A Thanam, Yamuna Devi M M, R Dillibai., Vaibhav Viswanath · 6 authors
In contemporary discourse, electronic voting (evoting) has surfaced as a highly accessible and effective mechanism for augmenting voter engagement within democratic frameworks. Nonetheless, apprehensions regarding the security, privacy, transparency, and the potential for electoral malpractice render it a highly debated subject. Conventional e-voting architectures depend on centralized servers and trust-centric authorities, which are susceptible to cyber threats, hacking incidents, and human fallibility. In response to these apprehensions, the notion of a decentralized and trust less e voting agenda, underpinned by blockchain technology, has attracted considerable scholarly focus. Blockchain, as a form of distributed ledger technology (DLT), provides intrinsic benefits such as transparency, immutability, and decentralization. These characteristics render it particularly advantageous for e-voting mechanisms, ensuring that votes are documented securely and transparently while concurrently safeguarding the confidentiality of individual voters. Within a decentralized e-voting architecture, the blockchain functions as an immutable ledger wherein all votes are cryptographically fortified, thereby thwarting tampering and preserving the integrity of electoral outcomes. Given that no single authority governs the blockchain, the system exhibits resilience against manipulation by any discrete entity, thus justifying the hazards attendant with centralized voting infrastructures. As this technology progresses, it is poised to serve as a pivotal enabler of free, fair, and transparent elections on a global scale.
P. Asha, P. Surendra Reddy, R. Aroul Canessane, J. Refonaa · 6 authors
The Voting DApp is a decentralized application created to offer a safe, open, and impenetrable platform for blockchain-based election administration. A smart contract running on the Ethereum blockchain manages the system’s basic voting logic, guaranteeing integrity through secure voter registration, role-based access control, and the avoidance of duplicate voting. Through a React-based user interface that is integrated with Web3.js, registered voters may cast their ballots, and administrators can add candidates and manage voter registrations. The Voting DApp is a strong solution for contemporary digital voting systems since it makes use of blockchain’s immutability and transparency to guarantee electoral process trust and offer real-time result visibility.
Weizhao Jin, Erik Kline, T. K. Satish Kumar, Lincoln Thurlow · 5 authors
Path validation in computer networks is used to enforce and verify data forwarding rules across network slices and administrative domains to satisfy specific service level requirements. Deviating from pre-established paths has the potential to downgrade network service quality, increase attack surface area, and disrupt network orchestration capabilities. Network operators regard the network infrastructure and topology as sensitive. This necessitates the need for privacy-preserving path validation techniques that leak minimal information about the overall network path to individual infrastructure owners. We present the design of a decentralized privacy-preserving path validation protocol using Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) proofs to provide provable path privacy guarantees. The NIZK-based pairwise validation design identifies individual slice nodes that deviate from the prescribed path. Deploying this lightweight protocol periodically enables individual nodes to enforce and validate the network control path. We have implemented and evaluated our system on a testbed simulating a multi-authority network. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of preserving path privacy as well as the practicality of our proposed protocols for next-generation multi-authority sliced networks.
Büşra Büyüktanır, Şahsene Altınkaya, Gozde Karatas Baydoğmus, Kazım Yıldız
Abstract Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising distributed machine learning approach that addresses confidentiality and integrity concerns in various sectors, including Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity. In order to improve privacy protection and detection accuracy in decentralized systems, this study investigates the incorporation of FL into Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). FL is especially useful in situations where data security and privacy are crucial because it allows for the cooperative training of models without centralizing sensitive data. We examine many FL-based IDS solutions across several domains, emphasizing how well they mitigate data breaches, maintain confidentiality, and enhance intrusion detection capabilities. The use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), artificial immune systems, and hybrid deep learning techniques to maximize IDS performance are among the current developments in FL methodology that are covered in the paper. We also look at issues like the requirement for effective aggregation procedures and non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data. Finally, we outline future directions and open research topics to improve the scalability, resilience, and effectiveness of FL-based IDS solutions in practical applications.
Evangelos Stavropoulos, Ioanna Karampela, Arjun Singh, Maria K. N. Fountoulakis · 8 authors
—The European research project GHOST challenges the traditional cyber security solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector by exploiting novel technologies, such as blockchain, to provide resilience and integrity of decision making on the communication exchange in a smart home context. When it comes to novel cyber security solutions for extremely heterogeneous environments like IoT and smart homes, the key focus is typically given to the understanding of network activities and elimination of suspicious traffic. The GHOST project adds an extra dimension to this approach by integrating blockchain technology at its core decision mechanism. On a daily basis, each GHOST installation is encountering malicious behaviour and suspicious IoT communications, where easy information sharing with other installations, as well as decentralised decision making, are mandatory features for the efficient protection of the end-user. GHOST's Smart Contracts (SC) are designed to tackle in an easy, yet productive way, the reporting on suspicious IP addresses which the IoT devices in a smart home are trying to communicate with. Two variations of blacklisting smart contracts are presented in this paper, covering a diverse spectrum of possible attack vectors while closely following the Privacy by Design (PbD) principles. A reputation scoring scheme for malicious IPs reporting is integrated in the SC, uncovering the implementation details on the penalisation of existing entries in case of malicious behaviour of reporting devices
Guangyu Liao, Zengpeng Li, Guangsheng Feng, Mei Wang · 5 authors
Distributed public ledger (e.g., Blockchain) has been proven to be a powerful technique that allows users to sign transactions in an untrusted environment, where identity-privacy disclosure is gaining attention in practice. Ring signatures can protect identities by providing anonymity property for users. However, a malicious anonymous user may generate multiple signatures on the same transaction, called double-spending attack. A unique ring signature avoids this attack by attaching a unique identifier to the transaction. In addition, future-proof cryptographic solutions are attracting attention in the quantum era. Thus, we aim to propose a post-quantum unique ring signature scheme for anonymous transactions, named . We initially provide verifiable random functions over lattices (L-VRF, in short) with tight security and optimize the proof size (compared with the work of Nguyen et al., ESORICS’ 22) using compression techniques. We then obtain from L-VRF inspired by the previous solution of Franklin-Zhang (FC’ 13) while enables to prevent of quantum computer attacks. Finally, is analyzed under the quantum random oracle model (QROM) while providing a prototype via C language. The performance evaluation shows offers a smaller communication load.
Existing electronic voting systems suffer from security concerns, identity theft, electoral fraud, and insufficient transparency in digital voting systems, which pose significant challenges to electoral integrity. Blockchain-based electronic voting systems provide immutability and decentralization. However, they are inappropriate for large-scale elections because of their inadequate consensus mechanisms, scalability issues, and security weaknesses. To provide an equitable electoral process, an electronic voting system must be scalable, secure, and efficient. This method requires real-time vote verification, secure vote recording to avert fraud, and voter authentication. This study introduces a blockchain-based smart contract electronic voting system (BCVS) to improve the security and efficiency of electronic voting. The three algorithms are employed by the proposed BCVS to safeguard and improve the electronic voting process via the utilization of smart contracts. These algorithms ensure the precise tabulation of results and establish a robust foundation for electronic voting by resolving disputes. The proposed approach ensures transparency, immutability, and a minimal likelihood of manipulation through the utilization of the prioritized delegated proof-of-stake (PDPoS) consensus mechanism. The PDPoS functions on Tier 3 scalable networks and diligently documents transactions on the blockchain to resolve critical challenges associated with electronic voting. The scalability and integrity of the proposed e-voting system are ensured through the implementation of a practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm. Improved voter authentication is accomplished by multi-factor authentication and elliptic curve digital signatures, reducing the dangers of unwanted access. Additionally, Nightshade sharding from the NEAR algorithm enhances scalability by partitioning the blockchain network into numerous smaller shards, facilitating parallel transaction processing. Consequently, throughput is markedly enhanced, and latency is diminished. The testing results indicate that the proposed BCVS achieves 100% confirmed transactions, 98% compatibility, 95% accuracy, and 95% audited votes. The proposed BCVS outperforms existing state-of-the-art systems in multiple essential domains, such as the volume of votes cast within a specified timeframe, precision, interoperability with other systems, quantity of confirmed transactions, auditability, and duration of vote counting.
Asjad Alli Khan, Sweta, Saurabh Krishna Chauhan, Vijay Kumar · 5 authors
The need for secure and accessible electronic voting systems has become increasingly critical, particularly during global emergencies that restrict physical polling access. While existing e-voting solutions offer convenience, they face significant challenges in ensuring vote integrity, voter privacy, and system security. This paper presents a novel blockchain-based evoting system that combines the security features of distributed ledger technology with traditional voting requirements. Our system architecture integrates a Distributed Permission Ledger Technology (DPLT) layer for voter validation and an Ethereum blockchain layer for immutable vote recording. The implementation utilizes smart contracts for automated vote processing and cryptographic techniques to maintain voter anonymity while ensuring transparent verification. We compare it with traditional e-voting systems and come up with considerable improvements in terms of security, transparency, and cost-effectiveness. Results indicate that blockchain technology can address all the important electoral challenges, such as resistance to tampering, real-time auditing ability, and reduced infrastructure costs. Case studies' evaluations found that the system is quite feasible for largescale elections, especially during emergencies when physical voting becomes unfeasible. Potential implementation barriers, such as technical complexity and social acceptance, have also been highlighted as a basis for future activities in blockchainbased democratic processes.
Blockchain technology offers a decentralized ledger where all transactions are transparently recorded. While this transparency facilitates trustless verification, it also raises critical privacy concerns: large-scale data collection and analytics can link and trace user addresses, undermining the pseudonymity once considered sufficient. In this paper, we propose ZK-R-SNARK, a novel scheme that integrates Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK-SNARKs) with Ring Signatures to enhance transactional anonymity in public blockchain networks. Our approach utilizes ring signatures to ensure that the originating signer remains indistinguishable among a group of potential signers, while ZK-SNARK ensures succinct and non-interactive verification of the signature’s correctness. By combining these techniques, ZK-R-SNARK enables nodes to validate the authenticity of transactions without revealing any critical information about the sender’s identity or transaction details. As a result, even advanced data analytics or machine learning techniques have limited capability to cluster or link addresses over time. We implement our scheme in the Circom framework to demonstrate its feasibility and measure performance metrics such as proof generation time, verification overhead, and on-chain data size. Experimental results indicate that ZK-R-SNARK achieves robust privacy guarantees with acceptable computational costs for practical blockchain environments.
As the demand for e-voting grows, it has become particularly important to ensure the security and fairness of the voting system. Therefore, an e-voting system is studied and designed to ensure the non-tamperability of voting results. The system utilizes zero-knowledge proof to verify the identity of the voter, while ensuring the tamperability of the voting data through blockchain technology. The experimental results indicated that the system outperformed the existing schemes in terms of processing speed and verification efficiency. Specifically, when the number of voters was 200, the time consuming and single verification time of this system were 3.7 s and 6.4 ms, respectively. When the number of voters increased to 600, the time consuming and single verification time were 8.3 s and 13.3 ms, respectively. In the number of candidates/voters was 5/80, none of the system’s gas consumption exceeded the maximum limit of a single transaction in Ether. Among them, the gas consumption of Vote Control contract was 5577485, and the gas consumption of non-interactive zero knowledge contract was 3826753. Furthermore, the more candidates there were, the longer it took the system to operate, although the number of voters had less of an effect on the cost of operating the voter system. The above outcomes reveal that the e-voting system proposed in the study provides a secure and efficient solution for small-scale voting activities and provides a basis for future optimization of large-scale voting scenarios.
E-voting has undergone significant advancements in recent years, nevertheless, ensuring the privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of voters' identities and their votes remains a crucial challenge. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized architecture and immutability, provides a promising solution for developing secure and transparent E-voting systems. Blockchain improves integrity and non-repudiation, however, its transparency compromises voters' anonymity, and the secrecy of vote contents. We propose in this paper an E-voting system that incorporates secure and privacy-preserving mechanisms based on a combination of Blockchain, and lightweight cryptographic techniques to address these issues, while mitigating the weaknesses of the most recent works such as Thakkar et al.'s voting system in which votes remain unencrypted. Moreover, the integration of advanced cryptographic techniques, as explored in Wang et al.'s work, inevitably introduces significant computational costs. The proposed system enables the verification of voter eligibility and the correctness of votes without revealing sensitive information while reducing computational costs. In our experimentation, we adopt smart contracts to implement the proposed system using solidity programming language, and deployed on Ethereum Blockchain. We evaluated our proposed system in terms of execution time and gas consumption. The obtained results proved its effectiveness compared to the most recent works.
The traditional voting process, whether paper-based or electronic, is often criticized for its lack of transparency, susceptibility to fraud, and dependence on centralized authorities. Blockchain technology, particularly in the Web3 ecosystem, provides a decentralized, secure, and tamper-proof solution for digital voting. This paper explores how blockchain can enhance election integrity by leveraging decentralized applications (DApps), smart contracts, and cryptographic security. The proposed system employs Ethereum-based smart contracts to automate vote casting and tallying while ensuring voter privacy through zero-knowledge proofs. Decentralized Identity (DID) is integrated for secure authentication, preventing double voting and identity fraud. The paper discusses system architecture, security considerations, scalability challenges, and real-world applications of blockchain voting, highlighting how Web3 can transform democratic elections.
Sarthak Singh Rawat, Rajeev Mohan Sharma, Brian J. Peter, Mohammad Wazid · 6 authors
Secure, verifiable, and transparent elections are the most crucial to democratic procedures. Blockchain technology can be utilized as a potential solution for tamper-resistant and decentralized voting schemes. The utilization of blockchain technology in e-voting systems is of significant interest because of its capacity to improve transparency, security, and integrity in digital voting. However, privacy and voter anonymity are imperative concerns. This paper presents a novel blockchain voting system that preserves vote integrity and voter anonymity by using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). In this paper, we propose the system architecture, cryptographic primitives, implementation strategies, and compare security and performance to conventional e-voting systems. The new paradigm preserves voter anonymity, correctness of votes, and ensures end-to-end verifiability. Further, the practical implementation of the proposed scheme is provided to measure the performance of important parameter, like, total votes cast, total gas used, number of mined blocks, transactions per seconds, etc.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ketav Shah, Aparna Kumari, Bhavya Solanki, S. N. Saud · 5 authors
This research presents ZTSec-FedSDN, a privacy-preserving federated framework for SDN attack detection that integrates zero-trust blockchain architecture with 6G terahertz networks. The framework enables collaborative training of Deep Neural Network models across distributed clients while maintaining data privacy and leveraging the high-speed capabilities of 6G terahertz communication. Using the SDNFlow dataset containing diverse network traffic patterns and attack types, we implement four federated optimization strategies: Federated Averaging (FedAvg), Federated Proximal (FedProx), Federated Adam (FedAdam), and Federated Adagrad (FedAdagrad). The zero-trust blockchain layer provides an immutable ledger for recording and verifying model updates, ensuring transparency and trustworthiness in the federated learning process. The integration with 6G terahertz networks enables ultra-low latency communication between federated clients, crucial for real-time intrusion detection in SDN environments. Multiple clients collaboratively train the shared DNN model on local traffic data without exposing sensitive information, preserving data privacy while benefiting from collective intelligence. This work systematically evaluates the performance of different federated learning algorithms by comparing model accuracy, convergence speed, robustness, and efficacy in multi-class network attack classification. The results provide comprehensive insights into each optimizer’s suitability for secure, transparent, and trustworthy intrusion detection systems in next-generation SDN environments powered by 6G terahertz networks.
Account-based anonymous blockchain systems can provide robust privacy protection for users. However, they become highly inefficient when handling high-frequency micro-payment scenarios. This paper presents systematic optimizations for batch processing and micro-payment transactions in account-based anonymous blockchain systems to enhance both privacy and efficiency. Building on BlockMaze, the first account-based anonymous blockchain system fully protecting transaction privacy, we propose innovations in batch transfers, batch receipts, and micro-payment handling. By reducing redundant data, improving circuit design, and optimizing zk-SNARK proof generation, we achieve up to 55.90% and 23.02% reductions in overall time consumption for batch transfers and receipts, respectively, significantly cutting computational cost and memory use. For micro-payments, a solution encapsulating the payment deadline reduces transaction delays and fund freezing. Experimental results show only slight increases in proof generation time—1.41 seconds for transfers and 1.02 seconds for payments—while maintaining privacy protection. This research lays a foundation for practical applications of account-based anonymous blockchain systems, enhancing privacy, processing efficiency, and transferability to other systems. • Optimized batch processing and improve transaction efficiency in account-based anonymous blockchain systems. • Optimized circuit design reduces redundant data and shortens zero-knowledge proof times. • Time consumption decreased by up to 55.90% in batch transfer function and 23.02% in batch receipt function. • Highly transferable to other account-based anonymous blockchain systems, offering strong flexibility and application potential. • Offers future research directions to improve blockchain efficiency and privacy protection.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The digitization of democratic processes promises greater accessibility but presents challenges in terms of security, privacy, and verifiability. Existing electronic voting systems often rely on centralized architectures, creating single points of failure and forcing too much trust in authorities, which contradicts democratic principles. This research addresses the challenge of creating a secure, private e-voting system with minimized trust dependencies designed for the most versatile personal device: the smartphone. We introduce SmartphoneDemocracy, a novel e-voting protocol that combines three key technologies: the emerging European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet for Sybil-resistant identity verification, Zero-Knowledge Proofs for privacy-preserving validation, and a peer-to-peer blockchain (TrustChain) for a resilient, serverless public bulletin board. Our protocol enables voters to register and cast ballots anonymously and verifiably directly from their smartphones. We provide a detailed protocol design, a security analysis against a defined threat model, and a performance evaluation demonstrating that the computational and network overhead is feasible for medium- to large-scale elections. By developing and prototyping this system, we demonstrate a viable path to empower citizens with a trustworthy, accessible, and user-controlled digital voting experience.
Transparency is one of the key benefits of public blockchains. However, the public visibility of transactions potentially compromises users' privacy. The fundamental challenge is to balance the intrinsic benefits of blockchain openness with the vital need for individual confidentiality. The proposal suggests creating a confidential version of wrapped Ethereum (cWETH) fully within the application layer. The solution combines the Elliptic Curve (EC) Twisted ElGamal-based commitment scheme to preserve confidentiality and the EC Diffie-Hellman (DH) protocol to introduce accessibility limited by the commitment scheme. To enforce the correct generation of commitments, encryption, and decryption, zk-SNARKs are utilized.
Encouraging just, secure, and open election processes is a fundamental aspect of any democratic culture. Traditional and even modern electronic voting systems are plagued by persistent issues like the failure to provide anonymity for voters, forgery risks, scalability, and the absence of verifiable trust. This paper proposes a blockchain-based digital voting framework designed to address these systemic limitations by leveraging distributed ledger technology and smart contracts. The proposed solution offers end-to-end verifiability, vote immutability, and decentralized auditing mechanisms through a mobile-accessible platform built on Ethereum using Solidity and Hardhat, with Node.js and React.js for frontend interfacing. Experimental results demonstrate improved system scalability, resistance to tampering, and support for remote voting, while maintaining ballot privacy and affordability. The research also evaluates key performance indicators under various test scenarios, establishing the system’s effectiveness and practical relevance in real-world electoral environments.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Alamelu alias Rajasree S, V. Mohanraj, R Charumathi, N. Shunmuga Karpagam · 6 authors
Beyond cryptocurrencies, blockchain's ability to create permanent, tamper-proof records is finding increasing application in domains such as supply chain management, insurance, healthcare, e-governance, and voting. Recently, researchers have shown significant interest in how blockchain technology could improve the voting process. However, despite its potential, blockchain remains complex, and setting it up, even for a small-scale election, can be challenging. This paper proposes a lightweight blockchain-based e-voting framework with reduced computational overhead, making it more practical for small-scale elections. The objective of the framework is to enhance voter trust in the e-voting process. The framework was designed following a comprehensive comparative analysis of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) and consensus algorithms. A mock election was conducted to validate the proposed framework. Evaluation results indicated that the proposed framework outperformed existing solutions in terms of efficiency and ease of implementation.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
ABSTRACT The rise of cyber threats has underscored the critical need for robust intrusion detection systems (IDS). While traditional approaches, including statistical, knowledge‐based, and AI‐driven methods, have been pivotal, they often face limitations such as data privacy concerns, scalability challenges, and low detection accuracy on unfamiliar threats. This paper addresses these issues by adopting a federated learning (FL) paradigm for collaborative intrusion detection, allowing data to remain local and enhancing privacy protection. The proposed solution integrates advanced encryption techniques and differential privacy to safeguard confidentiality while ensuring system scalability and adaptability. By introducing a robust separation of agents' roles and leveraging FL's decentralized architecture, the system overcomes the limitations of centralized learning, including single points of failure and communication overhead. Experimental results validate the proposed architecture, demonstrating significant improvements in performance and offering a promising direction for modern network security. This work not only highlights the potential of FL‐based IDS but also explores the integration of distributed ledger technologies to further enhance trust and security. These findings contribute to the growing field of privacy‐preserving computing and lay the groundwork for future innovations in scalable, secure, and efficient intrusion detection systems.
Decentralized anonymous payment (DAP) solves the privacy leakage problem in decentralized payment. However, some criminals may use DAP to carry out illegal activities, since DAP supports unconditional privacy protection and illegal transactions are difficult to be identified and tracked. Some studies have introduced regulatory mechanisms in DAP to track illegal transactions, but there are still problems such as privacy disclosure and low regulatory efficiency. In this paper, we propose an efficient two-level supervision scheme ETLS, which aggregates anonymous transactions based on Walsh commitment. The first-level regulator only needs to process the aggregation results to screen out suspicious users, and the second-level regulator discloses the public keys of suspicious users. During the supervision process, only the public keys of suspicious users will be identified, and the privacy of compliant transactions will be kept confidential. Compared to previous works, the ETLS scheme greatly improves regulatory efficiency while ensuring the privacy of transaction address and payment amount. The security properties of the ETLS scheme are defined and proved based on the security of DAP system, the security of Walsh commitment and zero-knowledge proof, and its performance is tested based on the Zcash system. The findings demonstrate that the ETLS scheme can effectively strike a compromise between privacy protection and regulatory requirements while maintaining low computational and communication overheads.