ABSTRACT: The integrity of democratic voting systems is increasingly threatened by security vulnerabilities, lack of transparency, and trust deficits, making electoral processes susceptible to manipulation. To address these concerns, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) introduces a blockchain-powered voting framework that leverages the Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) consensus protocol to enhance security and decentralization. To further fortify the system, ResNet-101, a deep learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN), is integrated for facial recognition authentication, ensuring voter legitimacy and eliminating identity fraud. Additionally, one-time password (OTP) authentication and live location tracking strengthen the system against unauthorized access and proxy voting. By combining blockchain technology, biometric verification, and AI-driven facial authentication, BSC establishes a highly secure, transparent, and tamper-proof voting system. This approach aims to restore public trust in electoral processes, setting a new benchmark for secure and verifiable digital voting systems in democratic governance. Keywords: Blockchain, PoSA, ResNet-101, Facial Recognition, OTP, Voting Security, Transparency, Authentication.
As cyber-crimes have become more complex network forensics has become an essential element of cybersecurity investigations. However, conventional forensic techniques are confronted with challenges such as data privacy, integrity, and secure authentication of evidence. This paper suggests a privacy-preserving AI-augmented forensic framework that uses Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) for authenticating forensics securely and blockchain for tamper-evident forensic storage. The intended framework employs AI and ML strategies for real-time intrusion detection real-time intrusion detection, anomaly recognition, and cyber-attack attribution, radically enhancing forensic efficacy and investigative productivity. Experimental evidence obtained with the UNSW-NB15 dataset provides evidence that the AI model offers a detection rate of 97.5% accompanied by precision as high as 96.8% and a recall of as much as 98.2% to ensure good cyber threat classification. Moreover, the verification process of ZKP takes only 1.2 milliseconds, allowing for fast forensic validation with data confidentiality being maintained. The blockchain-based logging system for forensics has an overhead of merely 0.35 MB per transaction, allowing tamper-proof and scalable storage of forensic data. The findings confirm that integrating AI, ZKP, and blockchain improves forensic trustworthiness at the cost of reduced data exposure. This work adds to developing privacy-protecting forensic techniques and offers a secure, scalable solution for contemporary cybercrime investigations.
Mourya Gowda S, C S Kushal, K. Nikhil, M Niranjanamurthy
In democratic governance, elections play a major role but the current voting systems encounter serious problems like insecurity, inefficiency and lack of openness. In order to overcome these issues, the project introduces a secure voting system built on blockchain which uses its key features of decentralization, unchanging records and transparency to improve how voting takes place. Online voting through the Ethereum blockchain is considered safe, visible and unalterable. Using Ethereum, Snap Vote is designed for open voting, that is, without third-party intervention, participants can take part and review the outcome of voting. It shows how, through the blockchain, votes are recorded in a way that makes results manipulation impossible. With the help of smart contracts, voting is entirely automatic, easy to view and safe. The adoption of a blockchain and a decentralized method ensures elections are trustworthy and economical. Based on the results of simulations, the system has been found feasible and ensures higher security, greater efficiency and greater trust from voters. This project helps us see how changes in voting systems led by blockchain can benefit democracies all over the world.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain, as a distributed ledger, inherently possesses tamper-resistant capabilities, creating a natural channel for covert communication. However, the immutable nature of data storage might introduce challenges to communication security. This study introduces a blockchain-based covert communication model utilizing dynamic Base-K encoding. The proposed encoding scheme utilizes the input address sequence to determine K to encode the secret message and determines the order of transactions based on K, thus ensuring effective concealment of the message. The dynamic encoding parameters enhance flexibility and address issues related to identical transaction amounts for the same secret message. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method maintains smooth communication and low susceptibility to tampering, achieving commendable concealment and embedding rates.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the backbone of the Internet, but remains highly centralised, creating<br/>risks related to censorship, surveillance, and single points of failure. While much of the focus has been on<br/>securing and decentralising DNS as a whole, recursive resolvers continue to rely on central infrastructure.<br/>This paper proposes a decentralised DNS resolver architecture that replaces traditional recursive resolvers<br/>with a decentralised alternative. The system uses the Chord protocol and distributed ledger technology<br/>(DLT) to distribute DNS resolution across a network of cooperating nodes, without altering existing<br/>zone authority structures. We present the key components of the architecture, including peer discovery,<br/>query routing, caching, updating and trust handling, and we analyse how this architecture overcomes<br/>the previously mentioned limitations.
Abstract: Ensuring free and fair elections is the foundation of democratic nations, but conventional voting systems are still susceptible to manipulation, fraud, and inefficiencies. With the advancement of digital infrastructure, electronic voting (evoting) has become a reality, but usually at the expense of transparency and security because of centralized control. Blockchain technology, and specifically Ethereum with its smart contract feature, provides a chance to transform voting systems through decentralization, immutability, and end-to-end verifiability. This suggests a next-generation e-voting system on the Ethereum blockchain with secure voter authentication, transparent vote casting, and smart contract-based automated result counting. Experimental results confirm the system's fraud resistance, scalability for medium-sized elections, and capability to present realtime, tamper-proof election results.
The traditional e-voting systems face a lot of challenges like unauthorized access to the data and there is no mechanism to self-verify the voter and has to depend on others for verification like election authorities. The election conducted through traditional e-voting system requires a lot of human interventions for conducting various processes like registration, tallying etc.). The current e-voting is also prone to hacking and has a lot of vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities significantly weaken the electoral process integrity and efficiency. In order to address these issues, this research involves the development of a permissioned smart contract-based e-voting system for academic institutions suitable for the small size and medium size environments like universities etc. An Electronic voting(e-voting) system is a digital process where the elections are conducted through the electronics instead of the traditional voting system. The e-voting system provides transparency and increases the efficiency of the election process and also allows the people with disabilities to cast their votes remotely. The integration of blockchain technology with smart contracts is able to address the challenges of the traditional electronic system. The proposed system, i.e., permissioned smart contract e-voting system can maintain the transparency during the whole election process and prevent unauthorized access to the data and the fraudulent activities like voter tampering and fraudulent votes. This proposed system uses features or capabilities of blockchain technology specifically Hyperledger Fabric to establish a immutable and decentralized ledger. It also ensures the participation of the voters in a well-managed and controlled manner. It also eliminates the need for human intervention in the election process. Smart Contracts automates the whole election process and is responsible for voter registration, verification and vote tallying process. Voter data and credentials are secured and encrypted with the help of an encryption algorithm, i.e. Advanced Encryption System (AES) throughout the whole electoral process. Furthermore, this research contributes to the digital governance by demonstrating the practical use of this proposed system, i.e. permissioned blockchain system under a controlled environment. Compared to the traditional systems, the proposed framework or system can provide or demonstrate 45% improvement in operational efficiency, human intervention can also be reduced to 60% and there is a slightly huge decrease in the vote tampering and data breaches i.e. by 70%. Future enhancements includes biometric integration for voter authentication or voter verification. AI integrated, permissioned smart contract based e-voting system could be the future or future enhancement that uses facial recognition in order to improve voter authentication uses anomaly detection models to identify the potential threats.
This paper presents a legal and privacy-preserving use of a covert channel built over BLE, specifically between two Android devices. A custom communication protocol has been designed and implemented through a dedicated mobile application, leveraging BLE advertisement packets for unidirectional message exchange. The protocol integrates non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to strengthen the authentication mechanism while preserving anonymity. This allows the receiver to verify the sender’s legitimacy without revealing or exchanging identifying information, achieving blind authentication in a fully connectionless and decentralized architecture. The resulting system enables encrypted, anonymous, and verifiable communication over BLE without pairing or persistent sessions. Experimental validation confirms the protocol’s feasibility, efficiency, and resilience against common wireless threats like spoofing, replay, and message injection. This work demonstrates how BLE and ZKP can be combined to form a secure, privacy-preserving covert communication framework applicable in real-world mobile environments.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Software defined networking (SDN) increasingly integrates multiple controllers from diverse vendors to enhance network scalability, flexibility, and reliability. However, such heterogeneous deployments pose significant security threats, especially at the east-west interface which is connecting these controllers. Existing solutions are inadequate for ensuring robust protection across multi-vendor SDN environments as most of them are meant to a specific type of attacks, use centralized solution, or designed for homogeneous SDN environments. This study proposes a blockchain-based security framework to address existing security gaps within heterogeneous SDN environments. The framework establishes a decentralized, robust, and interoperable security layer for distributed SDN controllers. By utilizing the Ethereum blockchain with customized smart contract-based checks, the proposed approach enables mutual authentication among controllers, secures data exchange, and controls network access. The framework effectively mitigates common SDN threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), man-in-the-middle (MitM), false data injection, and unauthorized access. Experimental results highlight the practicality of the solution, achieving a stable throughput of approximately 20 transactions per second with an average authentication latency of 28-40 ms. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework not only enhances inter-controller communication security but also maintains the network performance, making it a reliable and scalable solution for real-world SDN deployments.
