The rapid development of Internet of things (IoT) and edge computing technologies has brought forth numerous possibilities for the intelligent and digital future. The frequent communication and interaction between devices inevitably generate a large amount of sensitive information. Deploying a blockchain network to store sensitive data is crucial for ensuring privacy and security. The openness and synchronicity of blockchain networks give rise to challenges such as transaction privacy and storage capacity issues, significantly impeding their development in the context of edge computing and IoT. This paper proposes a reliable fog computing service solution based on a blockchain fog architecture. This paper stores data files in the inter planetary file system (IPFS) and encrypts the file hash values used for retrieving data files with stream cipher encryption. It employs a steganographic transmission technique leveraging AlphaZero's Gomoku algorithm to discretely transmit the stream cipher key across the blockchain network without a carrier, thus achieving dual encryption. This approach aims to mitigate the storage burden on the blockchain network while ensuring the security of transaction data. Experimental results demonstrate that the model enhances the transmission capacity of confidential information from kilobytes (KB) to megabytes (MB) and exhibits high levels of covert and security features.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the rapid emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, cross-domain collaboration and information sharing among IoT devices have become increasingly critical. However, the security and privacy risks associated with cross-domain communication have also escalated. Establishing efficient and secure authentication mechanisms for cross-domain collaboration among IoT devices remains a complex challenge, particularly in the context of bandwidth-constrained wide-area networks. Most recent cross-domain authentication solutions rely heavily on emerging blockchain technology. However, in bandwidth-constrained scenarios, they may suffer from efficiency losses. Consequently, an effective resolution of cross-domain authentication issues in bandwidth-limited conditions has become a pressing concern. In this article, we introduce an efficient blockchain-assisted cross-domain authentication mechanism, named EBCA, designed for bandwidth-constrained wide area IoT networks. To enhance authentication efficiency, we design a highly efficient multiblockchain architecture, which optimally leverages the underlying network bandwidth, significantly improving throughput and reducing latency for cross-domain authentication. Additionally, threshold signatures are incorporated to minimize communication overhead, further enhancing authentication efficiency. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. Our scheme has been shown to increase throughput by approximately 34% when compared to existing methods.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Today's digital revolution is built on the fusion of blockchain technology and cryptography. This paper examines how cryptographic algorithms support blockchain network security, integrity, and decentralization by delving into the complex interactions between these fields. We explore the landscape of cryptographic techniques that guarantee transactions and block authenticity through a thorough discussion. We also delve into the creation and administration of cryptographic keys within blockchain ecosystems and reveal the cryptographic underpinnings of consensus mechanisms. This paper also covered zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, scalable solutions, secure cooperation, and the effective development of post-quantum cryptography. The findings shed light on a secure, inclusive, and radically transformational future powered by blockchain technology.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Qi Liang, Ning Shi, Yu‐an Tan, Chunying Li · 5 authors
With the widespread adoption of blockchain technology, its public ledger characteristic enhances transaction transparency but also amplifies the risk of privacy breaches. Attackers can infer users’ real identities and behaviors by analyzing public transaction patterns and address relationships, posing a severe threat to users’ privacy and security, and thus hindering further advancements in blockchain applications. To address this challenge, covert communication has emerged as an effective strategy for safeguarding the privacy of blockchain users and preventing information leakage. But existing blockchain-based covert communication schemes rely solely on the immutability of blockchain itself for robustness and suffer from low transmission efficiency. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a stealthy communication model with blockchain smart contract for bidding systems. The model initiates by preprocessing sensitive information using a secret-sharing algorithm-the Shamir (t, n) threshold scheme-and subsequently embeds this information into bidding amounts, facilitating the covert transfer of sensitive data. We implemented and deployed this model on the Ethereum platform and conducted comprehensive performance evaluations. To assess the stealthiness of our approach, we employed a suite of statistical tests including the CDF, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, Welch’s t-test and K–L divergence. These analyses confirmed that amounts carrying concealed information were statistically indistinguishable from regular transactions, thus validating the effectiveness of our solution in maintaining the anonymity and confidentiality of information transmission within the blockchain ecosystem.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract Online voting is gaining traction in contemporary society to reduce costs and boost voter turnout, allowing individuals to cast their ballots from anywhere with an internet connection. This innovation is cautiously met due to the inherent security risks, where a single vulnerability can lead to widespread vote manipulation. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to address these concerns and create a trustworthy electoral process. Blockchain offers a decentralized network of nodes that enhances transparency, security, and verifiability. Its distributed ledger and non‐repudiation features make it a compelling alternative to traditional electronic voting systems, ensuring the integrity of elections. To further bolster the security of online voting, we propose DemocracyGuard platform on the Ethereum blockchain, which incorporates facial recognition technology to authenticate voters. By leveraging these advancements, DemocracyGuard aims to provide a secure and resilient platform for online voting, paving the way for its broader adoption and revolutionizing the electoral landscape.
A Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocol allows a participant to prove the knowledge of some secret without revealing any information about it. While such protocols are typically executed by computers, there exists a line of research proposing physical instances of ZKP protocols. Up to now, many card-based ZKP protocols for pen-and-pencil puzzles, like Sudoku, have been designed. Those games, mostly edited by Nikoli, have simple rules, yet designing them in card-based ZKP protocols is non-trivial. In this work, we propose a card-based ZKP protocol for Usowan, a Nikoli game. In Usowan, for each room of a puzzle instance, there is exactly one piece of false information. The goal of the game is to detect this wrong data amongst the correct data and also to satisfy the other rules. Designing a card-based ZKP protocol to deal with the property of detecting a liar has never been done. In some sense, we propose a physical ZKP for hiding of a liar. This work extends a previous paper appearing in Ref. [1]. In this extension, we propose two other protocols, for Herugolf and Five Cells. The puzzles are specifically chosen because each of those three puzzles shares a common constraint, connectivity. However, showing the connected configuration cannot be done with generic approach and brings new construction to the existing connectivity ZKP protocol. Indeed, in Herugolf, the connectivity is handled with a given length of cell which is decremental (i.e., the length of each connected cell decreases by one at each step). For Five Cells, there is an additional step in the setup allowing to encode all the information needed to ensure a valid ZKP protocol.
Open access
graph theory and CDMA systems
Graph Labeling and Dimension Problems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Non-Fungible Tokens (or, for short, NFT) establish the ownership and the authenticity of digital assets. Regardless the high security levels provided by blockchain, are not excluded the cases where the ownership of a digital object may be claimed without proper rights. Fraud and copyright infringement should be prevented through the insurance of the authenticity and the integrity of a digital object associated with an NFT. In this work we consider the case of NFT images under the aspect of being susceptible to duplication, theft, tampering, fraud, or in general any potential threat against their authenticity and integrity properties. To deal with such cases we propose an integrated system that provides an a priori embedding of authenticity and integrity related information by deploying robust authenticity information hiding in the frequency domain alongside fragile integrity information hiding in the spatial domain before the image is being publicly available as NFT. Moreover, an automated secure procedure for the development of smart contracts alongside the development of an NFT dual that serves as backup and is not publicly available through the marketplace is proposed in order to retain the initial digital image. We design a modular architecture that incorporates all the components proposed in this work and discuss its potentials on its deployment over different digital objects that can be considered as NFTs.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Saeed Bamashmos, Naveen Chilamkurti, Ahmad Salehi Shahraki
Internet of Things (IoT) technology is evolving over the peak of smart infrastructure with the participation of IoT devices in a wide range of applications. Traditional IoT authentication methods are vulnerable to threats due to wireless data transmission. However, IoT devices are resource- and energy-constrained, so building lightweight security that provides stronger authentication is essential. This paper proposes a novel, two-layered multi-factor authentication (2L-MFA) framework using blockchain to enhance IoT devices and user security. The first level of authentication is for IoT devices, one that considers secret keys, geographical location, and physically unclonable function (PUF). Proof-of-authentication (PoAh) and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman are followed for lightweight and low latency support. Second-level authentication for IoT users, which are sub-categorized into four levels, each defined by specific factors such as identity, password, and biometrics. The first level involves a matrix-based password; the second level utilizes the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA); and levels 3 and 4 are secured with iris and finger vein, providing comprehensive and robust authentication. We deployed fuzzy logic to validate the authentication and make the system more robust. The 2L-MFA model significantly improves performance, reducing registration, login, and authentication times by up to 25%, 50%, and 25%, respectively, facilitating quicker cloud access post-authentication and enhancing overall efficiency.
Open access
User Authentication and Security Systems
Biometric Identification and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Matthew Marcellino, Arya Wicaksana, Moeljono Widjaja
The advancement of blockchain technology introduces the new concept of electronic voting systems (e-voting) that are fully anonymous, transparent, trustless, and decentralized. The limitation of blockchain-based e-voting systems is the need for initial setup to verify and validate eligible voters. This initial setup requires human intervention, which curbs the full potential and exploitation of blockchain technology. Identity authentication is crucial in voting systems to ensure the eligibility of the voters and the validity of the results. This paper proposes a hybrid approach using ZK-SNARK for identity authentication systems in blockchain-based e-voting. The proposed hybrid approach aims to maintain the benefit of blockchain technology while guaranteeing the eligibility of voters. Both on-chain and off-chain identity authentication modules are designed and developed to balance the trade-off of centralized and decentralized nature for the blockchain-based e-voting systems. The affordability of the proposed system is essential in justifying the approach's feasibility and usability. Voting systems are expected to host thousands to millions of voters, and the cost is one major consideration. The proposed system is deployed in the Ethereum blockchain network, including its sidechain and Layer 2, i.e., Avalanche, Arbitrum One, and Polygon. The gas fee required for the smart contract deployment in Ethereum is USD12.5, while the lowest gas fee is in the Polygon blockchain network for USD0.02.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
최근 가상화폐의 대중화되면서 이의 특성을 이용한 피싱 및 자금 세탁과 같은 불법 행위가 급증하고 있다. 특히 이더리움을 이용한 온라인 피싱 및 스캠 범죄의 피해가 증가하는 추세이다. 이에 따라, 이더리움 기반 피싱 및 스캠을 효과적으로 탐지할 방법이 필요하다. 이 논문에서는 실시간으로 수집되는 이더리움 온체인 데이터를 활용하여 피싱 활동을 탐지할 수 있는 어텐션 기반 1D CNN을 모델을 제안한다. 본 모델의 핵심적인 특징은 트랜잭션 데이터의 시간 패턴을 인식하여 피싱을 예측하는 어텐션 메커니즘이 결합된 1D CNN 구조에 있다. 모델을 평가하기 위해 기존 딥러닝 모델들과 비교하였으며 비교한 결과 제안된 모델이 정확도와 AUC가 향상되었음을 확인할 수 있었다.
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Cryptocurrency is designed for anonymous financial transactions to avoid centralized control, censorship, and regulations. To protect anonymity in the underlying P2P networking, Bitcoin adopts and supports anonymous routing of Tor, I2P, and CJDNS. We analyze the networking performances of these anonymous routing with the focus on their impacts on the blockchain consensus protocol. Compared to non-anonymous routing, anonymous routing adds inherent-by-design latency performance costs due to the additions of the artificial P2P relays. However, we discover that the lack of ecosystem plays an even bigger factor in the performances of the anonymous routing for cryptocurrency blockchain. I2P and CJDNS, both advancing the anonymous routing beyond Tor, in particular lack the ecosystem of sizable networking-peer participation. I2P and CJDNS thus result in the Bitcoin experiencing networking partitioning, which has traditionally been researched and studied in cryptocurrency/blockchain security. We focus on I2P and Tor and compare them with the non-anonymous routing because CJDNS has no active public peers resulting in no connectivity. Tor results in slow propagation while I2P yields soft partition, which is a partition effect long enough to have a substantial impact in the PoW mining. To better study and identify the latency and the ecosystem factors of the cryptocurrency networking and consensus costs, we study the behaviors both in the connection manager (directly involved in the P2P networking) and the address manager (informing the connection manager of the peer selections on the backend). This paper presents our analyses results to inform the state of cryptocurrency blockchain with anonymous routing and discusses future work directions and recommendations to resolve the performance and partition issues.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Arad Kotzer, Mostafa Naamneh, Ori Rottenstreich, Pedro Reviriego
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets representing ownership or proof of authenticity of a unique item. NFTs are blockchain-based and rely on smart contracts. The increase in duplicate NFTs in recent years brings the need for discovery tools for forged NFTs, some of which include using image hash functions. Though the problem of image duplication is widely discussed, detecting NFT duplications requires using fast detection methods as a new NFT image needs to be compared with the entire NFT history on the blockchain. In this paper, we analyze the performance of several image-hash functions, examine the cases where each function performs well, and evaluate multiple image-hash-functions-based NFT duplication detectors. Our approach achieves high accuracy in detecting NFT duplications and demonstrates that using several hash functions rather than one increases the ability to detect duplications.
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Online voting is a trend that is gaining momentum in modern society. It has great potential to decrease organizational costs and increase voter turnout. It eliminates the need to print ballot papers or open polling stations—voters can vote from wherever there is an Internet connection. Despite these benefits, online voting solutions are viewed with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats. A single vulnerability can lead to large-scale manipulations of votes. Electronic voting systems must be legitimate, accurate, safe, and convenient when used for elections. Nonetheless, adoption may be limited by potential problems associated with electronic voting sys-tems . Blockchain technology came into the ground to overcome these issues and offers decentralized nodes for electronic voting and is used to produce electronic voting systems mainly because of their end-to-end verification advantages. This technology is a beautiful replacement for traditional electronic voting solutions with distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection characteristics. The following article gives an overview of electronic voting systems based on blockchain technology. The main goal of this analysis was to examine the current status of blockchain-based voting research and online voting systems and any related difficulties to predict future developments. This study provides a conceptual description of the intended blockchain-based electronic voting application and an introduction to the fundamental structure and characteristics of the blockchain in connection to electronic voting. As a consequence of this study, it was discovered that blockchain systems may help solve some of the issues that now plague election system
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The article delves into the intricate characteristics and security properties of the secp256k1 elliptic curve used for the generation of addresses in the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger that records all transactions made with Bitcoin cryptocurrency. In this work, the secp256k1 elliptic curve and its parameters and the method of generating private and public keys using random numbers are described. While the private key allows for the signing of transactions to spend Bitcoin, the corresponding public key and address enable others to verify transactions and send funds to that specific address on the blockchain, ensuring security, authenticity, and privacy in the decentralized network. The attacks on the use of secp256k1 for generating the bitcoin addresses like the Brute force attack, twist attack, fault attacks, and side channel attacks in the implementation of the elliptic curve are discussed. By maintaining the security and integrity of secp256k1, we can ensure that cryptographic operations, such as digital signatures and key exchanges, remain uncompromised. If the curve's security were compromised, malicious users could potentially derive private keys from public keys, leading to unauthorized transactions, double-spending, or other malicious activities. The security of implementation can be enhanced by ensuring cryptographic libraries and software implementations that utilize secp256k1 undergo thorough testing and validation to ensure correct and secure operations. The important attacks on blockchain technology like the 51% attack, Sybil attack, Double Spending attack, and Smart Contract vulnerabilities are discussed. Through a comprehensive exploration, readers will gain insights into why this particular elliptic curve was chosen for use in Bitcoin's cryptographic protocols, highlighting its role in ensuring the robustness and integrity of the blockchain ecosystem.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain-based steganography enables data hiding via encoding the covert data into a specific blockchain transaction field. However, previous works focus on the specific field-embedding methods while lacking a consideration on required field-generation embedding. In this paper, we propose GBSF, a generic framework for blockchain-based steganography. The sender generates the required fields, where the additional covert data is embedded to enhance the channel capacity. Based on GBSF, we design R-GAN that utilizes the generative adversarial network (GAN) with a reversible generator to generate the required fields and encode additional covert data into the input noise of the reversible generator. We then explore the performance flaw of R-GAN and introduce CCR-GAN as an improvement. CCR-GAN employs a counter-intuitive data preprocessing mechanism to reduce decoding errors in covert data. It incurs gradient explosion for model convergence and we design a custom activation function. We conduct experiments using the transaction amount of the Bitcoin mainnet as the required field. The results demonstrate that R-GAN and CCR-GAN allow to embed 11-bit (embedding rate of 17.2%) and 24-bit (embedding rate of 37.5%) covert data within a transaction amount, and enhance the channel capacity of state-of-the-art works by 4.30% to 91.67% and 9.38% to 200.00%, respectively.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Recently, sharding has become a popular direction to scale out blockchain systems by dividing the network into shards that process transactions in parallel. However, secure and efficient cross-shard transaction processing remains a vital and unaddressed challenge. Existing work handles a cross-shard transaction via transaction division: dividing it into sub-transactions, processing them separately, and combing the processing results. Such an approach is unfavorable for decentralized blockchain due to its reliance on trustworthy parties, e.g., the client or a reference node, to perform the transaction division and result combination. Furthermore, the processing result of one transaction can affect another, violating the important property of transaction isolation. In this work, we propose Sharon, a novel sharding protocol that processes cross-shard transactions via shard rotation rather than transaction division. In Sharon, shards rotate to merge pairwisely and process cross-shard transactions when merged. Sharon eliminates reliance on trustworthy parties and provides transaction isolation in nature because transactions are no longer divided. Nevertheless, it poses a scientific question of when and how to merge the shards to improve system performance. To answer the question, we formally define the shard scheduling problem to minimize transaction confirmation latency and propose a novel construction algorithm. The proposed algorithm is proven optimal and runs in polynomial time. We conduct extensive experiments on Amazon EC2 instances using Bitcoin and Ethereum data. The results indicate that Sharon achieves nearly linear scalability, improves the system throughput by 139%, and saves the transaction processing latency by 72.4% compared with state-of-the-art approaches.