this paper, an IoT system consisting of 10 clients and one server was implemented in hardware, and an experiment was conducted. Through the experiment, it was confirmed that when the proposed AES-CBC algorithm was used, the time taken and the amount of power consumed for encryption and decryption were reduced by about 20% compared to the conventional AES-CBC algorithm.

Ji-Hwei Horng, Ching‐Chun Chang, Guanlong Li, Wai‐Kong Lee · 5 authors

Medical images carry a lot of important information for making a medical diagnosis. Since the medical images need to be communicated frequently to allow timely and accurate diagnosis, it has become a target for malicious attacks. Hence, medical images are protected through encryption algorithms. Recently, reversible data hiding on the encrypted images (RDHEI) schemes are employed to embed private information into the medical images. This allows effective and secure communication, wherein the privately embedded information (e.g., medical records and personal information) is very useful to the medical diagnosis. However, existing RDHEI schemes still suffer from low embedding capacity, which limits their applicability. Besides, such solution still lacks a good mechanism to ensure its integrity and traceability. To resolve these issues, a novel approach based on image block-wise encryption and histogram shifting is proposed to provide more embedding capacity in the encrypted images. The embedding rate is over 0.8 bpp for typical medical images. On top of that, a blockchain-based system for RDHEI is proposed to resolve the traceability. The private information is stored on the blockchain together with the hash value of the original medical image. This allows traceability of all the medical images communicated over the proposed blockchain network.

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.

Gaurav Sharma, Denis Verstraeten, Vishal Saraswat, Jean‐Michel Dricot · 5 authors

Online auction systems allow to achieve an optimal trading of digital goods and services in a competitive market. Existing blockchain-based auctions allow the bidders to take part in the process while maintaining the confidentiality of their bids in a decentralized, transparent, secure and auditable way. However, in a competitive market, parties would prefer not to disclose their interests to competitors, and to remain anonymous during auctions. In this paper, we firstly analyze the specific requirements for blockchain-based anonymous fair auctions. We propose a formal model tailored to study auction systems facilitating anonymity, and we put forward a generic protocol relying on existing cryptographic primitives, such as designated verifier ring signature, to achieve bid confidentiality and bidder anonymity. Finally, we prove it to be secure against the security model we defined.

Alem Fitwi, Yu Chen

At present, more than a billion closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are watching the world. These cameras garner a lot of visual information that is often processed and stored in remote and centralized cloud servers. Multiple occasions have revealed that this traditional approach is plagued with security and privacy breaches. The breaches could be the interception of raw videos while in transit to distant surveillance analytics centers (SAC), infiltration to cameras and network video records (NVR), or abuse of cameras and stored videos. Hence, the traditional video surveillance system (VSS) cannot guarantee the protection of the privacy of individuals caught on CCTV cameras. Therefore, this paper proposes a Secure and Privacy-preserving Stored surveillance video sharing (SePriS) mechanism for authorized users/nodes based on blockchain (BC), smart contracts, and the enciphering of video frames using DAB, a mechanism developed based on discrete cosine transform (DCT), advanced encryption standard (AES), and a block shuffling (BS) algorithm. The BC-based solution creates an environment auspicious for creating decentralized, reliable SACs and storage sites with secure and privacy-aware sharing of stored surveillance videos across SAC nodes and by law enforcers, police departments, and courts securely connected to the SAC nodes. The experiments and analyses validate that the proposed BC-based SePriS solution achieves the design purpose.

Tripti Rathee, Parvinder Singh

After the acceptance of blockchain technology, there have been applications which aim to use blockchain in their fields. Various approaches have been proposed in past to build a secure Identity Management (IdM) System. This is a novel systematic literature mapping of IdM in blockchain. This paper provides an extensive review on IdM with emphasis on how the emergence of blockchain has addressed the IdM challenges faced over the years. A thorough study has been done on the existing literature. The primary and secondary “search string” were identified and search was conducted on five databases; and after screening the analysis was done. Out of the total studied literature, 30 primary studies published from 2009 to 2020 were selected. Through this paper, the researchers will be able to: 1) find out the research trends in IdM using blockchain, 2) understand the challenges in IdM and report whether blockchain can solve the IdM challenges, 3) scrutinize and understand how the different frameworks of IdM would deal with security, integrity and privacy problems, 4) know about initiatives taken for IdM using blockchain, 5) which consensus algorithms are popular among blockchains, 6) know about the research projects going on in the field of IdM using blockchain.

Chenchen Li, Jiang Xiao, Xiaohai Dai, Hai Jin

No abstract is available for this record.

Yojna Arora, Mr. Vivek Birla, Mr. Rajat Gupta, Mr. Samarth Tiku

Voting is a constitutional part of governmental systems which gives the people of the nation the liberty to express their opinions. The contemporary system constitutes Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) that is a pile-up of data natively and centralized, making it implausible. Since the data is amassed locally over the EVM(s) prior to the election's cessation, it could be hacked. Furthermore, there have been events of "polling booth hijacking" in some regions during the elections. Ethereum blockchain technology addresses concerns regarding integrity, security, and accessibility of current voting systems. Expanding e-voting into Ethereum based blockchain technology is one potential application of the emerging blockchain technology. This paper presents a decentralized, incognito, and limpid e-voting system named "DILE". It will escalate accessibility as the users could cast their votes without paying a visit to the polling booths. DILE makes practical and effective use of Ethereum's blockchain technology and smart contracts for its implementation.

Trishie Sharma, C. Rama Krishna, Arshdeep Bahga

Abstract In recent years, blockchain-based systems have emerged powerfully and led to the development of several new and improved applications in terms of increased security, trust, accountability and reliability. One important trust-based application is electronic voting system which still lacks in providing good throughput while also reducing the costs in voting given the deployment of state-of-the-art technologies. So, there is a need to imply an efficient consensus protocol to impart cost-efficiency as well as better performance of a blockchain-based electronic voting system. This paper focuses on boosting up the cost-efficiency in the voting process, while also being auditable, thus, strengthening the trust of voters on the government and lessening the overall costs incurred in voting. In this paper, Proof-of-Stake-Voting is used as consensus protocol which is observed to give a throughput of 4-5K transactions per second. Then its performance is compared with the other existing consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Authority in terms of gas consumption, gas cost, and throughput. It has been shown through the results that there is a significant difference in the total gas cost, with Proof-of-Stake-Voting protocol consuming 3.1 x 10 −7 Ethers (ETH), as compared to the Proof-of-Work, taking 5.42536 x 10 −4 ETH and Proof-of-Authority protocols taking 2.49759 x 10 −4 ETH.

Ratul Amin Md., Muhammad Yasar Khan, Megat F. Zuhairi

Distributed ledger technology is an immutable data storage and transparent system, which is a constituent component that empowers the FSCM (Food supply Chain Management). Due to the autonomous and immutable data feature, the scalability of blockchain technology is quite a challenge. A supply chain is a network that flows product from suppliers to the final consumer, which produces a high volume of data. In the blockchain, processing high volume of data is quite a significant issue and may affect business profit. To overcome the issue, Big Data and User Controllable Code for Smart Contracts (UCCSC) will be integrated with the blockchain-based FSCM system. Big data technology is typically used to analyze high volume of both structured and unstructured data, which is very difficult to process using habitual database and software techniques. The UCCSC integrates the blockchain and big data and manage the user in the FSCM system. This paper mainly discusses the integration of blockchain-based FSCM and Big Data, and the mechanism that supports such system.

