George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Rainer Stütz, S. Rollet · 6 authors
One of the defining features of Bitcoin and the thousands of cryptocurrencies that have been derived from it is a globally visible transaction ledger. While Bitcoin uses pseudonyms as a way to hide the identity of its participants, a long line of research has demonstrated that Bitcoin is not anonymous. This has been perhaps best exemplified by the development of clustering heuristics, which have in turn given rise to the ability to track the flow of bitcoins as they are sent from one entity to another. In this paper, we design a new heuristic that is designed to track a certain type of flow, called a peel chain, that represents many transactions performed by the same entity; in doing this, we implicitly cluster these transactions and their associated pseudonyms together. We then use this heuristic to both validate and expand the results of existing clustering heuristics. We also develop a machine learning-based validation method and, using a ground-truth dataset, evaluate all our approaches and compare them with the state of the art. Ultimately, our goal is to not only enable more powerful tracking techniques but also call attention to the limits of anonymity in these systems.
Yousif Mohammed Wahab, Alaan Ghazi, Aras Al-dawoodi, Muthana Alisawi · 7 authors
Election is a basic democratic tool that offers an official mechanism for the people to express their opinions in order to form a government by democratic means. Electronic voting has evolved into the most significant application of e-governance and e-democracy. Few countries have recently taken the opportunity to test and use electronic voting systems. Also, many countries expect that internet voting will become a reality during the next decade. In the conventional voting system, the electors authenticate themselves by displaying credentials; this move is open to the public and is validated by poll workers. During this authentication, they are manually checked before being eligible to vote. The standard system of voting is more costly and needs more human capital. Because of these factors, the whole world is heading toward the trend of e-voting. Electronic voting devices are supposed to be the answer to the shortages. A secure e-voting system must meet many criteria, including uniqueness, performance, fairness, stability, safety, authentication, and anonymity. Blockchain is a modern security solution, which is capable of securing e-voting system. Blockchain is distributed ledger. Each block contains only one transaction. Block chain provides security using cryptography and hashing. Blockchain provides a perfect infrastructure to provide secure e-voting netwms.ork. Blockchain along with smart contracts need hour to improvise an e-voting system. This paper presents a secure blockchain based framework for an e-electronic voting in Iraq.
Bitcoin emerged as the most successful cryptocurrency due to the fact that it evaluates in 2009. Other than its security tightness, the principal settlements are probably to be its key to achievement: anonymity and isolation. In this paper, we offer an entire description of the info that make this type of cryptocurrency a thrilling problem for studies in a private society. We're carrying out an intensive overview of nameless bitcoin research papers published up to now and describe a number of the conditions that require research on that topic. Keywords Bitcoin, Blockchain statistics, Mining channel, E-pockets, and so on.
The rapid development and wide application of distributed network systems have made network security especially access control and data privacy ever more important. Blockchain technology offers features such as decentralization, high confidence, and tamper-resistance, which are advantages to solving auditability, resource consumption, scalability, central authority, and trust issues all of which are challenges for network access control by traditional mechanisms. This document presents general information for blockchain access control systems from the views of blockchain system properties, components, functions, and supports for access control policy models. Considerations for implementing blockchain access control systems are also included.
Fengyin Li, Li Xiao, Peiyu Liu, Xueqing Sun · 6 authors
Blockchain gives a new method for distributed data ledgering. The smart grid obtains efficient two-way data transmission and information control. It effectively monitors and regulates the grid by collecting real-time electricity consumption data of users. However, online data collection brings privacy leakage. To solve the problem of privacy leakage in the electricity data collection in the smart grid, a privacy-aware electricity data collection model is proposed. Firstly, we propose a new group blind signature scheme by introducing the blind feature into the identity-based encryption method. Secondly, by applying the proposed group blind signature scheme to the electricity data collection process, we propose a privacy-aware electricity data collection model. The proposed model ensures the conditional anonymity and traceability of user identity and the privacy protection and unforgeability of electricity consumption data.
