Blockchain Papers

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1,224 papersLast indexed Aug 31, 2026
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Mar 7, 2022·Lecture notes in computer science
14 cites
Dispute-free Scalable Open Vote Network using zk-SNARKs

Muhammad ElSheikh, Amr Youssef

The Open Vote Network is a self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol suitable for boardroom elections. Currently, it has two Ethereum-based implementations: the first, by McCorry et al., has a scalability issue since all the computations are performed on-chain. The second implementation, by Seifelnasr et al., solves this issue partially by assigning a part of the heavy computations to an off-chain untrusted administrator in a verifiable manner. As a side effect, this second implementation became not dispute-free; there is a need for a tally dispute phase where an observer interrupts the protocol when the administrator cheats, i.e., announces a wrong tally result. In this work, we propose a new smart contract design to tackle the problems in the previous implementations by (i) preforming all the heavy computations off-chain hence achieving higher scalability, and (ii) utilizing zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) to verify the correctness of the off-chain computations, hence maintaining the dispute-free property. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, we develop prototype implementations on Ethereum and conduct multiple experiments for different implementation options that show a trade-off between the zk-SNARK proof generation time and the smart contract gas cost, including an implementation in which the smart contract consumes a constant amount of gas independent of the number of voters.

Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
Cryptography and Data Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Mar 6, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
6 cites
Exploring Unfairness on Proof of Authority: Order Manipulation Attacks and Remedies

Qin Wang, Rujia Li, Qi Wang, Shiping Chen · 5 authors

Proof of Authority (PoA) is a type of permissioned consensus algorithm with a fixed committee. PoA has been widely adopted by communities and industries due to its better performance and faster finality. In this paper, we explore the \textit{unfairness} issue existing in the current PoA implementations. We have investigated 2,500+ \textit{in the wild} projects and selected 10+ as our main focus (covering Ethereum, Binance smart chain, etc.). We have identified two types of order manipulation attacks to separately break the transaction-level (a.k.a. transaction ordering) and the block-level (sealer position ordering) fairness. Both of them merely rely on honest-but-\textit{profitable} sealer assumption without modifying original settings. We launch these attacks on the forked branches under an isolated environment and carefully evaluate the attacking scope towards different implementations. To date (as of Nov 2021), the potentially affected PoA market cap can reach up to $681,087$ million USD. Besides, we further dive into the source code of selected projects, and accordingly, propose our recommendation for the fix. To the best of knowledge, this work provides the first exploration of the \textit{unfairness} issue in PoA algorithms.

Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Original source
Mar 2, 2022·Sustainability
34 cites
Implementation and Early Adoption of an Ethereum-Based Electronic Voting System for the Prevention of Fraudulent Voting

Byeongtae Ahn

Today’s online voting systems pose security concerns and cannot be used for public elections, while offline voting costs significantly more. As a result, a decentralized electronic voting system is emerging, backed by blockchain technology. With blockchain technology applied to online voting, the system can guarantee transparency and confidentiality because individual voter information and aggregate information are stored in a distributed fashion. Due to its decentralized nature, a blockchain-based voting system is more secure than the existing central server-based online voting system. In this study, an Ethereum-based electronic voting system was developed. This system resolves the issue of fraudulent voting by enhancing the safety and reliability of the electronic voting system.

Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Original source
Mar 1, 2022·Data Science and Management
34 cites
Blockchain-based reporting protocols as a collective monitoring mechanism in DAOs

Saeed Banaeian Far, Seyed Mojtaba Hosseini Bamakan

As a recent decentralized business model, Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) challenges the management paradigms of conventional organizations and represents the future of democracy-based systems. However, DAOs are facing challenges that can be divided into two categories, including policy-based and technical challenges. Detecting misbehaving nodes is a crucial challenge that is considered in both categories. Designing mechanisms to report malicious behaviors while maintaining anonymity is essential for the survival and efficiency of DAOs. In this paper, we clarify the problem, and introduce Blockchain-Based Anonymous Reporting (BBAR) as a collective monitoring mechanism in DAOs with its requirements and implementation methods.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Original source
Mar 1, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
19 cites
Web3: A Decentralized Societal Infrastructure for Identity, Trust, Money, and Data

Joost Bambacht, Johan Pouwelse

A movement for a more transparent and decentralized Internet is globally attracting more attention. People are becoming more privacy-aware of their online identities and data. The Internet is constantly evolving. Web2 focused on companies that provide services in exchange for personal user data. Web3 commits to user-centricity using decentralization and zero-server architectures. The current digital society demands a global change to empower citizens and take back control. Citizens are locked into big-tech for personal data storage and their for-profit digital identity. Protection of data has proven to be essential, especially due to increased home Internet traffic during the COVID pandemic. Citizens do not possess their own travel documents. The European Commission aims to transition this governmental property towards self-sovereign identity, introducing many new opportunities. Citizens are locked into banks with non-portable IBAN accounts and unsustainable legacy banking infrastructures. Migration to all-digital low-fraud infrastructures and healthier competitive ecosystems is essential. The overall challenge is to return the power to citizens and users again. The transition to a more decentralized Internet is the first crucial step in the realization of user-centricity. This thesis presents the first exploratory study that integrates governmental-issued travel documents into a (decentralized) societal infrastructure. These self-sovereign identities form the authentic base to a private and secure transfer of money and data, and can effectively provide trust in authenticity that is currently missing in online conversations. A fully operational zero-server infrastructure that incorporates all our requirements has been developed for Android using the P2P network overlay IPv8, and a personalized blockchain called TrustChain...

Open access
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Access Control and Trust
Original source
Feb 19, 2022·IEEE Internet of Things Journal
12 cites
Device Identification in Blockchain-Based Internet of Things

Ali Dorri, Clemence Roulin, Shantanu Pal, Sarah Baalbaki · 6 authors

In recent years, blockchain technology has received tremendous attention. Blockchain users are known by a changeable public key (PK) that introduces a level of anonymity; however, studies have shown that anonymized transactions can be linked to deanonymize the users. Most of the existing studies on user deanonymization focus on monetary applications; however, the blockchain has received extensive attention in nonmonetary applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we study the impact of deanonymization on the IoT-based blockchain. We populate a blockchain with data of smart home devices and then apply machine learning algorithms in an attempt to classify the transactions to a particular device that, in turn, risks the privacy of the users. Two types of attack models are defined: 1) informed attacks: where attackers know the type of devices installed in a smart home and 2) blind attacks: where attackers do not have this information. We show that machine learning algorithms can successful classify the transactions with 90% accuracy. To enhance the anonymity of the users, we introduce multiple obfuscation methods which include combining multiple packets into a transaction, merging ledgers of multiple devices, and delaying transactions. The implementation results show that these obfuscation methods significantly reduce the attack success rates to 20%–30% and, thus, enhance the user privacy.

Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
cs.DC
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
Feb 16, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
1 cites
PhishChain: A Decentralized and Transparent System to Blacklist Phishing URLs

Shehan Edirimannage, Mohamed Nabeel, Charith Elvitigala, Chamath Keppitiyagama

Blacklists are a widely-used Internet security mechanism to protect Internet users from financial scams, malicious web pages and other cyber attacks based on blacklisted URLs. In this demo, we introduce PhishChain, a transparent and decentralized system to blacklisting phishing URLs. At present, public/private domain blacklists, such as PhishTank, CryptoScamDB, and APWG, are maintained by a centralized authority, but operate in a crowd sourcing fashion to create a manually verified blacklist periodically. In addition to being a single point of failure, the blacklisting process utilized by such systems is not transparent. We utilize the blockchain technology to support transparency and decentralization, where no single authority is controlling the blacklist and all operations are recorded in an immutable distributed ledger. Further, we design a page rank based truth discovery algorithm to assign a phishing score to each URL based on crowd sourced assessment of URLs. As an incentive for voluntary participation, we assign skill points to each user based on their participation in URL verification.

Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Spam and Phishing Detection
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Feb 14, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
1 cites
TRIP: Coercion-resistant Registration for E-Voting with Verifiability and Usability in Votegral

Louis-Henri Merino, Simone Colombo, Rene D. Reyes-Bardales, Alaleh Azhir · 12 authors

Online voting is convenient and flexible, but amplifies the risks of voter coercion and vote buying. One promising mitigation strategy enables voters to give a coercer fake voting credentials, which silently cast votes that do not count. Current systems along these lines make problematic assumptions about credential issuance, however, such as strong trust in a registrar and/or in voter-controlled hardware, or expecting voters to interact with multiple registrars. Votegral is the first coercion-resistant voting architecture that leverages the physical security of in-person registration to address these credential-issuance challenges, amortizing the convenience costs of in-person registration by reusing credentials across successive elections. Votegral's registration component, TRIP, gives voters a kiosk in a privacy booth with which to print real and fake credentials on paper, eliminating dependence on trusted hardware in credential issuance. The voter learns and can verify in the privacy booth which credential is real, but real and fake credentials thereafter appear indistinguishable to others. Only voters actually under coercion, a hopefully-rare case, need to trust the kiosk. To achieve verifiability, each paper credential encodes an interactive zero-knowledge proof, which is sound in real credentials but unsound in fake credentials. Voters observe the difference in the order of printing steps, but need not understand the technical details. Experimental results with our prototype suggest that Votegral is practical and sufficiently scalable for real-world elections. User-visible latency of credential issuance in TRIP is at most 19.7 seconds even on resource-constrained kiosk hardware, making it suitable for registration at remote locations or on battery power. A companion usability study indicates that TRIP's usability is competitive with other e-voting systems including some lacking coercion resistance, and formal proofs support TRIP's combination of coercion-resistance and verifiability.

Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
cs.CY
cs.HC
Original source
Feb 13, 2022·Sensors
16 cites
Secure Inter-Domain Routing Based on Blockchain: A Comprehensive Survey

Lukas Mastilak, Pavol Helebrandt, Marek Galinski, Ivan Kotuliak

The whole Internet consists of thousands of autonomous systems that transfer data with one another. The BGP plays a significant role in routing, but its behaviour is essentially naive, trusting neighbours without authenticating advertised IP prefixes. This is the main reason why BGP endures various path manipulation attacks. Recently, conventional methods for securing BGP have been implemented, i.e., BGPSec with RPKI. However, these approaches are centralised with a single point of failure that may be compromised, invalidating the whole security mechanism. There have been multiple decentralised projects dealing with various mechanisms, mostly built on Ethereum and blockchain networks. Some with ambition to strengthen existing centralised mechanisms, others to replace them. In this article, we present the first comprehensive survey on blockchain solutions to enforce BGP security, with complex explanations of their contributions and a comparison with different aspects. We explain how blockchain technology can provide an alternative to prevent the false origin of IP prefixes or hijacking AS paths. Moreover, we describe new blockchain-based attacks that BGP would face after the inclusion of blockchain into the inter-domain routing. Finally, we answer the defined research questions and discuss the potential open issues for further study.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Network Security and Intrusion Detection
Original source
Feb 8, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
14 cites
The role of Blockchain in DDoS attacks mitigation: techniques, open challenges and future directions

Rajasekhar Chaganti, Bharat Bhushan, Vinayakumar Ravi

With the proliferation of new technologies such as Internet of Things (IOT) and Software-Defined Networking(SDN) in the recent years, the distributed denial of service (DDoS)attack vector has broadened and opened new opportunities for more sophisticated DDoS attacks on the targeted victims. The new attack vector includes unsecured and vulnerable IoT devices connected to the internet, denial of service vulnerabilities like southbound channel saturation in the SDN architecture. Given the high-volume and pervasive nature of these attacks, it is beneficial for stakeholders to collaborate in detecting and mitigating the denial of service attacks in a timely manner. The blockchain technology is considered to improve the security aspects owing to the decentralized design, secured distributed storage and privacy. A thorough exploration and classification of blockchain techniques used for DDoS attack mitigation is not explored in the prior art. This paper reviews and categorizes the existed state-of-the-art DDoS mitigation solutions based on blockchain technology. The DDoS mitigation techniques are classified based on the solution deployment location i.e. network based, near attacker location, near victim location and hybrid solutions in the network architecture with emphasis on the IoT and SDN architectures. Additionally, based on our study, the research challenges and future directions to implement the blockchain based DDoS mitigation solutions are discussed. We believe that this paper could serve as a starting point and reference resource for future researchers working on denial of service attacks detection and mitigation using blockchain technology.

Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Network Security and Intrusion Detection
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Original source
Jan 28, 2022·Journal of Cloud Computing Advances Systems and Applications
23 cites
Security scheduling and transaction mechanism of virtual power plants based on dual blockchains

Xiaohong Zhang, Zilong Song, Ata Jahangir Moshayedi, IEEE Member

Abstract Aiming at the data authenticity and storage problems in the current coordinated scheduling of virtual power plants, as well as the opaque information and high transaction costs, a dual blockchains security mechanism is proposed to solve above problems. In the process of security scheduling, a hybrid attribute proxy re-encryption algorithm based on ciphertext strategy is designed. The algorithm is composed of an identity encryption algorithm and an attribute proxy re-encryption algorithm with ciphertext strategy. Combining blockchain, tamper-proof smart metering equipment can effectively solve data authenticity and confidentiality in the information transmission process of distributed energy. In the research process of the trading mechanism, a continuous double auction mechanism based on reputation is proposed. In order to create a favorable trading atmosphere, reputation-based market segmentation mechanisms are integrated, and participants are divided according to reputation value. Depending on the properties of the stored information, they are divided into the private blockchain (with coordination scheduling information) and the consortium blockchain (with transaction information). The system analysis shows the reliability of the dual blockchains architecture. The communication and calculation costs of the proxy re-encryption algorithm verify the practicability of the proposed scheme. The case analysis of the auction mechanism declares that the mechanism can operate effective in the electricity trading market.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Jan 27, 2022·arXiv
16 cites
On the Anonymity of Peer-To-Peer Network Anonymity Schemes Used by Cryptocurrencies

Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain, Claudia Díaz

Cryptocurrency systems can be subject to deanonimization attacks by exploiting the network-level communication on their peer-to-peer network. Adversaries who control a set of colluding node(s) within the peer-to-peer network can observe transactions being exchanged and infer the parties involved. Thus, various network anonymity schemes have been proposed to mitigate this problem, with some solutions providing theoretical anonymity guarantees. In this work, we model such peer-to-peer network anonymity solutions and evaluate their anonymity guarantees. To do so, we propose a novel framework that uses Bayesian inference to obtain the probability distributions linking transactions to their possible originators. We characterize transaction anonymity with those distributions, using entropy as metric of adversarial uncertainty on the originator's identity. In particular, we model Dandelion, Dandelion++ and Lightning Network. We study different configurations and demonstrate that none of them offers acceptable anonymity to their users. For instance, our analysis reveals that in the widely deployed Lightning Network, with 1% strategically chosen colluding nodes the adversary can uniquely determine the originator for about 50% of the total transactions in the network. In Dandelion, an adversary that controls 15% of the nodes has on average uncertainty among only 8 possible originators. Moreover, we observe that due to the way Dandelion and Dandelion++ are designed, increasing the network size does not correspond to an increase in the anonymity set of potential originators. Alarmingly, our longitudinal analysis of Lightning Network reveals rather an inverse trend -- with the growth of the network the overall anonymity decreases.

Open access
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Original source
Jan 24, 2022·International Journal of New Practices in Management and Engineering
18 cites
A Review Of E-Voting System Based on Blockchain Technology

Shivam Singh, Shriprasad Wable, Pandurang Kharose

Voting is arguably the most important as well as elementary right in democracy that has existed for the past hundreds of years; it has taken place in the context of a large- and small-scale community. The process transitioned from paper ballots to electronic voting machines (EVM) in the late 20th century, but even with all the advancement, transparency in the election process remained the same. Blockchain technology came in existence in 2008 with the introduction of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, and in the last decade we saw enormous growth in development and execution of this technology in various fields e-voting is one of them, blockchain-based e-voting system has potential to improve the election process if utilized to its potential. Blockchain can eliminate the need to print ballot paper as it is secure, immutable and convenient to voters and can make elections more transparent.

Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Blockchain Technology in Education and Learning
Original source
Jan 22, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
53 cites
On How Zero-Knowledge Proof Blockchain Mixers Improve, and Worsen User Privacy

Zhipeng Wang, Stefanos Chaliasos, Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou · 8 authors

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) mixers are one of the most widely-used blockchain privacy solutions, operating on top of smart contract-enabled blockchains. We find that ZKP mixers are tightly intertwined with the growing number of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) attacks and Blockchain Extractable Value (BEV) extractions. Through coin flow tracing, we discover that 205 blockchain attackers and 2,595 BEV extractors leverage mixers as their source of funds, while depositing a total attack revenue of 412.87M USD. Moreover, the US OFAC sanctions against the largest ZKP mixer, Tornado.Cash, have reduced the mixer's daily deposits by more than 80%. Further, ZKP mixers advertise their level of privacy through a so-called anonymity set size, which similarly to k-anonymity allows a user to hide among a set of k other users. Through empirical measurements, we, however, find that these anonymity set claims are mostly inaccurate. For the most popular mixers on Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC), we show how to reduce the anonymity set size on average by 27.34% and 46.02% respectively. Our empirical evidence is also the first to suggest a differing privacy-predilection of users on ETH and BSC. State-of-the-art ZKP mixers are moreover interwoven with the DeFi ecosystem by offering anonymity mining (AM) incentives, i.e., users receive monetary rewards for mixing coins. However, contrary to the claims of related work, we find that AM does not necessarily improve the quality of a mixer's anonymity set. Our findings indicate that AM attracts privacy-ignorant users, who then do not contribute to improving the privacy of other mixer users.

Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Original source
Jan 20, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
6 cites
Babylon: Reusing Bitcoin Mining to Enhance Proof-of-Stake Security

Ertem Nusret Tas, David Tse, Fisher Yu, Sreeram Kannan

Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners, but consumes huge amount of energy. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality and accountability, but face several fundamental security issues: susceptibility to non-slashable long-range safety attacks, non-slashable transaction censorship and stalling attacks and difficulty to bootstrap new PoS chains from low token valuation. We propose Babylon, a blockchain platform which combines the best of both worlds by reusing the immense Bitcoin hash power to enhance the security of PoS chains. Babylon provides a data-available timestamping service, securing PoS chains by allowing them to timestamp data-available block checkpoints, fraud proofs and censored transactions on Babylon. Babylon miners merge mine with Bitcoin and thus the platform has zero additional energy cost. The security of a Babylon-enhanced PoS protocol is formalized by a cryptoeconomic security theorem which shows slashable safety and liveness guarantees.

Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Jan 19, 2022
1 cites
ADEVA: A Decentralized Electronic Voting Application Using Blockchain Technology

Jacob Abegunde

<div>Abstract—Despite the various advantages inherent in the use of blockchain technology, blockchain application platforms are characterized by bottlenecks, latency, energy inefficiency, time inefficiency, low transaction throughput, vulnerability to 51% attacks, and a lack of fairness in the sharing of mining proceeds. These challenges are currently affecting the performance of this technology, hindering its rapid development and adoption for real-time applications such as Electronic Voting Applications (EVAs). It is well known that the consensus mechanism responsible for the security and consistency features of a blockchain, is also responsible for most of the above challenges.</div><div>In this paper, a new consensus mechanism, Proof of Vote (PoV) is proposed, a lightweight consensus mechanism specifically adapted for EVA, as a replacement for the heavyweight Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. We use the Ethereum blockchain as a decentralized application platform, in which we develop a decentralized electronic voting application (ADEVA), replacing the Ethereum PoW consensus algorithm with the proposed PoV consensus algorithm. Thus we implemented ADEVA with PoV and compared it to the two major consensus mechanisms: Proof of work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). We found that PoV enhanced the performance of ADEVA over and above that achieved using PoW and PoS. The low resource utilization and high transaction throughput of ADEVA with PoV makes it a scalable solution for real-world EVAs.</div>

Open access
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
Original source
Jan 18, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
48 cites
SoK: Blockchain Governance

Aggelos Kiayias, Philip Lazos

Blockchain systems come with a promise of decentralization that often stumbles on a roadblock when key decisions about modifying the software codebase need to be made. This is attested by the fact that both of the two major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have undergone hard forks that resulted in the creation of alternative systems, creating confusion and opportunities for fraudulent activities. These events, and numerous others, underscore the importance of Blockchain governance, namely the set of processes that blockchain platforms utilize in order to perform decision-making and converge to a widely accepted direction for the system to evolve. While a rich topic of study in other areas, governance of blockchain platforms is lacking a well established set of methods and practices that are adopted industry wide. This makes the topic of blockchain governance a fertile domain for a thorough systematization that we undertake in this work. We start by distilling a comprehensive array of properties for sound governance systems drawn from academic sources as well as grey literature of election systems and blockchain white papers. These are divided into seven categories, confidentiality, verifiability, accountability, sustainability, Pareto efficiency, suffrage and liveness that capture the whole spectrum of desiderata of governance systems. We proceed to classify ten well-documented blockchain systems. While all properties are satisfied, even partially, by at least one system, no system that satisfies most of them. Our work lays out a foundation for assessing blockchain governance processes. While it highlights shortcomings and deficiencies in currently deployed systems, it can also be a catalyst for improving these processes to the highest possible standard with appropriate trade-offs, something direly needed for blockchain platforms to operate effectively in the long term.

Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Original source
Jan 18, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
15 cites
Tutela: An Open-Source Tool for Assessing User-Privacy on Ethereum and Tornado Cash

Mike Wu, Will McTighe, Kaili Wang, István András Seres · 12 authors

A common misconception among blockchain users is that pseudonymity guarantees privacy. The reality is almost the opposite. Every transaction one makes is recorded on a public ledger and reveals information about one's identity. Mixers, such as Tornado Cash, were developed to preserve privacy through "mixing" transactions with those of others in an anonymity pool, making it harder to link deposits and withdrawals from the pool. Unfortunately, it is still possible to reveal information about those in the anonymity pool if users are not careful. We introduce Tutela, an application built on expert heuristics to report the true anonymity of an Ethereum address. In particular, Tutela has three functionalities: first, it clusters together Ethereum addresses based on interaction history such that for an Ethereum address, we can identify other addresses likely owned by the same entity; second, it shows Ethereum users their potentially compromised transactions; third, Tutela computes the true size of the anonymity pool of each Tornado Cash mixer by excluding potentially compromised transactions. A public implementation of Tutela can be found at https://github.com/TutelaLabs/tutela-app. To use Tutela, visit https://www.tutela.xyz.

Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Jan 17, 2022·Sensors
23 cites
Dynamic Asynchronous Anti Poisoning Federated Deep Learning with Blockchain-Based Reputation-Aware Solutions

Zunming Chen, Hongyan Cui, Ensen Wu, Xi Yu

As promising privacy-preserving machine learning technology, federated learning enables multiple clients to train the joint global model via sharing model parameters. However, inefficiency and vulnerability to poisoning attacks significantly reduce federated learning performance. To solve the aforementioned issues, we propose a dynamic asynchronous anti poisoning federated deep learning framework to pursue both efficiency and security. This paper proposes a lightweight dynamic asynchronous algorithm considering the averaging frequency control and parameter selection for federated learning to speed up model averaging and improve efficiency, which enables federated learning to adaptively remove the stragglers with low computing power, bad channel conditions, or anomalous parameters. In addition, a novel local reliability mutual evaluation mechanism is presented to enhance the security of poisoning attacks, which enables federated learning to detect the anomalous parameter of poisoning attacks and adjust the weight proportion of in model aggregation based on evaluation score. The experiment results on three datasets illustrate that our design can reduce the training time by 30% and is robust to the representative poisoning attacks significantly, confirming the applicability of our scheme.

Open access
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Cryptography and Data Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Jan 17, 2022·arXiv (Cornell University)
6 cites
Understanding the Decentralization of DPoS: Perspectives From Data-Driven Analysis on EOSIO

Jieli Liu, Weilin Zheng, Dingyuan Lu, Jiajing Wu · 5 authors

Recently, many Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS)-based blockchains have been widely used in decentralized applications, such as EOSIO, Tron, and Binance Smart Chain. Compared with traditional PoW-based blockchain systems, these systems achieve a higher transaction throughput and are well adapted to large-scale scenes in daily applications. Decentralization is a key element in blockchain networks. However, little is known about the evolution of decentralization in DPoS-based blockchain networks. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis on the decentralization of DPoS with data from up to 135,000,000 blocks in EOSIO, the first successful DPoS-based blockchain system. We characterize the decentralization evolution of the two phases in DPoS, namely block producer election and block production. Moreover, we study the voters with similar voting behaviors and propose methods to discover abnormal mutual voting behaviors in EOSIO. The analytical results show that our methods can effectively capture the decentralization evolution and abnormal voting phenomena in the system, which also have reference significance for other DPoS-based blockchains.

Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Auction Theory and Applications
Original source
Jan 13, 2022·Scientific Programming
32 cites
A Liquid Democracy Enabled Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting System

Ch Anwar Ul Hassan, Muhammad Hammad, Jawaid Iqbal, Saddam Hussain · 8 authors

Developing an electronic voting system that meets the practical needs of administrators has been a difficult task for a long time. Now, blockchain technologies solve this problem by providing a distributed ledger with immutable, encrypted, and secure transactions. Distributed ledger technologies are an interesting technological leap in the field of data innovation, transparency, and trustability. In public blockchain, distributed ledger technology is widely used. The blockchain technology can be used in an almost infinite number of ways to benefit from sharing economies. The purpose of this study is to assess how blockchain may be utilized to build electronic voting systems that can be used as a service. The purpose of electronic voting systems is explained in this article, as are the technological and legal limitations of employing blockchain as a service. Then, using blockchain as a foundation, we propose a new electronic voting system that fixes the flaws we observed. In general, this paper evaluates the capabilities of distributed ledger technologies by depicting a contextual investigation in order to fine-tune the process of political election decisions and employing a blockchain-based application that improves security and lowers the cost of conducting nationwide elections.

Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Jan 11, 2022·Security and Communication Networks
11 cites
BlockREV: Blockchain-Enabled Multi-Controller Rule Enforcement Verification in SDN

Ping Li, Songtao Guo, Jiahui Wu, Quanjun Zhao

Compared with the classical structure with only one controller in software-defined networking (SDN), multi-controller topology structure in SDN provides a new type of cross-domain forwarding network architecture with multiple centralized controllers and distributed forwarding devices. However, when the network includes multiple domains, lack of trust among the controllers remains a challenge how to verify the correctness of cross-domain forwarding behaviors in different domains. In this paper, we propose a novel secure multi-controller rule enforcement verification (BlockREV) mechanism in SDN to guarantee the correctness of cross-domain forwarding. We first adopt blockchain technology to provide the immutability and privacy protection for forwarding behaviors. Furthermore, we present an address-based aggregate signature scheme with appropriate cryptographic primitives, which is provably secure in the random oracle model. Moreover, we design a verification algorithm based on hash values of forwarding paths to check the consistency of forwarding order. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BlockREV mechanism is effective and suitable for multi-controller scenarios in SDN.

Open access
Software-Defined Networks and 5G
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Original source
Jan 6, 2022·Applied Sciences
67 cites
Electronic Voting System Using an Enterprise Blockchain

Camilo Denis González, Daniel Frias Mena, Alexi Massó Muñoz, Omar Rojas · 5 authors

Conventional electronic voting systems use a centralized scheme. A central administration of these systems manages the entire voting process and has partial or total control over the database and the system itself. This creates some problems, accidental or intentional, such as possible manipulation of the database and double voting. Many of these problems have been solved thanks to permissionless blockchain technologies in new voting systems; however, the classic consensus method of such blockchains requires specific computing power during each voting operation. This has a significant impact on power consumption, compromises the efficiency and increases the system latency. However, using a permissioned blockchain improves efficiency and reduces system energy consumption, mainly due to the elimination of the typical consensus protocols used by public blockchains. The use of smart contracts provides a secure mechanism to guarantee the accuracy of the voting result and make the counting procedure public and protected against fraudulent actions, and contributes to preserving the anonymity of the votes. Its adoption in electronic voting systems can help mitigate part of these problems. Therefore, this paper proposes a system that ensures high reliability by applying enterprise blockchain technology to electronic voting, securing the secret ballot. In addition, a flexible network configuration is presented, discussing how the solution addresses some of the security and reliability issues commonly faced by electronic voting system solutions.

Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Original source
Jan 1, 2022·Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
8 cites
The Applications of Blockchain in the Covert Communication

Bangyao Du, Debiao He, Min Luo, Cong Peng · 5 authors

Covert communication is designed for hiding the subliminal communication which takes place between both of the speakers and their relationship. The traditional covert communication utilizes the centralized channel and the third‐party central node or authority to distribute messages which leads to a lack of undetectability, antitraceability, and robustness. In recent years, there have been attempts to apply the blockchain to covert communication solutions, for the characteristics of blockchain such as decentralization, openness, and trustworthiness. In this paper, based on the analysis of the literature and the classification according to the hiding position, we identify four kinds of covert communication: Address Channel, Value Channel, DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm) Channel, and Script Channel, which will help inform future research agenda.

Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
User Authentication and Security Systems
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