Blockchain Papers

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.

Angelo Furfaro, Carmelo Felicetti, Domenico Saccà, Felice Crupi

No abstract is available for this record.

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

No abstract is available for this record.

Tao Zhang, Fahim Rahman, Mark Tehranipoor, Farimah Farahmandi

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) bitstream reverse engineering and counterfeiting is a pertinent challenge in the modern hardware supply chain. To this end, this article proposes a blockchain-based technology to foster authenticity and integrity of the FPGA supply chain for trustworthy traceability. The proposed approach is transformative in being able to detect counterfeit FPGA chips and bitstreams using state-of-the-art blockchain technologies.—Kanad Basu, The University of Texas at Dallas

Kilian Becher, Mirko Schäfer, Axel Schröpfer, Thorsten Strufe

Ensuring sustainable sourcing of crude materials and production of goods is a pressing problem in consideration of the growing world population and rapid climate change. Supply-chain traceability systems based on distributed ledgers can help to enforce sustainability policies like production limits. We propose two mutually independent distributed-ledger-based protocols that enable public verifiability of policy compliance. They are designed for different supply-chain scenarios and use different privacy-enhancing technologies in order to protect confidential supply-chain data: secret sharing and homomorphic encryption. The protocols can be added to existing supply-chain traceability solutions with minor effort. They ensure confidentiality of transaction details and offer public verifiability of producers' compliance, enabling institutions and even end consumers to evaluate sustainability of supply chains. Through extensive theoretical and empirical evaluation, we show that both protocols perform verification for lifelike supply-chain scenarios in perfectly practical time.

XiaoQi Zhang, GuangSong Li, YongJuan Wang

Since its inception, blockchain technology attracts great attention from the industry and academia. With its development, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin based on blockchain technology gradually emerge and enter the financial field. Meanwhile, malicious behaviors aimed at bitcoin become more and more common and cause huge damage to cryptocurrency users and the evolution of blockchain technology, which prompt researchers to establish various models to deal with this problem. In this paper, we collected the historical bitcoin transaction dataset and extracted features from it. After standardizing features, we used an unsupervised learning model based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to detect dataset containing more than 30 million normal and 108 malicious samples and reached a precision of 23% and recall value close to 100%.

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.

Siqi Liu

Online privacy protection is highly associated with verification since it is a part of communication between users and servers. Because privacy has a probability of leaking out during the transmissions. With a new method without knowing and verifying the privacy, the verification method will have a revolution. The traditional verification pattern can be rewritten. This paper introduces the history of verification or secret protection and specifically discusses the theory of zero-knowledge proof. After pointing out that the disadvantage of zero-knowledge is time-consuming, this paper expends the theory with zk-SNARK which stands for “zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge”. The part of zk-SNARK gives 2 implementations by linear algebra and polynomial. This paper lists 3 applications of zk-SNARK, which are z-cash, filecoin and loopring 3.0 in detail. In the end, this paper presents the advantage of zero-knowledge proof with the comparison of other currencies and discusses the risk of using zero-knowledge proof as contracts.

Dimitris Mouris, Charles Gouert, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos

As integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing have become highly globalized, hardware security risks become more prominent as malicious parties can exploit multiple stages of the supply chain for profit. Two potential targets in this chain are third-party intellectual property (3PIP) vendors and their customers. Untrusted parties can insert hardware Trojans into 3PIP circuit designs that can both alter device functionalities when triggered or create a side channel to leak sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. To mitigate this risk, the absence of Trojans in 3PIP designs should be verified before integration, imposing a major challenge for vendors who have to argue their IPs are safe to use, while also maintaining the privacy of their designs before ownership is transferred. To achieve this goal, in this work we employ modern cryptographic protocols for zero-knowledge proofs and enable 3PIP vendors prove an IP design is free of Trojan triggers without disclosing the corresponding netlist. Our approach uses a specialized circuit compiler that transforms arbitrary netlists into a zero-knowledge-friendly format, and introduces a versatile Trojan detection module that maintains the privacy of the actual netlist.

Dawei Li, Ruonan Chen, Di Liu, Yingxian Song · 8 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Ying Zhang

Music creation and its promotion are encouraged both in music education and through activities organized in the context of artistic creation as part of the education in question. Although copyright registration is the primary way authors protect their rights, this is not feasible in most cases, as the processes take a long time to complete and incur high costs. We utilize modern innovative technologies and their developments in copyright protection matters to increase security and trust in music education. In particular, an advanced model of ensuring the methods and innovation produced in music education processes is proposed, using blockchain technology and smart contracts. But given that, even in an advanced system like the proposed one, authentication evidence can be easily intercepted, this work proposes a single and robust identification scheme based on an innovative zero-knowledge proof (ZNP) system, which allows one side of communication to convince the other of its validity.

Hsing‐Chung Chen, Bambang Irawan, Pei-Yu Hsu, Jhih-Sheng Su · 11 authors

Advances in information technology (IT) and operation technology (OT) accelerate the development of manufacturing systems (MS) consisting of integrated circuits (ICs), modules, and systems, toward Industry 4.0. However, the existing MS does not support comprehensive identity forensics for the whole system, limiting its ability to adapt to equipment authentication difficulties. Furthermore, the development of trust imposed during their crosswise collaborations with suppliers and other manufacturers in the supply chain is poorly maintained. In this paper, a trust chain framework with a comprehensive identification mechanism is implemented for the designed MS system, which is based and created on the private blockchain in conjunction with decentralized database systems to boost the flexibility, traceability, and identification of the IC-module-system. Practical implementations are developed using a functional prototype. First, the decentralized application (DApp) and the smart contracts are proposed for constructing the new trust chain under the proposed comprehensive identification mechanism by using blockchain technology. In addition, the blockchain addresses of IC, module, and system are automatically registered to InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), individually. In addition, their corresponding hierarchical CID (content identifier) values are organized by using Merkle DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), which is employed via the hierarchical content identifier mechanism (HCIDM) proposed in this paper. Based on insights obtained from this analysis, the trust chain based on HCIDM can be applied to any MS system, for example, this trust chain could be used to prevent the counterfeit modules and ICs employed in the monitoring system of a semiconductor factory environment. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme could work in practice under the much lower costs, compared to the public blockchain, with a total cost of 0.002094 Ether. Finally, this research is developed an innovation trust chain mechanism that could be provided the system-level security for any MS toward Industrial 4.0 in order to meet the requirements of both manufacturing innovation and product innovation in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Venkata K. V. V. Bathalapalli, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos, Babu Kaji Baniya · 5 authors

This article presents the first-ever hardware-assisted blockchain for simultaneously handling device and data security in smart healthcare. This article presents the hardware security primitive physical unclonable functions (PUF) and blockchain technology together as PUFchain 2.0 with a two-level authentication mechanism. The proposed PUFchain 2.0 security primitive presents a scalable approach by allowing Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices to connect and obtain PUF keys from the edge server with an embedded PUF module instead of connecting a PUF module to each device. The PUF key, once assigned to a particular media access control (MAC) address by the miner, will be unique for that MAC address and cannot be assigned to other devices. PUFs are developed based on internal micro-manufacturing process variations during chip fabrication. This property of PUFs is integrated with blockchain by including the PUF key of the IoMT into blockchain for authentication. The robustness of the proposed Proof of PUF-Enabled authentication consensus mechanism in PUFchain 2.0 has been substantiated through test bed evaluation. Arbiter PUFs have been used for the experimental validation of PUFchain 2.0. From the obtained 200 PUF keys, 75% are reliable and the Hamming distance of the PUF module is 48%. Obtained database outputs along with other metrics have been presented for validating the potential of PUFchain 2.0 in smart healthcare.

Xiaofeng Chen, Xiangjuan Jia, Jing Xu, Lu Zhang · 6 authors

Standards are an important key to the success of developing technologies, and formulating the right standards at the right time for technology development helps ensure the ease of use and interoperability of the technology, and blockchain technology is no exception. As blockchain technology has been officially incorporated into China’s new information infrastructure category, the application field of blockchain has expanded rapidly, gradually extending from the financial field and government affairs to other fields in the real economy. The real implementation of blockchain is inseparable from the open a complete standard system. The development of international standards aims to standardize the applications of blockchain, which can effectively break through the cognitive and technical barriers between different countries, industries and systems on a global scale, prevent application risks, and provide a standard basis for the development of the global blockchain industry. From the perspective of international standardization, this paper summarizes the current status of IEEE standards in the field of blockchain, comparatively analyzes the current status of major international standards organizations ISO, ITU-T and IEEE in the field of blockchain standards, focusing on the current status of IEEE blockchain standards analyzed, analyzed the characteristics of IEEE in blockchain technology standards and application standards. Through data analysis, carry out the planning and layout of future standards, assist the development of international standardization, promote the application and implementation of blockchain technology, and promote the joint application and development of blockchain technology in various industries.

Yacov Manevich, Adi Akavia

A Hash Time Lock Contract (HTLC) is a protocol that is commonly used to exchange payments across different blockchains. Using HTLC as a building block for cross blockchain atomic swaps has its drawbacks: The notion of time is handled differently in each blockchain, be it private or public. Additionally, if the swap ends up aborted, the funds are locked in escrow until the safety timeout expires. In this work we formulate a new cryptographic primitive: Attribute Verifiable Timed Commitment which enables to prove that a timed commitment commits to a value which possesses certain attributes. Using our cryptographic primitive, we describe a new cross chain atomic swap protocol that operates without blockchain derived time and unlike the state of the art, all parties can instantly abort the swap without waiting for the safety timeouts to expire. In order to prove in zero knowledge that a secret committed to using a timed commitment has a claimed hash value, we employ the “MPC in the head” technique by Ishai et al. and implement our zero-knowledge proof protocol and evaluate its performance. As part of our techniques, we develop a novel and efficient procedure for integer Lower-Than validation in arithmetic circuits which may be of independent interest.

Hui Zhang, Weixin Bian, Biao Jie, Shuwan Sun

We propose an efficient identity authentication protocol based on cancelable biometric and Physical Uncloable Function (PUF) namely BioP-TAP, which realizes the two-way authentication between the user and the server. Specially, the concept of biometric template protection is added to the proposed protocol to better protect user privacy. We use the properties of PUF to generate the cancelable biometric and adds it to the authentication protocol. Then, we design a complete authentication protocol combining the elliptic curve Pedersen commitment and Zero-knowledge proof. Finally, we adopt the method of combining formalization and non-formalization to carry out scientific evaluation from multiple perspectives. And the performance analysis and comparison with existing schemes are employed to evaluate the proposed scheme, so as to ensure the effectiveness and security. The results show that the proposed method is more effective for security than existing methods, and more suitable for the user biometric authentication in a multi-server environment.

Akhtar Badshah, Muhammad Waqas, Ghulam Abbas, Fazal Muhammad · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Sungjin Yu, Youngho Park

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs)-based medical systems are an emerging paradigm of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in which the patients and doctors can access various healthcare services via wireless communication technology without visiting the hospital in person. However, an adversary attempts a variety of security attacks because the sensitive information in various fields is exchanged via an insecure channel. Thus, robust and lightweight authentication protocols are essential for providing dependable healthcare services in WMSN-based medical systems. Recently, Wang et al. (IEEE Internet of Things Journal, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3117762) proposed blockchain and physically unclonable functions (PUFs)-based lightweight authentication protocol for WMSN. They claimed that their protocol is resistant to cyber and physical security threats and also does provide necessary security requirements. However, we prove that their protocol is vulnerable to various security attacks, such as man-in-the-middle and session key disclosure attacks and also lacks mutual authentication. As a result, we propose a robust authentication protocol for WMSN using blockchain and PUF to address the security problems raised by Wang et al.’s scheme. we assess the security of the proposed scheme by using informal and formal security analyses, such as AVISPA simulation and the ROR oracle model. Furthermore, we present the testbed experiments using Raspberry PI 4 based on MIRACL Crypto SDK. Then, we show the performance of the enhanced scheme compared with related schemes based on testbed experiments. Consequently, our scheme is better suited for practical WMSN-based medical systems because it provides greater security and efficiency than competing schemes.

Feng Yang, Liao Lei, Lin Chen

Blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger where data is produced and stored in units of blocks, and is connected end to end in chronological order to form a chain structure. However, at present, the blockchain has a certain degree of closure, that is, the problem of interaction between the blockchain and the outside of the chain, and the blockchain cannot access the state of the external closed world system. In order to overcome this limitation, various platforms have introduced the concept of oracles in different forms and purposes. However, so far, there is still a lack of elaboration on the classification, analysis and research of basic Oracle methods. Based on the two basic perspectives of Oracle, this article studies and expresses the basic Oracle model of the blockchain to solve the following problems: From the perspective of the blockchain, the data flow is divided into inbound data flow and outbound data flow; From the perspective of the originator of the data flow, the communication direction is divided into push-based communication and pull-based communication. This paper describes the structural design of these four methods in detail, which can provide researchers with some method inspiration and design ideas for the interaction between the blockchain and the off-chain world.

Bhavaraju Venkata Anagha, Devika KN, Ramesh Bhakthavatchalu

At present, Blockchain is one of the biggest sought after research-oriented field that finds application in numerous areas including finance, cryptocurrency, asset management and so on. Blockchain is basically a public distributed database that holds the encrypted data. To ensure that each transaction is true and correct, the blocks are initially validated and then agreed upon by the user through a consensus mechanism like Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS) etc [57] [53]. The most commonly used consensus mechanism over the year is PoW, which involves the user to solve a computationally hard puzzle. But, the problem with this traditional consensus mechanism is that the whole process is power and resource hungry and requires a considerable amount of time for the computation. This huge requirement can be reduced considerably by replacing these algorithms with certain hardware primitives without even compromising on the correctness, security and trust features. This project work focuses on providing a viable replacement to the authentication/ validation and mining part of the existing Consensus algorithm. This work make use of a Ring Oscillator PUF (ROPUF) for authenticating the identity of user and a reconfigurable LFSR for doing the mining function. This is a research attempt to study on how hardware primitives can be used as a substitute to the power and resource hungry mechanisms currently in use. This aims at reducing the burden on hefty software by leveraging the advantages of cost effective hardware primitives.