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This paper presents a framework for securing blockchain-based IoT systems by integrating Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) within a Hyperledger Fabric environment. Our approach leverages PUFs for robust device authentication and ZKPs for privacy-preserving transaction processing, addressing key challenges of security, privacy, and scalability in IoT systems. The framework’s architecture utilizes Hyperledger Fabric’s modular design and private channels to enhance scalability. Off-chain experimental results demonstrate the framework’s feasibility, with compact proof sizes (median 805 bytes) and efficient processing times (average 2,800 ms end-to-end). A comprehensive security analysis shows the framework’s resilience against various attacks, including device impersonation and data tampering. This work provides a foundation for secure and scalable blockchain-based IoT systems, with directions for future on-chain implementation and optimization for resource-constrained devices.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of devices are connected using a variety of communication technologies to ensure that they can communicate both physically and over the network. However, devices face the challenge of a single point of failure, a malicious user may forge device identity to gain access and jeopardize system security. In addition, devices collect and transmit sensitive data, and the data can be accessed or stolen by unauthorized user, leading to privacy breaches, which posed a significant risk to both the confidentiality of user information and the protection of device integrity. Therefore, in order to solve the above problems and realize the secure transmission of data, this paper proposed EBIAS, a secure and efficient blockchain-based identity authentication scheme designed for IoT devices. First, EBIAS combined the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithm and the SHA-256 algorithm to achieve encrypted communication of the sensitive data. Second, EBIAS integrated blockchain to tackle the single point of failure and ensure the integrity of the sensitive data. Finally, we performed security analysis and conducted sufficient experiment. The analysis and experimental results demonstrate that EBIAS has certain improvements on security and performance compared with the previous schemes, which further proves the feasibility and effectiveness of EBIAS.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Tianyi Liu, Tiancheng Xie, Jiaheng Zhang, Dawn Song · 5 authors
In the past decade, blockchains have seen various financial and technological innovations, with cryptocurrencies reaching a market cap of over 1 trillion dollars. However, scalability is one of the key issues hindering the deployment of blockchains in many applications. To improve the throughput of the transactions, zkRollups and zkEVM techniques using the cryptographic primitive of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have been proposed and many companies are adopting these technologies in the layer-2 solutions. However, in these technologies, the proof generation of the ZKP is the bottleneck and the companies have to deploy powerful machines with TBs of memory to batch a large number of transactions in a ZKP.In this work, we improve the scalability of these techniques by proposing new schemes of fully distributed ZKPs. Our schemes can improve the efficiency and the scalability of ZKPs using multiple machines, while the communication among the machines is minimal. With our schemes, the ZKP generation can be distributed to multiple participants in a model similar to the mining pools. Our protocols are based on Plonk, an efficient zero-knowledge proof system with a universal trusted setup. The first protocol is for data-parallel circuits. For a computation of M sub-circuits of size T each, using M machines, the prover time is O(T log T + M log M), while the prover time of the original Plonk on a single machine is O(MT log(MT )). Our protocol incurs only O(1) communication per machine, and the proof size and verifier time are both O(1), the same as the original Plonk. Moreover, we show that with minor modifications, our second protocol can support general circuits with arbitrary connections while preserving the same proving, verifying, and communication complexity. The technique is general and may be of independent interest for other applications of ZKP.We implement Pianist (Plonk vIA uNlimited dISTribution), a fully distributed ZKP system using our protocols. Pianist can generate the proof for 8192 transactions in 313 seconds on 64 machines. This improves the scalability of the Plonk scheme by 64×. The communication per machine is only 2.1 KB, regardless of the number of machines and the size of the circuit. The proof size is 2.2 KB and the verifier time is 3.5 ms. We further show that Pianist has similar improvements for general circuits. On a randomly generated circuit with 225gates, it only takes 5 s to generate the proof using 32 machines,24.2× faster than Plonk on a single machine.
2 source records
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques