Blockchain Papers

Alessandro Coglio, Eric McCarthy, Eric W. Smith

Zero-knowledge circuits are sets of equality constraints over arithmetic expressions interpreted in a prime field; they are used to encode computations in cryptographic zero-knowledge proofs. We make the following contributions to the problem of ensuring that a circuit correctly encodes a computation: a formal framework for circuit correctness; an ACL2 library for prime fields; an ACL2 model of the existing R1CS (Rank-1 Constraint Systems) formalism to represent circuits, along with ACL2 and Axe tools to verify circuits of this form; a novel PFCS (Prime Field Constraint Systems) formalism to represent hierarchically structured circuits, along with an ACL2 model of it and ACL2 tools to verify circuits of this form in a compositional and scalable way; verification of circuits, ranging from simple to complex; and discovery of bugs and optimizations in existing zero-knowledge systems.

Zhangyue Shi, Boris Oskolkov, Wenmeng Tian, Kan Chen · 5 authors

Abstract The advancement of sensing technology enables efficient data collection from manufacturing systems for monitoring and control. Furthermore, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and information technologies, more and more manufacturing systems become cyber-enabled, facilitating real-time data sharing and information exchange, which significantly improves the flexibility and efficiency of manufacturing systems. However, the cyber-enabled environment may pose the collected sensor data with high risks of cyber-physical attacks during the data and information sharing. Specifically, cyber-physical attacks could target the manufacturing process and/or the data transmission process to maliciously tamper the sensor data, resulting in false alarms or failures in anomaly detection in monitoring. In addition, cyber-physical attacks may also enable illegal data access without authorization and cause the leakage of key product/process information. Therefore, it becomes critical to develop an effective approach to protect data from these attacks so that the cyber-physical security of the manufacturing systems can be assured in the cyber-enabled environment. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes an integrative blockchain-enabled data protection method by leveraging camouflaged asymmetry encryption. A real-world case study that protects the cyber-physical security of collected sensor data in additive manufacturing is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that malicious tampering could be detected in a relatively short time (less than 0.05 ms), and the risk of unauthorized data access is significantly reduced as well.

Qin Wang, Guangsheng Yu, Shiping Chen

In this paper, we design, implement, and (partially-) evaluate a lightweight bridge (as a type of middleware) to connect the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks that were heterogeneously uncontactable before. Inspired by the recently introduced Bitcoin Request Comment (BRC-20) standard, we leverage the flexibility of Bitcoin inscriptions by embedding editable operations within each satoshi and mapping them to programmable Ethereum smart contracts. A user can initialize his/her requests from the Bitcoin network, subsequently triggering corresponding actions on the Ethereum network. We validate the lightweight nature of our solution and its ability to facilitate secure and seamless interactions between two heterogeneous ecosystems.

Kasthuri, Ashok, Pahuja, Aseem, Guo, Zhiling, Jiang, Lingxiao · 5 authors

NFT marketplaces have witnessed exponential growth. The unique attributes of NFTs, encapsulated by the acronym CRAVED (concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable, disposable), make them susceptible to multifaceted thefts. In response, we introduce "SafeNFT Mart," an NFT marketplace architecture devised to thwart counterfeiting and uphold both asset and ownership integrity. We leverage Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) for ownership verification and integrate a stringent punishment protocol to deter illicit activities. Our design draws from the design science research (DSR) approach. Expert interviews were conducted to fortify our findings, focusing on relevance, adaptability, and technological viability in tandem with real-world and strategic implications. An initial analytical model is provided to gauge the efficacy of our punitive mechanism. This research culminates with future work, outlining the further development and refinement of the proposed marketplace solution.

Ruta Jawale, Dakshita Khurana

A non-interactive ZK (NIZK) proof enables verification of NP statements without revealing secrets about them. However, an adversary that obtains a NIZK proof may be able to clone this proof and distribute arbitrarily many copies of it to various entities: this is inevitable for any proof that takes the form of a classical string. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to rely on quantum information in order to build NIZK proof systems that are impossible to clone. We define and construct unclonable non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (of knowledge) for NP, addressing a question first posed by Aaronson (CCC 2009). Besides satisfying the zero-knowledge and argument of knowledge properties, these proofs additionally satisfy unclonability. Very roughly, this ensures that no adversary can split an honestly generated proof of membership of an instance $x$ in an NP language $\mathcal{L}$ and distribute copies to multiple entities that all obtain accepting proofs of membership of $x$ in $\mathcal{L}$. Our result has applications to unclonable signatures of knowledge, which we define and construct in this work; these non-interactively prevent replay attacks.

Norbert Oláh, B. Molnár, Andrea Huszti

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly popular in recent years and are applied in various fields, from commercial and scientific to military and humanitarian operations. However, their usage presents many challenges, including limited resources, scalability issues, insecure communication, and inefficient solutions. We developed a secure and scalable registration protocol to address these issues using LoRa technology. Our solution involves the usage of the physical unclonable function (PUF) and blockchain technology for key exchange. PUF also ensures security against physical tampering, and blockchain is applied to share the symmetric key among the base stations. After the registration, the later communication messages are encrypted with AES-GCM to provide authentication and confidentiality between the parties. We conducted a security analysis of the registration protocol using the ProVerif tool, and our solution meets the security requirements, including the mutual authentication of entities, key freshness, key secrecy and also key confirmation properties. Besides the Proverif-based analysis, an informal security analysis is also provided that shows that the registration is protected against a variety of well-known active and passive security attacks. As drone resources are limited, we also prepared a proof of concept to test our solution under real-life conditions, focusing on efficiency and lightweight operations.

Zejia Tang, Tianyao Pan, Yang Han, Tongzhou Shen · 6 authors

Tor is now using a centralized measurement system called Sbws to measure the bandwidth of relays to guide clients in selecting relays to balance traffic. Sbws has been proven to be vulnerable to multiple attacks because of the centralized structure and exposed measurements. We present SmartMeasurer, a secure and decentralized system for bandwidth measurement. Combining smart contract, Oracle Chainlink and ECC technology, we achieve decentralization while hiding the measurement circuits among the general circuits by exploiting the dual identity of randomly dynamic measurers and guards. We analyze the security of our system and demonstrate that it defends against three types of attacks. Our experiments on both private and public Tor networks show that our system is decentralized while keeping the error and the average of our measurements converges to a small interval of 0.30 Mbps. Compared to other existing methods, our system reduces trust assumptions and the costs of using smart contract, and enhances the practical feasibility of the solution.

Mustafa Ibrahim Alnajjar, Mehmet Sabır Kiraz, Ali H. Al‐Bayatti, Süleyman Kardaş

A distributed ledger is a shared and synchronized database across multiple designated nodes, often referred to as miners, validators, or peers. These nodes record, distribute, and access data to ensure security and transparency. However, these nodes can be compromised and manipulated by selectively choosing which user transactions to include, exclude, or reorder, thereby gaining an unfair advantage. This is known as a miner/maximal extractable value (MEV) attack. Existing solutions can be classified into various categories, such as MEV auction platforms and time-based ordering properties, which rely on private transaction Mempools. In this paper, we first identify some architectural weaknesses inherent in the latest proposals that divide the block creation and execution roles into separate functions: block builders and block executors. The existing schemes mainly suffer from the verifiability of the decryption process, where a corrupted builder or executor can simply deny the inclusion of specific targeted transactions by exploiting the fact that all transactions are in plain format. To address this, we propose an enhanced version that incorporates a verifiable decryption process. On a very high level, within our proposal, whenever an Executor or a Builder performs a decryption, the decrypted values must be broadcasted. This enables any entity in the network to publicly verify whether the decryption was executed correctly, thus preventing malicious behavior by either party from going undetected. We also define a new adversary model for MEV and conduct a comprehensive security analysis of our protocol against all kinds of potential adversaries related to MEV. Finally, we present the performance analysis of the proposed solution.

Hossein Pourrahmani, Adel Yavarinasab, Amir Mahdi Hosseini Monazzah, Jan Van herle

The current advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the solutions being offered by this technology have accounted IoT among the top ten technologies that will transform the global economy by 2030. IoT is a state-of-the-art paradigm that has developed traditional living into a high-tech lifestyle. The current study aims to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of the existing cybersecurity attacks and vulnerabilities in IoT, offering suitable countermeasures with a focus on describing the impact of emerging technologies on IoT devices and protocol layers. The main vulnerabilities across different layers of the IoT reference model are discussed and categorized, and suitable countermeasures (such as separating IT and IoT network traffic, enhancing physical security, implementing encryption and secure messaging protocols, etc.) are suggested. In addition, the hardware, communication, application, web, and cloud vulnerabilities are introduced, then the corresponding safeguards and protections are presented. Furthermore, ia! (ia!) has been deliberately defined and the adoption of the NIST framework and IA model is recommended as a metric to ensure security for IoT solutions considering the five pillars of availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. Finally, Blockchain technology, known for its use in securing cryptocurrencies, is suggested to facilitate secure data exchange, identification, authentication, and communication for IoT devices by various avenues including ensuring the integrity of sensor data, eliminating the need for intermediaries, reducing costs, and enabling direct addressability of IoT devices.

Yadi Zhong, Joshua Hovanes, Ujjwal Guin

Due to the exponential growth of IoT devices across diverse applications, it has become essential to secure edge devices against various hardware attacks, such as tampering and cloning. A tampered device with a hardware Trojan can bypass the security measures implemented through the software layers. One of the primary ways to verify the authenticity of a device is by using physically unclonable functions (PUFs) as a unique device fingerprint. During authentication, the PUF response from the edge device is transferred securely and compared with the stored response. This requires a secure communication setup between the edge device and the central server. The fingerprint must also be stored on a server for response matching. However, the potential compromise of the central server will result in the leak of all secret information of the edge devices, and adversaries can exploit it to gain unauthorized access to the IoT network. In this paper, we propose an efficient, secure, and on-demand communication protocol using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) that allow the prover to provide evidence of its secret without revealing that to the verifier. The edge device, acting as the prover, convinces the central server, the verifier, of the unique PUF response stored inside the device without needing the actual storage of PUF responses on the server. The non-interactive characteristic of zk-SNARK, a widely used ZKP protocol in many popular cryptocurrencies such as Zcash, offers better optimization to authentication frequency, communication bandwidth between device and server, and protection of device-specific secret, all of which contribute to constructing our proposed device authentication framework.

Venkata K. V. V. Bathalapalli, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos, Vasanth Iyer · 5 authors

This work presents a sustainable cybersecurity solution using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and Tangle Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for sustainable device and data security. Security-by-Design (SbD) or Hardware- Assisted Security (HAS) solutions have gained much prominence due to the requirement of tamper-proof storage for hardwareassisted cryptography solutions. Designing complex security mechanisms can impact their efficiency as IoT applications are more decentralized. In the proposed architecture, we presented a novel TPM-enabled PUF-based security mechanism with effective integration of PUF with TPM. The proposed mechanism is based on the process of sealing the PUF key in the TPM, which cannot be accessed outside the TPM and can only be unsealed by the TPM itself. A specified NV-index is assigned to each IoT node for sealing the PUF key to TPM using the Media Access Control (MAC) address. Access to the TPM's Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM) is defined by the TPM's Enhanced Authorization policies as specified by the Trust Computing Group (TCG). The proposed architecture uses Tangle for sustainable data security and storage in decentralized IoT systems through a Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) scheme for efficient and secure access control to Tangle. We validated the proposed approach through experimental analysis and implementation, which substantiates the potential of the presented PUFchain 4.0 for decentralized IoT-driven security solutions.

Diefenbach, Carolin

Due to the rapid growth experienced by the market for non-fungible tokens in 2021, the topic has become much more present. Even people who have not previously dealt with the topic of cryptoassets are finding interest in it. What exactly is hidden behind the term NFT, which areas of application there are and in which direction crypto tokens are developing will be briefly presented in this article. Significant changes on the market and in the technological field will be highlighted, as well as opportunities and challenges.

Junrui Liu, Ian Kretz, Hanzhi Liu, Bryan E‐Xin Tan · 10 authors

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proof systems have emerged as a promising solution for building security-sensitive applications. However, bugs in ZK applications are extremely difficult to detect and can allow a malicious party to silently exploit the system without leaving any observable trace. This paper presents Coda, a novel statically-typed language for building zero-knowledge applications. Critically, Coda makes it possible to formally specify and statically check properties of a ZK application through a rich refinement type system. One of the key challenges in formally verifying ZK applications is that they require reasoning about polynomial equations over large prime fields that go beyond the capabilities of automated theorem provers. Coda mitigates this challenge by generating a set of Coq lemmas that can be proven in an interactive manner with the help of a tactic library. We have used Coda to re-implement 77 arithmetic circuits from widely-used Circom libraries and applications. Our evaluation shows that Coda makes it possible to specify important and formally verify correctness properties of these circuits. Our evaluation also revealed 6 previously-unknown vulnerabilities in the original Circom projects.

Suthee Ruangwises, Mitsugu Iwamoto

Abstract Decomposition puzzles are pencil-and-paper logic puzzles that involve partitioning a rectangular grid into several regions to satisfy certain rules. In this paper, we construct a generic card-based protocol called printing protocol , which can be used to physically verify solutions of decompositon puzzles. We apply the printing protocol to develop card-based zero-knowledge proof protocols for two such puzzles: Five Cells and Meadows. These protocols allow a prover to physically show that he/she knows solutions of the puzzles without revealing them.

Devika Kalathil Nandalal, Ramesh Bhakthavatchalu

Globalization of the chip design and manufacturing industry has imposed significant threats to the hardware security of integrated circuits (ICs). It has made ICs more susceptible to various hardware attacks. Blockchain provides a trustworthy and distributed platform to store immutable records related to the evidence of intellectual property (IP) creation, authentication of provenance, and confidential data storage. However, blockchain encounters major security challenges due to its decentralized nature of ledgers that contain sensitive data. The research objective is to design a dedicated programmable hardware security modules scheme to safeguard and maintain sensitive information contained in the blockchain networks in the context of the IC supply chain. Thus, the blockchain framework could rely on the proposed hardware security modules and separate the entire cryptographic operations within the system as stand-alone hardware units. This work put forth a novel approach that could be considered and utilized to enhance blockchain security in real-time. The critical cryptographic components in blockchain secure hash algorithm-256 (SHA-256) and the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm are designed as separate entities to enhance the security of the blockchain framework. Physical unclonable functions are adopted to perform authentication of transactions in the blockchain. Relative comparison of designed modules with existing works clearly depicts the upper hand of the former in terms of performance parameters.

Dylan Paulin, Raphaël Joud, Christine Hennebert, Pierre-Alain Moëllic · 6 authors

Abstract In areas of activity where the notion of accountability is strong, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is limited by the opacity and lack of understanding of its behavior, all the more so in the embedded domain where neural networks are compressed and executed on microcontrollers. While the NIST introduced in 2021 several principles allowing the AI explainability, this paper introduces a novel scheme, HistoTrust, combining secure hardware and blockchain technology to bring trust in the traceability of AI behavior and allow its explainability. HistoTrust attests in an Ethereum ledger all the relevant data produced by a physical device, especially the heuristics inferred by AI. Thus, the audition of the ledger allows security verifications and AI behavior analysis.

Mauro Isaja, Phu H. Nguyen, Arda Göknil, Sagar Sen · 14 authors

There is a current wave of a new generation of digital solutions based on intelligent systems, hybrid digital twins and AI-driven optimization tools to assure quality in smart factories. Such digital solutions heavily depend on quality-related information within the supply chain business ecosystem to drive zero-waste value chains. To empower zero-waste value chain strategies with meaningful, reliable, and trustful data, there must be a solution for end-to-end industrial data traceability, trust, and security across multiple process chains or even inter-organizational supply chains. In this paper, we first present Product, Process, and Data quality services to drive zero-waste value chain strategies. Following this, we present the Trusted Framework (TF), which is a key enabler for the secure and effective sharing of quality-related information within the supply chain business ecosystem, and thus for quality optimization actions towards zero-defect manufacturing. The TF specification includes the data model and format of the Process/Product/Data (PPD) Quality Hallmark, the OpenAPI exposed to factory system and a comprehensive Identity Management layer, for secure horizontal- and vertical quality data integration. The PPD hallmark and the TF already address some of the industrial needs to have a trusted approach to share quality data between the different stakeholders of the production chain to empower zero-waste value chain strategies.

Zhengwei Ren, Guangxin He, Rongwei Yu, Yan Tong · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Yijing Lin, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato, Jiangtian Nie · 7 authors

The construction of virtual transportation networks requires massive data to be transmitted from edge devices to Virtual Service Providers (VSP) to facilitate circulations between the physical and virtual domains in Metaverse. Leveraging semantic communication for reducing information redundancy, VSPs can receive semantic data from edge devices to provide varied services through advanced techniques, e.g., AI-Generated Content (AIGC), for users to explore digital worlds. But the use of semantic communication raises a security issue because attackers could send malicious semantic data with similar semantic information but different desired content to break Metaverse services and cause wrong output of AIGC. Therefore, in this paper, we first propose a blockchain-aided semantic communication framework for AIGC services in virtual transportation networks to facilitate interactions of the physical and virtual domains among VSPs and edge devices. We illustrate a training-based targeted semantic attack scheme to generate adversarial semantic data by various loss functions. We also design a semantic defense scheme that uses the blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs to tell the difference between the semantic similarities of adversarial and authentic semantic data and to check the authenticity of semantic data transformations. Simulation results show that the proposed defense method can reduce the semantic similarity of the adversarial semantic data and the authentic ones by up to 30% compared with the attack scheme.

Nathanaël Denis

Pour un internet des objets sécurisé et respectueux de la vie privée basé sur le contrôle d'usage et les registres distribués Les objets connectés représentent l'une des principales cibles de la cybercriminalité. Les raisons en sont multiples : d'abord, pour limiter le coût de la sécurité, les fabricants peuvent vendre des produits vulnérables avec des failles de sécurité. Deuxièmement, de nombreux objets connectés sont soumis à des contraintes de performance et ne disposent pas de la puissance nécessaire pour exécuter des logiciels de sécurité. Enfin, l'hétérogénéité des applications, du matériel et des logiciels élargit la surface d'attaque.Pour parer à ces menaces, l'Internet des Objets (IoT) a besoin de technologies de sécurité et de préservation de la vie privée sur mesure.En ce qui concerne la protection de la vie privée, le contrôle d'usage donne aux utilisateurs la possibilité de spécifier comment leurs données peuvent être utilisées et par qui. Le contrôle d'usage étend le contrôle d'accès classique en introduisant des obligations, c'est-à-dire des actions à effectuer pour obtenir l'accès, et des conditions qui sont liées à l'état du système, comme la charge du réseau ou le temps.Cette thèse vise à apporter des réponses aux défis de l'internet des objets en termes de performance, de sécurité et de respect de la vie privée. Pour cela, les registres distribués (DLT) constituent, de par leur caractère décentralisé, une solution prometteuse aux contraintes de l'internet des objets, en particulier pour les micro-transactions. Cela se traduit par trois contributions:1. un ensemble de technologies pour des transactions sans frais préservant la vie privée, conçu pour passer à l'échelle;2. une méthode d'intégration du contrôle d'usage et des registres distribués pour permettre une protection efficace des données des utilisateurs;3. un modèle étendu pour le contrôle d'usage dans les systèmes distribués, afin d'y ajouter le contrôle de flux décentralisé et les aspects liés à l'internet des objets.Une preuve de concept de l'intégration (2) a été mise en place pour démontrer la faisabilité et effectuer des tests de performance. Elle s'appuie sur IOTA, un registre distribué qui utilise un graphe orienté acyclique pour son graphe de transactions au lieu d'une blockchain. Les résultats des tests de performance sur un réseau privé montrent une diminution d'environ 90% du temps nécessaire pour effectuer des transactions et pour évaluer des politiques de contrôle d'usage, dans le cas où ce dernier est intégré au réseau.

Mark Carney

This paper presents a new method for quantum identity authentication (QIA) protocols. The logic of classical zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) due to Schnorr is applied in quantum circuits and algorithms. This novel approach gives an exact way with which a prover $P$ can prove they know some secret by encapsulating it in a quantum state before sending to a verifier $V$ by means of a quantum channel - allowing for a ZKP wherein an eavesdropper or manipulation can be detected with a fail-safe design. This is achieved by moving away from the hardness of the Discrete Logarithm Problem towards the hardness of estimating quantum states. This paper presents a method with which this can be achieved and some bounds for the security of the protocol provided. With the anticipated advent of a `quantum internet', such protocols and ideas may soon have utility and execution in the real world.

Anichur Rahman, Md. Jahidul Islam, Shahab S. Band, Ghulam Muhammad · 6 authors

Some of the significant new technologies researched in recent studies include BlockChain (BC), Software Defined Networking (SDN), and Smart Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). All three technologies provide data integrity, confidentiality, and integrity in their respective use cases (especially in industrial fields). Additionally, cloud computing has been in use for several years now. Confidential information is exchanged with cloud infrastructure to provide clients with access to distant resources, such as computing and storage activities in the IIoT. There are also significant security risks, concerns, and difficulties associated with cloud computing. To address these challenges, we propose merging BC and SDN into a cloud computing platform for the IIoT. This paper introduces “DistB-SDCloud”, an architecture for enhanced cloud security for smart IIoT applications. The proposed architecture uses a distributed BC method to provide security, secrecy, privacy, and integrity while remaining flexible and scalable. Customers in the industrial sector benefit from the dispersed or decentralized, and efficient environment of BC. Additionally, we described an SDN method to improve the durability, stability, and load balancing of cloud infrastructure. The efficacy of our SDN and BC-based implementation was experimentally tested by using various parameters including throughput, packet analysis, response time, bandwidth, and latency analysis, as well as the monitoring of several attacks on the system itself.

Xueping Liang, Charalambos Konstantinou, Sachin Shetty, Eranga Bandara · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Yajing Wang, Yaodong Yang, Shuaipeng Suo, Mingyuan Wang · 5 authors

As three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is widely used, security issues have arisen, especially in the terminal parts of automobiles, aircraft, and 3D-printed military equipment. If the original design models or the STL (stereolithography) files are hacked or tampered, severe consequences can be anticipated. In this paper, we propose a demonstration to use a high-throughput blockchain to store the “fingerprints” of the 3D model and verify the “fingerprints” before printing to prevent illegal tampering. Relying on the tamper-resistant features of blockchain, the security of the model and the credibility of the terminal components can be ensured. The combination of blockchain and 3D printing will help people to build a trusted manufacturing environment and realize a more flexible manufacturing for future industry.