In this article, we propose the first self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol for a ranked-choice voting system based on Borda count. Our protocol does not need any trusted setup or tallying authority to compute the tally. The voters interact through a publicly accessible bulletin board for executing the protocol in a way that is publicly verifiable. Our main protocol consists of two rounds. In the first round, the voters publish their public keys, and in the second round they publish their randomized ballots. All voters provide Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) proofs to show that they have been following the protocol specification honestly without revealing their secret votes. At the end of the election, anyone including a third-party observer will be able to compute the tally without needing any tallying authority. We provide security proofs to show that our protocol guarantees the maximum privacy for each voter. We have implemented our protocol using Ethereum's blockchain as a public bulletin board to record voting operations as publicly verifiable transactions. The experimental data obtained from our tests show the protocol's potential for the real-world deployment.
The paper deals with the concept of homomorphic encryption and the possibility of its use in the mechanism of electronic voting. One of the problematic requirements for electronic voting systems is voter anonymity. On the one hand, each voter must be identified, and on the other, the content of his or her vote must be unknown. Currently, the methods and mechanisms used in real voting systems do not provide real anonymity. Therefore, both theoretical and practical content is an urgent and necessary problem of developing mechanisms for anonymous counting of votes with the protection of their distortion. The paper also provides a general analysis of the security level of prospective homomorphic encryption schemes. The essence of homomorphic encryption is that there is some set of operations whose result of executing over ciphertexts (with subsequent decryption) coincides with similar actions over plaintexts. Homomorphic encryption allows you to perform some calculations on information without having access to the information itself. However, there are a number of problems when trying to apply such calculations. The main ones are the choice of the method of asymmetric encryption, which provides the necessary cryptographic stability from both classical and quantum attacks, the identification of possible candidates for asymmetric cryptotransformations in homomorphic encryption, their evaluation of comparison with each other, and, of course, the choice of the most rational for a given multiple restrictions. The asymmetric schemes of homomorphic encryption are compared using the hierarchy analysis process. The method of asymmetric encryption with zero knowledge is substantiated. The objective of this article is to substantiate the possibilities, conditions, and constraints on the use of standardized asymmetric cryptotransformations in the creation of modern homomorphic encryption-type transformations, when anonymity of electronic voting and practical implementation of anonymous voting based on proof of zero knowledge must be guaranteed.
Bitcoin paper gave birth to a new era; cryptocurrencies aiming distributed trust model. Almost all the cryptocurrencies require their users individually manage their own cryptographic keys, provide or recommend use of cryptocurrency wallets. A wallet, which at least stores public-private keys and addresses, is one of the key points for end-users' security. Since the authentication of a transaction strictly depends on private keys, any adversary who gains access to a wallet may seize all the coins within. Hence, cryptocurrency wallet solutions should be carefully analyzed and better to be certified if possible. In this study, we aim to define the security problems and objectives necessary for the development of a certified product that can stand against the known attacks within the Framework of Common Criteria (CC). We believe this would be a brief source for cryptocurrency wallet Protection Profile (PP) and Security Target (ST) documents.
Ralph Holz, Diego Perino, Matteo Varvello, Johanna Amann · 9 authors
In late 2017, a sudden proliferation of malicious JavaScript was reported on the Web: browser-based mining exploited the CPU time of website visitors to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. Several studies measured the deployment of such code and developed defenses. However, previous work did not establish how many users were really exposed to the identified mining sites and whether there was a real risk given common user browsing behavior. In this paper, we present a retroactive analysis to close this research gap. We pool large-scale, longitudinal data from several vantage points, gathered during the prime time of illicit cryptomining, to measure the impact on web users. We leverage data from passive traffic monitoring of university networks and a large European ISP, with suspected mining sites identified in previous active scans. We corroborate our results with data from a browser extension with a large user base that tracks site visits. We also monitor open HTTP proxies and the Tor network for malicious injection of code. We find that the risk for most Web users was always very low, much lower than what deployment scans suggested. Any exposure period was also very brief. However, we also identify a previously unknown and exploited attack vector on mobile devices.
Recent development of electronic voting (e-voting) systems has been focusing on blockchain-based design [4]. Despite blockchain’s advantages in public verifiability, existing blockchain-based voting systems are impractical due to the high block time and transaction costs of the underlying blockchain. To achieve verifiability and efficiency simultaneously, we propose Hybrid-Voting, a hybrid structured e-voting system that combines an untrusted centralized server with smart contracts on Ethereum blockchain. In addition, voter anonymity and privacy are guaranteed by using short linkable ring signature and ElGamal encryption. Our evaluation shows that Hybrid-Voting can support 10k voters by using one commodity computer, and the cost per voter is less than one US dollar, much lower than the cost per voter in today’s elections [1].
Monero provides a high level of anonymity for both users and their transactions. However, many criminal activities might be committed with the protection of anonymity in cryptocurrency transactions. Thus, user accountability (or traceability) is also important in Monero transactions, which is unfortunately lacking in the current literature. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing a new cryptocurrency named Traceable Monero to balance the user anonymity and accountability. Our framework relies on a tracing authority, but is optimistic, in that it is only involved when investigations in certain transactions are required. We formalize the system model and security model of Traceable Monero. We present a detailed construction of Traceable Monero by overlaying Monero with two types of tracing mechanisms, tracing the one-time addresses with money flows and tracing the long-term addresses. We prove the security of Traceable Monero and implement a prototype of the system, which demonstrates that Traceable Monero incurs merely a very small overhead in generating and verifying a transaction compared to Monero transactions.
Xun Yi, Russell Paulet, Elisa Bertino, Fang-Yu Rao
In this paper we consider the problem where a client wishes to subscribe to some product or service provided by a server, but maintain their anonymity. At the same time, the server must be able to authenticate the client as a genuine user and be able to discontinue (or revoke) the client's access if the subscription fees are not paid. Current solutions for this problem are typically constructed using some combination of blind signature or zero-knowledge proof techniques, which do not directly support client revocation (that is, revoking a user before expiry of their secret value). In this paper, we present a solution for this problem on the basis of the broadcast encryption scheme, suggested by Boneh et al., by which the server can broadcast a secret to a group of legitimate clients. Our solution allows the registered client to log into the server anonymously and also supports client revocation by the server. Our solution can be used in many applications, such as location-based queries. We formally define a model for our anonymous subscription protocol and prove the security of our solution under this model. In addition, we present experimental results from an implementation of our protocol. These experimental results demonstrate that our protocol is practical.
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and its public-key infrastructure (PKI) are widely used in the Internet to achieve secure communication. Validating domain ownership by trusted certification authorities (CAs) is a critical step in issuing digital certificates, but unfortunately, this process provides a poor security level. In this work, we present SmartCert, a novel approach based on smart contracts to improve digital certificates. A certificate in SmartCert conveys detailed information about its validation state which is constantly changing but only with respect to the specified smart contract code and individual domain policies. CAs issuing and updating certificates are kept accountable and their actions are transparent and monitored by the code. We present the implementation and evaluation of SmartCert, and discuss its deployability.
Pemilihan Suara Secara Elektronis Menggunakan Sistem Terdesentralisasi Berbasis Blockchain Ethereum merupakan suatu sistem yang dibuat dalam bentuk aplikasi yang dapat digunakan dalam pemilihan umum. Hal ini dilakukan untuk menyelesaikan masalah yang dimiliki oleh sistem pemilihan suara secara elektronis yang konvensional dimana integritas data belum terjamin dan data hasil suara kemungkinan dapat dirubah oleh pihak tertentu. Masalah ini dapat diselesaikan dengan membuat sistem pemilihan suara secara elektronik yang menyimpan data hasil suara pada blockchain agar integritas data dapat terjamin. Pembuatan sistem ini dilakukan menggunakan bahasa Solidity, bahasa pemrograman yang sudah Turing Complete pada Ethereum. Source code yang dijalankan akan di kompilasi menjadi Bytecode yang kemudian dijalankan pada Ethereum Virtual Machine. Program yang dibuat tersebut kemudian akan di desentralisasi kan menggunakan Blockchain. Hasil nya adalah sistem Electronic Voting yang terdesentralisasi. Sistem ini dapat diakses melalui website https://pemilurt.herokuapp.com/. Abstract Electronic Voting Using Decentralised System Based On Ethereum’s Blockchain is a system made in the form of application used for Electronic Voting. This is done to solve the current problem on conventional electronic voting system where the integrity of the data can’t be ascertain and the result of the vote can be tampered malicious actors. To solve this problem, an electronic voting system will be built that store the data of election results on blockchain to ensure the integrity of the data. The creation of the system involves using the Solidity language, a Turing Complete programming language used on Ethereum. Source code that will be run will first need to be compiled into Bytecode, which will then in turn run on Ethereum Virtual Machine. The finished program will then be decentralised using Blockchain. The result will be a decentralised Electronic Voting system that can be accessed from the website https://pemilurt.herokuapp.com/.
Christian Killer, Bruno Rodrigues, Raphael Matile, Eder J. Scheid · 5 authors
Digitization of electoral processes depends on confident systems that produce verifiable evidence. The design and implementation of voting systems has been widely studied in prior research, bringing together expertise in many fields. Switzerland is organized in a federal, decentralized structure of independent governmental entities. Thus, its decentralized structure is a real-world example for implementing an electronic voting system, where trust is distributed among multiple authorities.
Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the scalability, availability, and crypto-economics of the Lightning Network, but relatively little attention has been paid to exploring the level of privacy it achieves in practice. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the privacy offered by the Lightning Network, by presenting several attacks that exploit publicly available information about the network in order to learn information that is designed to be kept secret, such as how many coins a node has available or who the sender and recipient are in a payment routed through the network.
With the rise of cloud computing, data centers, and big data, the current rigid network architecture has been found to be inadequate. The modern technological demands require a flexible and easily reconfigurable network architecture. Software Defined Networking is a revolutionary concept that separates the control plane of network devices from their data plane and centralizes the control plane of all devices, facilitating the controlling of the entire network through a single portal. This helps us create flexible network architectures that can be reconfigured quickly to fit different needs. However, centralizing control leads to a Single Point of Failure and makes the network vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks, which is one of the major reasons why industries are reluctant to adopt this technology. Blockchain provides us a with a distributed ledger and a decentralized state, allowing us to create decentralized applications that run over multiple computers. This research aims to distribute the control plane of Software Defined Networks across multiple devices using blockchain. This addresses the existing security vulnerabilities of the Software Defined Network architecture such as Single Point of Failure while continuing to keep the control plane logically centralized, thereby allowing the network to be configured through a single portal. The resulting architecture has a physically distributed control plane whose logic is centralized.
The security and accountability issues are a challenge to the traditional structure from still widespread elections. General e-voting system use a centralized system, where one organization manages overall system. These organisations have full control over the database and system, allowing manipulation of the database. There should be no e-voting system to secure data and potential attacks should be able to withstand. Blockchain technology should solve certain voting problems. In this paper we are implementing an ethereum blockchain based electronic voting system. Ethereum blockchain networks are used to transfer money and store data. Networks are organized by one or more machines. Every node is a machine that running an ethereum client. The eligible one can run the node. By adopting blockchain in e-voting system database distribution, one of the cheating sources of database manipulation and data loss can be reduced. This can be a better solution for the currently existing issues over rigging the electronic voting machines to win elections by the political parties in our government.
Advanced smart grid technologies enable energy prosumers to trade surplus energy from their distributed renewable energy sources with other peer prosumers through peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. In many previous works, P2P energy trading was facilitated by blockchain technology through blockchain’s distributive nature and capacity to run smart contracts. However, the feature that all the data and transactions on a blockchain are visible to all blockchain nodes may significantly threaten the privacy of the parties participating in P2P energy trading. There are many previous works that have attempted to mitigate this problem. However, all these works focused on the anonymity of participants but did not protect the data and transactions. To address this issue, we propose a P2P energy trading system on a blockchain where all bids are encrypted and peer matching is performed on the encrypted bids by a functional encryption-based smart contract. The system guarantees that the information encoded in the encrypted bids is protected, but the peer matching transactions are performed by the nodes in a publicly verifiable manner through smart contracts. We verify the feasibility of the proposed system by implementing a prototype composed of smart meters, a distribution system operator (DSO) server, and private Ethereum blockchain.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing explosive growth and has gained extensive attention from academia and industry in recent years. However, most of the existing IoT infrastructures are centralized, which may cause the issues of unscalability and single-point-of-failure. Consequently, decentralized IoT has been proposed by taking advantage of the emerging technology called blockchain. Voting systems are widely adopted in IoT, for example a leader election in wireless sensor networks. Self-tallying voting systems are alternatives to unsuitable, traditional centralized voting systems in decentralized IoT. Unfortunately, self-tallying voting systems inherently suffer from fairness issues, such as adaptive and abortive issues caused by malicious voters. To address these issues, in this article, we introduce a framework of the self-tallying voting system in decentralized IoT based on blockchain. We propose a concrete construction and prove that the proposed system satisfies all the security requirements, including fairness, dispute-freeness, and maximal ballot secrecy. We simulate the algorithms on a laptop, an Android phone, and a Raspberry Pi to test the time consumption and evaluate the gas cost of each algorithm in a private blockchain as well. The implementation results demonstrate the practicability of our system.
Abstract The electoral process has suffered from deep political instability following the post-colonial independence of most African nations. Moreover, the electoral process in many countries is characterized by massive rigging, high cost of electoral materials, and declaration of false results. In this paper, we will present a review of the blockchain Technology and some of the potential roles to play in conducting a transparent election. This paper opines that with the emergence of the blockchain technology, African Nations should tap from it and build a reliable, secure, and convenient electoral voting system. It further suggests that a blockchain electoral voting system will eliminate most of the challenges faced by African nations in conducting a free, fair and transparent election with low cost and total security. The issue of election rigging is almost completely eradicated with this technology (if properly installed). An attempt to alter/manipulate records (votes) in the system’s database can be spotted easily, because of its rigorous consensus rules, such an attempt is considered void and denied permission to access, alter, or destroy any of the previously saved votes. However, the paper argues that there are institutional challenges to implementing this technology within the continent. Specifically, there is a need to educate the masses as well as create robust policies that can accommodate this technology within the continent. Failure to acknowledge these challenges may well prevent the application of blockchain technology in African electoral process in the foreseeable future.
Utz Nisslmueller, Klaus-Tycho Foerster, Stefan Schmid, Christian Decker
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden\n(e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain\ntransactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their\ntransactions, these networks need to provide gossip and probing mechanisms.\nThis paper explores whether these mechanisms may be exploited to infer\nsensitive information about the flow of transactions, and eventually harm\nprivacy. In particular, we identify two threats, related to an active and a\npassive adversary. The first is a probing attack: here the adversary aims to\ndetect the maximum amount which is transferable in a given direction over a\ntarget channel by actively probing it and differentiating the response messages\nit receives. The second is a timing attack: the adversary discovers how close\nthe destination of a routed payment actually is, by acting as a passive\nman-in-the middle and analyzing the time deltas between sent messages and their\ncorresponding responses. We then analyze the limitations of these attacks and\npropose remediations for scenarios in which they are able to produce accurate\nresults.\n
National elections are a big deal which has a major role in the development and progress of a country. The security of an election is in fact the matter of national security. Current voting systems in the context of Nepal and other parts of the world are still traditional and insecure. From the dawn of democracy, elections are still based on pen and papers. While there are new electronic voting machines, these systems have a high risk of rigging and are prone to failure, crashes, and attacks from intruders. The stated problems can be addressed through the implementation of new technology namely Blockchain for a transparent and reliable voting process. A blockchain based voting platform has been built to make the voting process digital, secure, reliable and intuitive. The votes casted by voters are stored in the blockchain, thus making it immutable and secure. The system can be scaled based on the requirements of an election. Voters can login to the system with the help of encrypted identification. This encrypted identification will lead to secure voting process. A separate portal for both voters and the election commission reduces the election hassle and time. So, in this system, it is demonstrated how the use of blockchain platform could contribute to modern elections using Ethereum, smart contracts and distributed systems to provide voters with secure, transparent and reliable voting platform.
The Rapid growth of agile gadgets has led to tremendous increase in digital media utilization, mostly for mobile video in ease of marketing. As encryption provides better user confidentiality and perseveration, greater number of online movement is associated with end-to-end encryption form. Irrevlant content such as unreal, violent and unconstitutional videos are being circulated online without being identified its truthfulness creating a platform for intruders and attackers. It is necessary for users to identify and report the contents of the video. Sometimes these videos act as evidence in courts to prove the guilty and the proper state and contents recorded in it .We aim a system to detect and classify the video's truthfulness to solve these problems. A detailed collection of studies has been toted to demonstrate the efficacy of new program over current literature.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ethereum Smart contracts use blockchain to transfer values among peers on networks without central agency. These programs are deployed on decentralized applications running on top of the blockchain consensus protocol to enable people to make agreements in a transparent and conflict-free environment. The security vulnerabilities within those smart contracts are a potential threat to the applications and have caused huge financial losses to their users. In this paper, we present a framework that combines static and dynamic analysis to detect Reentrancy vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts. This framework generates an attacker contract based on the ABI specifications of smart contracts under test and analyzes the contract interaction to precisely report Reentrancy vulnerability. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of our proposed framework on 5 modified smart contracts from Etherscan and our framework was able to detect the Reentrancy vulnerability in all our modified contracts. Our framework analyzes smart contracts statically to identify potentially vulnerable functions and then uses dynamic analysis to precisely confirm Reentrancy vulnerability, thus achieving increased performance and reduced false positives.
Shakkeera L, Hem Pransanth K C, Sabareesh, Sumaiya Begum · 5 authors
In today’s era, the cloud database security is one of the main concerns for any of the real time data accessing web/mobile applications. The cloud database protection involves accessibility and vulnerability of data, data protection, storage space, integrity and confidentiality on sensitive data. Building an electronic voting system that tries to completely fulfill the needs of the people has always been a challenge to achieve. The existing E-Voting System (E-VS) is not that much compatible with that of the current trends and does not assure to provide more security A lot of distributed ledger technologies which has been an exciting approach during existing election voting process. If we take a look on the ways of implying E-VS in a distribute ledger then Blockchain would be the right choice. As we all know that nowadays, Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies in the field of Information Technology. It normally stores information in batches called blocks which are linked together in a chronological way or method to form chain of blocks using cryptography techniques. During online voting process, many fraudulent activities happens which corrupt the entire election process. One of the major problems faced are fake voting which is obviously done by unauthorized people, inconvenient to reach to the respective places, average security level which may lead to the chances of an electoral fraud or any other malpractices.. Our proposed E-Voting System is mainly to protect the cloud database for real time data and to reduce the time consumption in voting and vote counting processes. Instead of standing in the queue for casting the vote, people can cast their votes from anywhere they want through online. The E-VS gives complete privacy and security for the online voting and makes it an ease for every individual to access it and cast their votes from anywhere possible with full pronounced security. In our proposed E-VS, Blockchain security concept called Consensus algorithm is implemented which makes it impossible for any unwanted activities to occur during election process. The E-VS system also achieves a higher level of security. Hence, the proposed system achieves data integrity, data confidentiality, eliminates storage overhead, and reduces time consumption for overall electronic voting system.
Sri Aravinda Krishnan Thyagarajan, Adithya Bhat, Bernardo Magri, Daniel Tschudi · 5 authors
Although blockchains aim for immutability as their core feature, several instances have exposed the harms with perfect immutability. The permanence of illicit content inserted in Bitcoin poses a challenge to law enforcement agencies like Interpol, and millions of dollars are lost in buggy smart contracts in Ethereum. A line of research then spawned on Redactable blockchains with the aim of solving the problem of redacting illicit contents from both permissioned and permissionless blockchains. However, all the existing proposals follow the build-new-chain approach for redactions, and cannot be integrated with existing systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. We present Reparo, a generic protocol that acts as a publicly verifiable layer on top of any blockchain to perform repairs, ranging from fixing buggy contracts to removing illicit contents from the chain. Reparo facilitates additional functionalities for blockchains while maintaining the same provable security guarantee; thus, Reparo can be integrated with existing blockchains and start performing repairs on the pre-existent data. Any system user may propose a repair and a deliberation process ensues resulting in a decision that complies with the repair policy of the chain and is publicly verifiable. Our Reparo layer can be easily tailored to different consensus requirements, does not require heavy cryptographic machinery and can, therefore, be efficiently instantiated in any permission-ed or -less setting. We demonstrate it by giving efficient instantiations of Reparo on top of Ethereum (with PoS and PoW), Bitcoin, and Cardano. Moreover, we evaluate Reparo with Ethereum mainnet and show that the cost of fixing several prominent smart contract bugs is almost negligible. For instance, the cost of repairing the prominent Parity Multisig wallet bug with Reparo is as low as 0.000000018% of the Ethers that can be retrieved after the fix.
In this paper, the prototype of Thai voting sys-tem using blockchain technology (B-VoT) has been successfully designed and developed. Hyperledger Fabric was chosen to be a major blockchain infrastructure. The web-application was developed to allow voters to vote. In addition, real-time voting results will be shown on the same website after election period has passed. We connected the web-application and blockchain database together in order to store the votes as a blockchain transaction. With our Blockchain Internet Election, the voters can easily elect on the website and their votes is automatically stored in the blockchain database as a single blockchain transaction. This voting prototype can assure the data integrity because no one can modify any information or voting results. Therefore, our system could have a huge impact on the voting reliability as well as rebuild public trustworthiness in Thailand election.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques