Blockchain Papers

Adel Khelifi, Mark Altaweel, Mohammad Hashir, Tasoula Hadjitofi · 5 authors

Abstract Many modern cultural object collections suffer from the problem of being obtained in unethical and illegal circumstances. Additionally, information about collections, including their status, object descriptions, and other data need up-to-date information presented to users. We propose a novel blockchain tool called Salsal that enables the vetting of objects, individually or as part of more extensive collections, to meet required ethical and legal guidelines while informing users about relevant information regarding collections. Blockchain provides a better and more rapid way for users to know about collections using a decentralized and immutable ledger technology. Blockchain can be used to incentivize or even pressure collections to vet their objects for ethical and legal guidelines that can benefit the public who use object collections. The prototype software we have made is presented and compared to other blockchains, with code and demonstration provided. We present how our blockchain can enable benefit, providing a useful vetting process for cultural objects, and allowing a user community to contribute to collections in a transparent and secure manner.

Ali Eghmazi, Mohammadhossein Ataei, René Landry, Guy Chevrette

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that can connect billions of devices or “things” to other devices (machine to machine) or even to people via an existing infrastructure. IoT applications in real-world scenarios include smart cities, smart houses, connected appliances, shipping, monitoring, smart supply chain management, and smart grids. As the number of devices all over the world is increasing (in all aspects of daily life), huge amounts of data are being produced as a result. New issues are therefore arising from the use and development of current technologies, regarding new applications, regulation, cloud computing, security, and privacy. The blockchain has shown promise in terms of securing and preserving the privacy of users and data, in a decentralized manner. In particular, Hyperledger Fabric v2.x is a new generation of blockchain that is open source and offers versatility, modularity, and performance. In this paper, a blockchain as a service (BaaS) application based on Hyperledger Fabric is presented to address the security and privacy challenges associated with the IoT. A new architecture is introduced to enable this integration, and is developed and deployed, and its performance is analyzed in real-world scenarios. We also propose a new data structure with encryption based on public and private keys for enhanced security and privacy.

Brahim Ferik, Lakhdar Laimeche, Abdallah Meraoumia, Omar Aldabbas · 7 authors

In electronic healthcare, patient medical imaging data is critical for remote diagnostic procedures. The increasing demand to harness the potential of these medical images necessitates their secure sharing among various entities, including hospitals, medical institutions, and insurance companies. However, third-party access and possible manipulation make it challenging to maintain the ownership and integrity of this data. This study introduces a novel approach that combines compression, digital watermarking, symmetric encryption, and blockchain technology to protect medical images from unauthorized third-party interventions. Using the Discrete Wavelet Transform, our proposed technique embeds a compressed watermark into the host image. Specifically, the watermark is encoded into vectors and inserted into the second-level approximation, i.e., the Low-Low of the image using the Least Significant Bit, producing a watermarked image. The watermarked data is encrypted and stored on a blockchain to further safeguard these images’ integrity. This multi-layer security framework not only preserves the integrity and confidentiality of the data but also facilitates transparent and secure sharing among stakeholders. The proposed method achieves a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 63.24dB and a structural similarity index of 1. These results demonstrate the robustness of our solution in protecting and exchanging medical images within the digital healthcare ecosystem, positioning it as an advanced and reliable option for secure data management.

Muhammad Ahmad Nawaz Ul Ghani, She Kun, Muhammad Arslan Rauf, Shumaila Khan · 7 authors

In recent years, the extensive use of facial recognition technology has raised concerns about data privacy and security for various applications, such as improving security and streamlining attendance systems and smartphone access. In this study, a blockchain-based decentralized facial recognition system (DFRS) that has been designed to overcome the complexities of technology. The DFRS takes a trailblazing approach, focusing on finding a critical balance between the benefits of facial recognition and the protection of individuals' private rights in an era of increasing monitoring. First, the facial traits are segmented into separate clusters which are maintained by the specialized node that maintains the data privacy and security. After that, the data obfuscation is done by using generative adversarial networks. To ensure the security and authenticity of the data, the facial data is encoded and stored in the blockchain. The proposed system achieves significant results on the CelebA dataset, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The proposed model has demonstrated enhanced efficacy over existing methods, attaining 99.80% accuracy on the dataset. The study's results emphasize the system's efficacy, especially in biometrics and privacy-focused applications, demonstrating outstanding precision and efficiency during its implementation. This research provides a complete and novel solution for secure facial recognition and data security for privacy protection.

Md. Biplob Hossain, Maya Rahayu, Md. Arshad Ali, Samsul Huda · 6 authors

Email serves as the primary mode of communication in today’s interconnected digital world, encompassing business, education, and interpersonal relationships. However, email’s reliance on shared media makes it susceptible to interception and misuse of confidential data. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) protects the privacy of email contents to address this problem. While PGP offers encryption, its key sharing has weaknesses. Blockchain technology is characterized by its immutability feature. Once information is stored in the blockchain, altering it becomes extremely difficult. This characteristic serves as a valuable defense against weaknesses in the PGP key sharing system. Furthermore, the implementation of smart contracts eliminates the need for a Man-in-the-Middle when sharing keys, thereby improving the security of key sharing and fostering trust among individuals. Blockchain and smart contracts improve security, but privacy remains a concern. To further bolster privacy protection, in this paper we propose the integration of Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and blockchain into PGP key sharing mechanism. zk-SNARKs enable efficient verification of encrypted data without revealing sensitive information, thus preventing exposure of user privacy. Additionally, we employ Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in order to guarantee the confidentiality of the PGP key. Through this holistic integration, the security of the PGP key is enhanced, ensuring both confidentiality and integrity while safeguarding user privacy. Furthermore, gas consumption and transaction costs were evaluated with and without zk-SNARKs. The results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism minimizes gas consumption and transaction costs.

Dharminder Chaudhary, P. Santhi, M. S. P. Durgarao, A Padmavathi · 6 authors

Truck platooning uses networking technology and automated driving support systems to join multiple trucks in a group. When these vehicles interact for particular journey stages, such as on highways, they autonomously maintain a predefined, tight spacing among themselves. Platooning improves transportation by making better use of highways, delivering cargo faster, and minimizing congestion in traffic. Therefore, safety and platooning are two important attributes of an intelligent truck system. This paper discusses a quantum-safe blockchain-empowered authentication mechanism for autonomous truck platooning. The proposed idea is to use blockchain to combine multiple nodes and ensure authenticity with the help of an aggregation technique. The proposed design ensures authenticity to the system due to hard assumptions:1) Learning With Error (LWE) and 2) Short Integer Solution (SIS) on random module generated lattice. This paper uses operations over module lattices to be more efficient than general lattices. We can perform operations on module lattices with the help of fast algorithms for polynomial arithmetic.

Archana Chhabra, Rahul Saha, Gulshan Kumar, Tai-hoon Kim

Blockchain networks provide a reliable and secure mode of communication due to their decentralized and distributed nature. The emergence of amalgamated blockchain-based internet-of-things (IoT) systems has generated a huge amount of data to be online. Though blockchains show potential for ensuring transparency, traceability, and immutable records, the privacy of online data in blockchains becomes a question. The privacy of blockchain transactions is at stake as various privacy breaching methods are used by attackers such as linking the transactions, deanonymization, etc. However, the benefits of blockchain make the technology a dominator in the present and future technological paradigms. The other side of the coin deals with privacy information retrieval (PIR), which is necessary to retrieve private information from servers without much revealing. However, the conjunction of blockchain privacy and PIR is very critical and an important aspect of blockchain solutions. In this present survey, we pioneer in analyzing the privacy factors of existing blockchain solutions. We discuss the privacy parameters and important privacy enhancement techniques for blockchains comprehensively. We show the applicability of privacy in various domains including e-commerce, supply chain, healthcare, and IoT. We also discuss PIR-related issues and solutions in the existing literature. We highlight open research problems and discuss the benefits of collaborating with PIR and blockchain systems to improve privacy in blockchains. Our survey is beneficial for academia and industries to be aware of the present status of privacy solutions in blockchains and to address the identified loopholes to make the systems better.

Minjae Seo, Jaehan Kim, Myoungsung You, Seungwon Shin · 5 authors

Blockchain technology has ushered in a transformative paradigm of decentralized and transparent systems, offering innovative solutions across diverse sectors. While these systems strive for unparalleled transparency and trustlessness in a fully distributed framework, permissionless blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, encounter vulnerabilities due to their intrinsically public nature. Addressing these vulnerabilities, the emergence of permissioned blockchains presents a fortified alternative, incorporating rigorous access controls and authentication protocols to ensure participation exclusivity and transaction confidentiality. Nevertheless, a keen observation reveals that, despite encryption, the operational traffic within these blockchains manifests distinct time-series patterns and operational relations during sensitive data exchanges. Such patterns hold the potential to inadvertently expose critical details about the network, encompassing its topology and the operational dependencies among nodes. In light of this revelation, we introduce a pioneering blockchain fingerprinting mechanism, denoted as gShock. This system meticulously analyzes periodic patterns and the context of operational relations from the collected blockchain network traffic. It employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based model, adept at capturing the intricate characteristics innate to specialized blockchain operations. Through empirical experiments conducted in a realistic permissioned blockchain environment, comprising various nodes, we ascertain that gShock demonstrates a remarkable proficiency in classifying blockchain operational traffic with an F1-score of$\geq 96$% and identifying individual dependencies with a macro F1-score of$\geq 93$%.

Avijit Bose, Pradyut Sarkar, Premananda Jana

In today's world of internet marketing product review plays a crucial role. Often E-Commerce companies are accused of manipulating with the data and it suffers from biasing. Biasing leads to wrong customer's view creation thereby prediction for a top rating product fails. This study shows how crowd annotation prevents this biasness and thereby design a smart contract which ultimately will help to eliminate the data manipulation. The smart contract is deployed and tested to see if data can be saved in the run time storage memory regions of the Ethereum blockchain, and the test results are positive. In future this will help to get the unbiased data and better machine learning results, which will ultimately be beneficial for the economy.

Suresh Kumar Kagitha, Diksha Rani, Pavan Kumar Penta

Cryptocurrency tracker is an online platform that provides a userfriendly experience. Users get a simple and userfriendly experien ce through the user interface. Users can sign into their account with Gmail or a mobile number for easy access to their account. U sers can track prices of different cryptocurrencies and view currency charts. Using this user interface, users can find prices and ot her relevant information about cryptocurrencies. The app helps users to create watchlists and we can track prices. We can set alerts for cryptocurrency prices. We can customize notifications and help understand new cryptocurrency trends. Users can easily find various cryptocurrencies and track future crypt currency trends. It helps users invest in new popular cryptocurrencies that will be more useful to them in the future. Overall, the Cryptocurrency Tracker web app is a valuable tool for anyone looking to invest, trade, or just keep an eye on the cryptocurrency market. It provides realtime data and insights that can help users make informed investment decisions and stay abrea st of the latest industry trends and developments.

A. Sasikumar, Logesh Ravi, Malathi Devarajan, A. Selvalakshmi · 8 authors

The edge devices will produce enormous quantities of data daily as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) expands in scope. Still, most IIoT data is stored in data centers, making it challenging to transfer data between domains safely. Smart logistic products have dramatically changed due to the prevalence of decentralized edge computing and blockchain in the industry sector. To address the need to exchange data between logistics networks, we proposed a novel decentralized hierarchical attribute-based encryption (HABE) scheme combining edge computing and blockchain. To begin, we offer an IoT data encryption strategy in which edge devices can send data to a nearby cloud network for data processing while maintaining privacy. In addition, we developed a blockchain-integrated data-sharing scheme that makes it possible for users to share data via the use of edge and cloud storage. In particular, an IoT device incorporates an encryption-based authentication system to verify users’ access rights at the network’s periphery in a decentralized manner. Using HABE, we provide a blockchain-integrated architecture for the IoT that protects user privacy. The suggested design utilizes the edge and cloud network paradigms and HABE to maintain privacy and works well with smart logistics applications. The authentication time of the proposed model is reduced by 1.5 times compared with the centralized model. The analyses and experimental findings show that the proposed blockchain-integrated edge computing architecture is better than the existing schemes in terms of data sharing, data privacy, and security.

Nawras H. Sabbry, Алла Левина

<abstract> <p>This paper proposes a deterministic nonce generation technique to address the catastrophic issues associated with nonce reuse in message signing and to enhance the efficiency of Schnorr multi-signature schemes. Additionally, this research aims to reduce computational complexity and bandwidth requirements in digital and multi-signature schemes while maintaining robust security against common attacks. The proposed method was inspired by the EdDSA approach. The methodology includes a comprehensive mathematical analysis of digital signature algorithms and a rigorous examination of their vulnerabilities to well-known cryptographic attacks. This analysis evaluates the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed nonce generation technique within the frameworks of the Schnorr digital signature and the two-round MuSig schemes. Techniques and tools employed in this research involve deterministically generating nonces by hashing the private key and subsequently hashing the result with the message. Furthermore, it is proposed to exclude the public nonce R from the challenge calculations and to allow signers to directly prove possession of their secret keys through the aggregated public key, thereby eliminating the need for non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs. The findings demonstrate significant reductions in computational complexity and operational requirements, thereby improving bandwidth efficiency and making this method well-suited for resource-constrained devices. The approach also exhibits strong resistance to various attacks, including nonce reuse, key cancellation, rogue keys, and virtual machine rewinding.</p> </abstract>

Youakim Badr, Xiaoyang Zhu, Samia Saad-Bouzefrane, Soumya Banerjee

No abstract is available for this record.

Muhammad Noman Sohail, Adeel Anjum, Iftikhar Ahmed Saeed, Madiha Haider Syed · 6 authors

Connecting smart industrial components to computer networks revolutionizes business operations. However, in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the sharing of data has bandwidth, computational, and privacy issues. Researchers presented cloud computing and fine-grained access control to overcome these challenges. However, traditional centralized computing systems involve single points of failure. To mitigate these challenges, we have proposed a secure and incentive-based data-sharing framework for IIoT systems using blockchain technology. We leverage blockchain due to its ability to provide secure and tamper-resistant data storage and sharing as participants store their data on a distributed ledger (DL), preventing unauthorized access. A security protocol is designed that utilizes the properties of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Moreover, Shapley value is employed to calculate revenue and distribute it fairly. To perform the formal security evaluation, we have conducted extensive simulations using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) and Scyther protocol simulation tools, which demonstrated that our protocol is robust against various adversarial attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed incentive distribution framework demonstrated fairness in the distribution of revenue among participants.

Muhammad Iqbal, Arshad Iqbal, Abdullah Alshammari, Ihtisham Ali · 6 authors

Decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are digital assets with a price volatility nature, that allow for blockchain-based, peer-to-peer monetary transactions. Due to the price volatility problem with decentralized cryptocurrencies, research into the underlying pricing mechanism is required. Additionally, the behavior of Bitcoin prices is non-stationary, meaning that the statistical distribution of data varies over time. The proposed framework demonstrates the use of sophisticated machine learning models in predicting the short and medium-term trends and actual values of Bitcoin prices. This research goes beyond previous work that has only looked at machine learning-based categorization for a single day by instead using such models to forecast price changes seven, thirty, and ninety days into the future. The generated models are useful and work admirably, with the classification models reaching a maximum accuracy enhancement up to 31.48% for a 90-day prediction and a 11.76% F1-score for a forecast extending to the thirtieth day. In the case of regression the margin of error shifts from the one-time horizon for price projections to the next. A significant notable downfall occurs in different error metrics. These findings suggest that the models given here outperform those already found in the literature.

Tiphaine Henry, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni

No abstract is available for this record.

Elif Bozkaya

The current explosion in user traffic necessitates the placement of edge servers in proximity to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, allowing computation tasks to be offloaded to edge servers. This strategy aims to minimize the average delay of traffic requests by enabling user/IoT devices to locally execute time-sensitive tasks or offload them to edge servers within the mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm. This new paradigm will also allow to cache contents at edge servers, but considering such an increasing number of user requests and limited storage capability of edge servers, selection in edge caching decisions is challenging. In addition, while there is general consensus that this technology may provide a variety of benefits, there are serious questions about its security implications. This is because malicious users can manipulate the caching decisions of the edge servers by sending fake traffic requests, which reduces the caching efficiency of the resource-constrained edge servers. Driven by these issues, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based content caching and computation strategy to validate the authenticity of cached content and thus prevent unauthorized requests from malicious users. Specifically, the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is presented to handle low computational work, validate the process of blocks, and manage the transactions between edge servers and legitimate users. Then, a Deep Q Network (DQN)-based solution is proposed to intelligently develop an effective content caching and computation strategy. According to performance evaluation, the proposed model significantly outperforms the conventional methods. It improves the cache hit rate by up to 8.2% on average and reduces the response delay by up to 7.45% on average.

Lu Lin, Lingyan Han, Liangmin Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Kuznetsov, Oleksandr, Anton Yezhov, Vladyslav Yusiuk, Alexandr Kuznetsov

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have emerged as a promising solution to address the scalability challenges in modern blockchain systems. This study proposes a methodology for generating and verifying ZKPs to ensure the computational integrity of cryptographic hashing, specifically focusing on the SHA-256 algorithm. By leveraging the Plonky2 framework, which implements the PLONK protocol with the FRI commitment scheme, we demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our approach for both random data and real data blocks from the NEAR blockchain. The experimental results show consistent performance across different data sizes and types, with the time required for proof generation and verification remaining within acceptable limits. The generated circuits and proofs maintain manageable sizes, even for real-world data blocks with a large number of transactions. The proposed methodology contributes to the development of secure and trustworthy blockchain systems, where the integrity of computations can be verified without revealing the underlying data. Further research is needed to assess the applicability of the approach to other cryptographic primitives and to evaluate its performance in more complex real-world scenarios.

Amir Semnani, Guowu Yang

No abstract is available for this record.

Shruti Jadon, Karthikeya Bhat, Karthikeya R. Jenni, Krishna Vedantha · 6 authors

In the current digital landscape, almost everyone is on social media or various social media platforms. People use social media for a plethora of purposes, which include staying connected with friends and family, accessing information and updates about ongoing events, entertainment, networking with professionals, expressing themselves to a wide range of users, promoting businesses, joining online communities and engaging in various activities which has led to an increase in the consumption and usage of online social networks (OSN). One of the reasons for such a growth is their features such as ubiquitous access, on-demand service, friendship networks, user engagement strategies like recommendation engines, etc. However, there are various limitations to the current approach, such as the centralization of control, lack of data ownership, poor access control, fake news, bot accounts, censorship, digital rights management issues, etc. To address these limitations, a paradigm shift is necessary. This paper aims to develop a social media application where every post can be converted to a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and be sold to earn money. Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is used as the decentralized storage. Algorithms for all the functionalities of the applications are given along with an algorithm for a reputation score for every user and their posts in social media are also proposed.

Lucien K. L. Ng, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Duc V. Le, Mohsen Minaei · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Zulfiqar Ali Khan, Akbar Siami Namin

Ethereum Blockchain technology introduced a competitive environment in the financial sector. Consequently, new technologies emerged, such as Smart Contracts (SCs), which preclude code corrections due to their immutable nature. But the incorrect and faulty uploaded SCs led to uninvited penetrations into SCs’ accounts, resulting in considerable customer losses. This SC’s drawback requires tools to test the SCs and paves the way for research on vulnerability detection techniques. Our survey paper comprehensively reviews 41 SC tools and presents the vulnerability detection techniques (VDTs) of the several previously discussed tools by dividing them into general and specific classes. Finally, we also perform a classification of detection techniques to standardize the approaches. Thus, our study will help SC developers and security analysts to streamline the security of SCs and reduce the chances of malicious monetary transfers.

Suman Majumder, Sangram Ray, Dipanwita Sadhukhan, Mou Dasgupta · 6 authors

Traditional voting systems mainly comprise of paper polling, electronic ballot system (EVM), mechanical devices, etc., and demand the physical presence of the voters. In the new age of digitization, the electronic voting system has come up with a unique facility to cast votes from any discreet place. However, the e-voting system has to face several challenges regarding security and privacy. To overcome such obstructions, blockchain is introduced in e-voting applications that preserve anonymity, security, and consistency of voter-related information with the help of Merkle tree and hash digest. Hence, any discrepancy can immediately be detected whenever the hash values of the respective block have been modified and consequently, the whole block is discarded. In this research, a novel e-voting scheme is proposed following the decentralized service-oriented architecture of Exonum private blockchain, hybrid consensus algorithm, and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Helmen (ECDH) protocol to agree upon a secure session key among different participants. Moreover, the proposed scheme (ECC-EXONUM-eVOTING) employs a zero-knowledge protocol and is customized to work over idemix technologies with a blind signature scheme. Numerous well-known cryptographic attacks are analyzed formally using the probabilistic random oracle model and informally for validating the security strength of ECC-EXONUM-eVOTING. As a result, it is found that the proposed scheme is well-defended against all potential security concerns. Furthermore, the scheme is simulated using both Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) and Scyther tools to demonstrate the proposed scheme is not prone to any security attacks. Finally, it is concluded that the proposed scheme is well-suited for secure e-voting applications.