Digitization of a secure electoral system capable of ensuring fairness and privacy has been a long-standing challenge for a variety of reasons. One is the system's reliance on a third-party organization to manage and verify election results, rendering it insecure. There is a possibility that data will be altered during the election process. As a result, a decentralized e-voting system application capable of verification will be developed in this work using blockchain technology. The Ethereum network and the Truffle framework will be used to implement smart contracts as self-executing electoral agreements. The Ganache (local blockchain) network design demonstrated that the prototype is capable of recording every voting transaction on the network without the use of a central database. The voter can verify the election result by inspecting each voting transaction on the local blockchain. The proposed design will ensure that all voting transactions are stored in a decentralized database, ensuring that no administrative control over the ballot is exercised.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohammad Salahuddin, Priyesh Kadbe, Rajat Wanjarkar
In place of traditional electoral systems, the implementation of e-voting systems is widely adopted which still has major problems in the results. Online voting is an alternative to the old paper voting system and today's popular Electronic Vote Machine (EVM). E-voting systems are very susceptible to manipulation issues, such as alteration of election results by hacking or by the manufacturer of the voting system. To solve this problem, we use distributed ledger technology to create a voting application that is accessible to everyone and everywhere. Blockchain, which is the technology behind the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency, has attracted a lot of attention globally in recent years. This paper proposes a blockchain-based voting system that removes some limitations of existing voting systems. The application is based on the Ethereum blockchain which makes the entire system secure and immutable in nature. The presented implementation is suitable for small-scale elections such as inside corporate homes, meeting rooms, and more.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
By nature, a traditional attack method, denial-of-service (DDoS) attack poses a considerable threat to the security of the blockchain network layer. This paper proposes a distributed DDoS-attack traffic detection method based on a cross multilayer convolutional neural network model in the blockchain network layer. The method resolves the low generalisation, high misreporting rate, and low detection efficiency problems of the existing detection methods, which are caused by nondistinctive core features and the high complexity of robust features when detecting DDoS attacks transmitted by mixed protocols on a blockchain network layer. First, the model performs a convolution operation on preprocessed traffic on the blockchain network layer using a cross-layer method based on L2 regularisation. After this operation, the model can perceive the detailed features of attack traffic from multiple levels while enhancing the representational performance of key features; specifically, the parameters with high-variance terms are penalised to limit changes in the model’s weight parameters. The highly robust abstract features of attack traffic are extracted, thereby increasing the generalisation ability and reducing the misreporting rate of the model. Second, parametric encoding of the abstract features is performed by a stacked sparse autoencoder based on Kullback–Leibler divergence, and the sparsity of the model is adjusted to reduce the redundant data and the coupling between abstract features. The outputs of the encoded features are then effectively categorised. Finally, the global optimisation of parameters is performed by an improved random gradient-descent algorithm, which prevents oscillation of the training parameters and accelerates the model convergence. In an experimental evaluation, the proposed method achieved satisfactory binary- and multiclass detection of DDoS-attack traffic on both CSE-CIC-IDS 2018 on the AWS dataset and on the real mixed data of a blockchain network layer.
The Internet has become one of the most important technologies in the world, and hackers use various methods to launch cyber attacks to profit from it. Phishing is one of famous social engineering attacks, it is often used to steal user data, including login credentials and credit card numbers. Although the Transport Layer Security certificate is used to verify the trust of websites, there are still a series of vulnerabilities. The demand for trusted IP addresses has led a lot of research, including IP whitelisting, DNS filtering and so on. However, these technologies still have many shortcomings. In view of this, we proposed a novel mechanism for verifying websites using blockchain technology. The URL and IP address of a permissioned website are recorded in blockchain through a specific smart contract. A DNS query is executed through a smart contract designed to avoid URL redirection attacks. With the help of immutable nature of blockchian, phishing websites can be detected. The mechanism will not add any load to users and provides tamper-proof functions based on the characteristics of blockchain. The comparison of related works shows that the proposed mechanism is more secure. We also provided a reference implementation of the proposed mechanism on Ethereum Quorum simulation platform, which proves the effectiveness and practicability of the mechanism.
Matthias Grundmann, Max Baumstark, Hannes Hartenstein
A recent spam wave of IP addresses in the Bitcoin P2P network allowed us to estimate the degree distribution of reachable peers. The resulting distribution indicates that about half of the reachable peers run with Bitcoin Core’s default setting of a maximum of 125 concurrent connections and nearly all connection slots are taken. We validate this result empirically. We use our observations of the spam wave to group IP addresses that belong to the same peer. By doing this grouping, we improve on previous measurements of the number of reachable peers and show that simply counting IP addresses overestimates the number of reachable peers by 15 %. We revalidate previous work by using our observations to estimate the number of unreachable peers.
Digital voting is the use of electronic device, such as voting machines or an internet browser to cast vote. It has disadvantages like security of data and potential attacks such as DoS and DDoS attack. One way to solve these security credentials problems is through the blockchain technology. Blockchain technology embraces a decentralized system and the entire database is owned by many users that overcome the disadvantage of centralized system. The existing system has many security, confidentiality, and anonymity issues. These issues can be resolved by using blockchain technology. Here in the proposed system Ethereum blockchain is used, which enables smart contracts. Smart contracts can be written with solidity, which is object oriented programming language. The outcome of the project is it provides privacy by keeping individual’s vote secret by providing a unique transaction id to each voter. Eligibility is made once to vote and the transaction will be highly secure and encrypted.
Kun Li, Huachun Zhou, Zhe Tu, Feiyang Liu · 5 authors
The malicious flow originating from massive access devices in 6G network will increase sharply. In order to effectively reduce malicious flow, we hope to establish a new framework for coordination of security monitoring and malicious behaviour control in 6G network. Federated learning provides data and privacy protection for the distributed network security behaviour knowledge base. However, since the equipment of its participants needs to upload the original data to the central server for model training, this may lead to data leakage in the knowledge base. Therefore, in this article, we first use the knowledge graph to describe network security behaviours, then build a universal network security malicious behaviour knowledge base, and discuss its application scenarios. Then, we propose a blockchain empowered federated learning (BeFL) for distributed network security malicious behaviour knowledge base architecture to ensure the security of knowledge transmission. Finally, we deployed the designed distributed knowledge base in the prototype system and compared it with the other two baseline methods to verify the performance. Relevant results show that our method outperforms other methods in terms of user identification, flow detection, and attack source tracing.
A. Sampathkumar, Shishir Kumar Shandilya, Nebojša Bačanin
In the area where privacy is of greater concern, federated learning,a distributed machine learning strategy for preserving privacy,is widely employed in several privacy concern applications. In the meantime, neural architectures became familiar with deep learning approaches for automatic tuning of the architecture of deep neural networks (DNN). While searching with neural architecture and federated learning has experienced several challenges, optimized neural architecture research in federated learning is extensively on demand. DNN faces numerous issues while training such user privacy and ensuring the integrity of the aggregated results obtained from a server. To provide solutions for the above-mentioned issues, enormous federated learning techniques worked towards preserving privacy and were applied in different situations. Still, it is an open challenge that enables users to verify if the cloud server functions appropriately while ensuring users’ privacy while training. Federated Learning Method is a new way to improve the accuracy and precision, since the previous approach failed to opt the solutions. Here, Elliptical Curve Cryptography with Blockchain-based Federated Learning (ECC-BFL)is proposed to ensure the confidentiality of users’ local gradients while performing federated learning. The parameters such as classification accuracy, running time, Communication overhead, Computation overhead, and transaction speed are considered. The values obtained for these parameters are compared against three standard methods, namely Biparing Method (BM) Homomorphic Cryptosystem (HC), and Multiple Authorities with Attribute-Based Signature scheme (MA-ABS)against proposed Elliptical Curve Cryptography with Blockchain-based Federated Learning (ECC-BFL). As a result, the proposed ECC-BFL achieved 95% of classification accuracy, 65 sec of running time, 76% of communication overhead, 63% of computation overhead, and 92% of transaction speed.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enhances the flexibility and programmability of networks by separating control plane and data plane. The logically centralized control mechanism makes the control plane vulnerable in both single and multiple controller scenarios. Malicious third parties can exploit vulnerabilities of reactive forwarding mode to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against SDN controllers. Unfortunately, existing DoS/DDoS solutions under single controller can not afford effective performance under multiple controllers due to the absence of cooperative detection and mitigation. To solve the above problem, we propose a blockchain-based SDN-targeted DDoS defense framework (BSD-Guard) that can provide cooperative detection and mitigation mechanism to protect SDN controllers. BSD-Guard introduces a blockchain-based secure middle plane between control plane and data plane. The secure middle plane calculates the suspect rate of new flows based on the collected packets’ information and reports suspect lists to blockchain for immutably storing and sharing. Besides, the smart contract deployed on blockchain in advance constitutes collaborative defense strategies based on the suspect lists reported from multiple SDN domains. When receiving defense strategies, the secure middle plane converts them to specific flow table actions and installs actions into relevant switches. The experimental results indicate that BSD-Guard can efficiently detect DoS/DDoS attacks in multiple controllers scenario and issue precise defensive strategies near the source of attack by identifying the attack path.
Ardeshir Shojaeinasab, Amir Pasha Motamed, Behnam Bahrak
Abstract Cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, have garnered attention for their potential in anonymous transactions. However, their anonymity has often been compromised by deanonymization attacks. To counter this, mixing services have been introduced. While they enhance privacy, they obscure fund traceability. This study seeks to demystify transactions linked to these services, shedding light on pathways of concealed and laundered money. We propose a method to identify and classify transactions and addresses of major mixing services in Bitcoin. Unlike previous research focusing on older techniques like CoinJoin, we emphasize modern mixing services. We gathered labelled data by transacting with three prominent mixers (MixTum, Blemder, and CryptoMixer) and identified recurring patterns. Using these patterns, an algorithm was created to pinpoint mixing transactions and distinguish mixer‐related addresses. The algorithm achieved a remarkable recall rate of 100%. Given the lack of clear ground truth and the vast number of unlabelled transactions, ensuring accuracy was a challenge. However, by analyzing a set of non‐mixing transactions with our model, it was confirmed that the high recall rate was not misleading. This work provides a significant advancement in monitoring mixing transactions, presenting a valuable tool against fraud and money laundering in cryptocurrency networks.
Gautam Gajra, Omkar Ghadge, Yash Gandhi, Prof. Devita Durge
Abstract: Developing a protected electronic voting system that gives the decency and security of a current voting system, while providing the accuracy and flexibility offered by electronic systems, has been a test for quite a while. Use of blockchain as an assist to actualize disseminated digital balloting structures is accessed. At the present, neither civilians nor elected leaders have favoured conventional ballots. Elections are surrounded via way of means of vote falsification, bribery and different vote casting problems paper and polling shape balloting a ballot system, the checking of vote's takes hours and the number of the time days and hardly ever any activities reduce to rubble the effects through distinctive feature of human or machine. There needs to be an awesome function of current technology to improve the prevailing system. Blunder, which brings about the process taking much more. Blockchain innovation offers a fact in which that character flaw is eliminated from the situation and votes are checked proper away. Blockchain generation is the only one that handles the real vote. We use the stable hash set of rules for resolving this trouble and attempted to convey an answer via using this booming generation. The system based on blockchain will be safe, trustworthy, and private. It will help to realize the general remember of the applicants who participated and its capabilities inside the equal manner as people's religion of their governments does. The citizens and political selection executives can get sizable benefits from the voting poll programming application. And yet, e-vote casting a poll gives large risks to political race safety and honesty and modifications the concept of political selection straightforwardness and investigation. E-Voting has a Relatively bit of freedom; at the cease of the day, Relative Advantage is degree while an improvement is regarded as advanced to the past one; Since, e-Voting is advanced to the guide vote casting system. Keywords: Blockchain, E-voting, Security, Smart Contracts, Immutable
Remote voting has become more critical in recent years, especially since the COVID-19 outbreak. Blockchain technology and its benefits such as decentralization, security, and transparency have given rise to proposals for blockchain-based voting systems. However, the traceability of blockchain transactions violates voter anonymity in existing proposals. Besides, transaction costs also need to be considered. Solutions that may cause repeated elections should be avoided for a low-cost scalable voting system. In this work, we propose ElectAnon, a blockchain-based, self-tallying, and ranked-choice voting protocol focusing on anonymity, robustness, and scalability. ElectAnon achieves anonymity by enabling voters to register with identity commitments and cast their votes via zero-knowledge proofs. Robustness is realized by removing the direct control of the authorities in the voting process by using timed-state machines. Each voter encodes the ballot into a single integer and blinds the vote off-chain while making the verification on-chain. This makes