Takio Uesugi, Yoshinobu Shijo, Masayuki Murata

Securing the traceability of products in a supply chain is an urgent issue. Recently, supply-chain systems that use a blockchain have been proposed. In these systems, the blockchain is used as a common database shared among supply chain parties to secure the integrity and reliability of distribution information such as ownership transfer records. These systems thus secure a high level of traceability in the supply chain. Considering future scalability of supply chains, public permissionless blockchain (PPBC) is a promising approach. In this approach, however, distribution information that should be kept private is made public since the information recorded in PPBC can be read by anyone. We therefore propose a method for preserving privacy while securing traceability in a supply chain system using PPBC. The proposed method preserves privacy by concealing distribution information via encryption. In addition, the proposed method ensures distribution among legitimate supply chain parties while concealing their blockchain addresses by using zero-knowledge proofs.We implement the proposed method on Ethereum smart contracts and verify the system behavior. The results show that the proposed method works as expected, and that system usage cost per distribution party is at most 2.2 × 106 gas units in terms of blockchain transaction fees.

Drew Stone

In this paper, we present a protocol for facilitating trust-less cross-chain cryptocurrency transfers that preserve privacy of bridge withdrawals. We leverage zero-knowledge primitives that are commonly used to design cryptocurrency mixing protocols to provide similar functionality but across two or more blockchains. To that end, we receive cryptocurrency mixing for free through the bridge operations and de-scribe how to extend these protocols to incentivise bridge transfers using past ideas. We describe how resulting protocols lead to similar vampire style attacks coined in the Uniswap vs. Sushiswap saga but across chains.

D. Srivatsa, N. S. Jai Aakash, S. Sahisnu, Priyanka Kumar

Abstract The supply chain management industry is struggling with inadequate resources for efficient authenticity verification. Blockchain technology and smart contracts can overcome such conventional limitations to authenticate products in an easy, economical and secure manner. Decentralized and immutable blockchain systems allow product tracking to its origin.In this paper we have proposed and implemented a system for product authentication using blockchain technology based on ethereum platform by making use of smart contracts. We have analysed the existing centralized system and the need to shift from the existing centralized system to a decentralized blockchain based ledger technology. The use of blockchain technology in supply chain technology has reduced the complexity in product authentication by making the entire history of the product available from its production stage till it reaches the customer.

Rihab Habeeb Sahib, Eman S. Al-Shamery

Abstract Election is an important event in all countries. Conventional voting suffers many issues, such as cost of time and efforts needed for tallying and counting results, cost in papers, arrangements and all that it takes for a voting process to be achieved. Many countries such as Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Namibia, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Switzerland, the UK, Venezuela and the Philippines considered online e-voting systems, but the traditional e-voting systems suffer a lack of trust, it is not known if a vote is counted correctly, tampered or not. The voter has no guarantee that his/her vote is considered as they voted in elections, it’s a lack of transparency. A solution is e-voting systems based on blockchain (sometimes referred as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)) has now turned to be promising for what properties it offer, such as, privacy, security, transparency, accuracy, decentralization in which no central control exist, and most of all, creates an immutable system, where citizens are allowed to vote from their location by using digital devices (smart phones, computers, electronic voting machines). Also, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many technology applications are heading towards systems with all these properties, at the same time, maintaining social distancing. This review introduced many different ideas for implementing e-voting systems based on Blockchain and how the users (voters and candidates) interact with the system showing the voting process from the first step of registration to authentication till showing the final results. At the end of this review we will illustrate a table that contain all mechanisms used in the papers involved that covers the most important requirements needed for every e-voting system based on blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

Iago Sestrem Ochôa, Valderi Reis Quietinho Leithardt, Leonardo Calbusch, Juan F. De Paz · 7 authors

Since the early 2000s, life in cities has changed significantly due to the Internet of Things (IoT). This concept enables developers to integrate different devices collecting, storing, and processing a large amount of data, enabling new services to improve various professional and personal activities. However, privacy issues arise with a large amount of data generated, and solutions based on blockchain technology and smart contract have been developed to address these issues. Nevertheless, several issues must still be taken into account when developing blockchain architectures aimed at the IoT scenario because security flaws still exist in smart contracts, mainly due to the lack of ease when building the code. This article presents a blockchain storage architecture focused on license plate recognition (LPR) systems for smart cities focusing on privacy, performance, and security. The proposed architecture relies on the Ethereum platform. Each smart contract matches the privacy preferences of a license plate to be anonymized through public encryption. The storage of data captured by the LPR system can only be done if the smart contract enables it. However, in the case of motivation foreseen by the legislation, a competent user can change the smart contract and enable the storage of the data captured by the LPR system. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed architecture is satisfactory, regarding the scalability of the built private network. Furthermore, tests on our smart contract using security and structure analysis tools on the developed script demonstrate that our solution is fraud-proof. The results obtained in all experiments bring evidence that our architecture is feasible to be used in real scenarios.

Sarjana Singh, Sumit Kumar

Blockchain was mainly introduced for secure transactions in connection with the mining of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. This article discusses the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology and its components, such as block header, transaction, smart contracts, etc. Blockchain uses the distributed databases, so this article also explains the advantages of distributed Blockchain over a centrally located database. Depending on the application, Blockchain is broadly categorized into two categories; Permissionless and Permissioned. This article elaborates on these two categories as well. Further, it covers the consensus mechanism and its working along with an overview of the Ethereum platform. Blockchain technology has been proved to be one of the remarkable techniques to provide security to IoT devices. An illustration of how Blockchain will be useful for IoT devices has been given. A few applications are also illustrated to explain the working of Blockchain with IoT.

Yun-Ciao Wang, Chin‐Ling Chen, Yong‐Yuan Deng

In addition to the exhibition, collection, research, and educational functions of the museum, the development of a future museum includes the trend of leisure and sightseeing. Although the museum is a non-profit organization, if it can provide digital exhibits and collections under the premises of “intellectual property rights” and “cultural assets protection”, and licensing and adding value in various fields, it can generate revenue from digital licensing and handle the expenses of museum operations. This will be a new trend in the sustainable development of museum operations. Especially since the outbreak of COVID-19 at the beginning of this year (2020), the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) recently stated that nearly a third of the museums in the United States may be permanently closed since museum operations are facing “extreme financial difficulties.” This research is aimed at museums using the business model of “digital authorization”. It proposes an authorization mechanism based on blockchain technology protecting the museums’ digital rights in the business model and the application of cryptography. The signature and time stamp mechanism achieve non-repudiation and timeless mechanism, which combines blockchain and smart contracts to achieve verifiability, un-forgery, decentralization, and traceability, as well as the non-repudiation of the issue of cash flow with signatures and digital certificates, for the digital rights of museums in business. The business model proposes achievable sustainable development. Museums not only achieve the goal of promoting social education, but also solve their financial problems.

Houshyar Honar Pajooh, Mohammad A. Rashid, Fakhrul Alam, Serge Demidenko

The proliferation of smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks creates significant security challenges for the communications between such devices. Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed technology that can potentially tackle the security problems within the 5G-enabled IoT networks. This paper proposes a Multi layer Blockchain Security model to protect IoT networks while simplifying the implementation. The concept of clustering is utilized in order to facilitate the multi-layer architecture. The K-unknown clusters are defined within the IoT network by applying techniques that utillize a hybrid Evolutionary Computation Algorithm while using Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. The chosen cluster heads are responsible for local authentication and authorization. Local private blockchain implementation facilitates communications between the cluster heads and relevant base stations. Such a blockchain enhances credibility assurance and security while also providing a network authentication mechanism. The open-source Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain platform is deployed for the proposed model development. Base stations adopt a global blockchain approach to communicate with each other securely. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed clustering algorithm performs well when compared to the earlier reported approaches. The proposed lightweight blockchain model is also shown to be better suited to balance network latency and throughput as compared to a traditional global blockchain.

A. H. Mohsin, A. A. Zaidan, B. B. Zaidan, K. I. Mohammed · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.