the protocol infinitely scalable in the number of voters. ElectAnon is also a solution for governance in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO): It includes a candidate proposal module and an algorithm-agnostic mechanism to plug-in different tallying methods easily. The Merkle forest extension is proposed for conducting even more trustless elections. ElectAnon is implemented with smart contracts based on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and a zero-knowledge gadget, Semaphore. The implementation also includes two different sophisticated tallying methods, Borda Count and Tideman. Experimental results show that a 40-voter and 10-candidate election can be implemented with the gas consumption reduced up to 89% compared to previous works. While other studies could not exceed a 25,000-voter setup, ElectAnon has been observed to run safely for 1,000,000 voters. The implementation can be found at https://github.com/ceyonur/electanon .
Saba Abdulbaqi Salman, Sufyan Al-Janabi, Ali Makki Sagheer
Developing a solid e-voting system that offers fairness and privacy for users is a challenging objective. This paper is trying to address whether blockchain can be used to build an efficient e-voting system, also, this research has specified four blockchain technologies with their features and limitations. Many papers have been reviewed in a study covered ten years from 2011 to 2020. As a result of the study, the blockchain platform can be a successful public ledger to implement an e-voting system. Four blockchain technologies have been noticed from this study. These are blockchain using smart contracts, blockchain relying on Zcash platform, blockchain programmed from scratch, and blockchain depending on digital signature. Each blockchain model has details about its features and limitations. Finally, this study suggests developing a blockchain platform that can avoid limitations of currently used blockchain platforms by ensuring authentication, privacy, security for remote e-voting processes.
Abstract: The electronic voting has emerged over time as a replacement to the paper-based voting to reduce the redundancies and inconsistencies. The historical perspective presented in the last two decades suggests that it has not been so successful due to the security and privacy flaws observed over time. This project is about decentralizing authority to record, count and verify votes and the voters, rather than having a central authority. We are using blockchain technology which is a distributed database. With its immutability property and decentralized architecture, it can run and support a voting scheme that is open, fair and independently verifiable. The project will be developed in Ethereum framework which primarily uses Solidity as a language. Ethereum’s backbone is its decentralized virtual machine called Ethereum Virtual Machine. The application will be deployed on the thirdweb(web3.0). Overall this project is a potential roadmap for blockchain technologies developing in the nation to support complex applications. Keywords: Blockchain, Cryptography, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum Framework, Solidity, Decentralization, Hashing, Dapp, Web3, Digitalizing.
Although the traditional P2P botnet has significant resilience against termination, its dependence on neighbor lists (NL) has left it vulnerable to infiltration and destruction. In addition, it is not sufficient in protecting the botmaster’s identity. To overcome these weaknesses, we proposed BlockchainBot, a botnet model that leveraged IoT devices as maintainers, and integrated blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). The BlockchainBot was able to fully deploy bots on public blockchains. It was versatile for multiple botnet applications and eliminated the dependence on NL. In addition, we further introduced a novel method, the forking of a channel, to kick out spy nodes that infiltrate a botnet. To further enforce the resistance against a single point of failure (SPoF), we introduced bot-cluster dispersing to prevent clustering around full nodes and more evenly scatter bots to prevent hostile takeovers. The analysis of the security of BlockchainBot indicated that it had strong resilience against DDoS attacks, Sybil attacks, and forensic investigations. Furthermore, the security of the forking of the channel and bot-cluster dispersing were also shown to be effective. The robustness of the BlockchainBot against the Sybil attack was also briefly discussed. Experimental results authenticated the effectiveness and performance of the BlockchainBot, as compared to previous models.
İlk kripto para birimi olan Bitcoin, son zamanlarda araştırmacılardan büyük ilgi görmektedir. Bitcoin literatürüne daha fazla katkı sağlamak için araştırmacılar tarafından yapılan çalışmalar bulunmaktadır. Bununla birlikte, Bitcoin literatürünü farklı çalışmalarla desteklemek önemlidir. Bu çalışma, teknoloji kabul modelini güven yapısı ile genişleten entegre bir modelin yapısal geçerliliğini test ederken, kullanıcıların Bitcoin'i kolay ve faydalı olarak algılamalarına ve Bitcoin'e olan güvenlerine dayalı olarak Bitcoin kullanma niyetlerini açıklamayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaçla 206 katılımcıdan online anket kullanılarak veri toplanmıştır. Process macro tekniği ile test edilen modelin yapısal geçerliliği istatistiksel analizlerle doğrulanmıştır. İstatistiksel analiz sonuçlarına göre Bitcoin'in algılanan kullanım kolaylığı, Bitcoin'in algılanan faydası ve Bitcoin'e olan güven ile bu faktörler arasındaki mevcut ilişkiler Bitcoin kullanma niyeti üzerinde etkilidir. Bununla birlikte, kullanıcıların Bitcoin kullanma niyetlerinin cinsiyet, yaş aralığı/jenerasyon, eğitim durumu ve aylık gelir açısından önemli ölçüde farklılık göstermediği belirtilmelidir. Bu çalışma hem teori hem de uygulama için çıkarımların yanı sıra gelecekteki araştırmalar için öneriler sunmaktadır.
Smart Contracts (SCs) publicly deployed on blockchain have been shown to include multiple vulnerabilities, which can be maliciously exploited by users. In this paper, we present extorsionware, a novel attack exploiting the public nature of vulnerable SCs to gain control over the victim's SC assets. Thanks to the control gained over the SC, the attacker obliges the victim to pay a price to re-gain exclusive control of the SC.
Blockchain-based systems have gained immense popularity as enablers of independent asset transfers and smart contract functionality. They have also, since as early as the first Bitcoin blocks, been used for storing arbitrary contents such as texts and images. On-chain data storage functionality is useful for a variety of legitimate use cases. It does, however, also pose a systematic risk. If abused, for example by posting illegal contents on a public blockchain, data storage functionality can lead to legal consequences for operators and users that need to store and distribute the blockchain, thereby threatening the operational availability of entire blockchain ecosystems. In this paper, we develop and apply a cloud-based approach for quickly discovering and classifying content on public blockchains. Our method can be adapted to different blockchain systems and offers insights into content-related usage patterns and potential cases of abuse. We apply our method on the two most prominent public blockchain systems - Bitcoin and Ethereum - and discuss our results. To the best of our knowledge, the presented study is the first to systematically analyze non-financial content stored on the Ethereum blockchain and the first to present a side-by-side comparison between different blockchains in terms of the quality and quantity of stored data.
Abstract Traditionally, governments and companies store data to identify persons for services provision and interactions. The rise of self-sovereign identities (SSIs) based on blockchain technologies provides individuals with ownership and control over their personal data and allows them to share their data with others using a sort of “digital safe.” Fundamentally, people have the sole ownership of their identity data and control when and how it is shared, protecting their privacy. As these data need to be validated to be trusted, they may become a more important data source for digital information sharing and transactions than the formal source of identity controlled by governments. Furthermore, SSIs can be used for interacting digitally with any organization. These developments change the relationship between government, companies, and individuals. We explore information sharing and governance in the digital society using blockchain-based SSIs. In addition, the impact of SSIs on data storage in the digital world is assessed. Technology enactment might result in no greater control or privacy and might only reinforce current practices. Finally, we argue that regulation and a combination of centralized and decentralized governance are still required to avoid misuse and ensure that envisaged benefits are realized.