A novel electronic voting system (EVS) was developed by integrating blockchain technology and advanced facial recognition to enhance electoral security, transparency, and accessibility.The system integrates a public, permissionless blockchain-specifically the Ethereum platform-to ensure end-to-end transparency and immutability throughout the voting lifecycle.To reinforce identity verification while preserving voter privacy, a facial recognition technology based on the ArcFace algorithm was employed.This biometric approach enables secure, contactless voter authentication, mitigating risks associated with identity fraud and multiple voting attempts.The confluence of blockchain technology and facial recognition in a unified architecture was shown to improve system robustness against tampering, data breaches, and unauthorized access.The proposed system was designed within a rigorous research framework, and its technical implementation was critically assessed in terms of security performance, scalability, user accessibility, and system latency.Furthermore, potential ethical implications and privacy considerations were addressed through the use of decentralized identity management and encrypted biometric data storage.The integration strategy not only enhances the verifiability and auditability of election outcomes but also promotes greater inclusivity by enabling remote participation without compromising system integrity.This study contributes to the evolving field of electronic voting by demonstrating how advanced biometric verification and distributed ledger technologies can be synchronously leveraged to support democratic processes.The findings are expected to inform future deployments of secure, accessible, and transparent electoral platforms, offering practical insights for governments, policymakers, and technology developers aiming to modernize electoral systems in a post-digital era.
Eber J. Ávila-Martínez, G L K Niharika, Arutchelvi Jayaraj
Voting is the most important topic for societal concern. Nowadays voting is considered as important and mandatory for all the citizens of India. So, compared with the traditional methods, E Voting is considered as the best option for voting mechanism as it is cost efficient, easy accessibility and convenient for every citizen in India. Therefore, E-Voting is mainly focused on Security and these security issues are considered as major drawbacks. To eradicate this factor, Blockchain came up with the idea of Quantum-Resistant Zero-Knowledge Proof Algorithm (QRZ-KPA). QRZ-KPA uses cryptographic and hashing strategies to make a secure and safe voting process. It also safeguards unauthorized users and voters to access it by ensuring the authenticity of the voter without revealing the personal information of the voters by using zero knowledge algorithm. Thus, the QR-ZKPA algorithm ensures the safe and integrated voting process and becomes a strong solution for the challenges and drawbacks faced by the online voting system. Hence, this algorithm provides the safe voting process in democratic process. Furthermore, QR-ZKPA is stronger with the combination of the Isolation Forest (iForest) machine mastering algorithm to identify irregularities and anomalies in vote casting styles, thereby similarly fortifying the system’s defenses in opposition to false sports. This technique offers good protection against vote manipulation, double balloting, unauthorized entry to, and other capability dangers. Our assessments illustrate the combined effectiveness of QR-ZKPA and iForest in enhancing the integrity, confidentiality, and security of blockchain-based totally e-balloting systems, guaranteeing their durability and dependability in a put upquantum environment.
R. N. Kulkarni, Chetna Kaushal, Ismail Keshta, Mukesh Soni · 5 authors
As a prime exemplar of the Internet of Things (IoT), the vehicle-to-vehicle network assumes a pivotal position in the realm of intelligent transportation. It provides various online services for vehicles and reduces the risk of accidents for drivers. However, during communication, the vehicle-to-vehicle network generates sensitive information, such as vehicle location and routes. Enhancing the anonymity of vehicle identities in secure services is a research interest in vehicle-to-vehicle network security, especially in Zero Trust network security. This article introduces an anonymous identity authentication scheme based on batch verification algorithms, leveraging the principles of Zero Trust security. It expands the scope of anonymous authentication methods for IEEE WAVE security services by incorporating techniques such as anonymous credentials and zero-knowledge proofs, in accordance with the tenets of the Zero Trust model. Furthermore, it offers a mechanism for identity recovery via a trusted third party, thereby establishing a holistic 186 security framework. Experimental results indicate that when the number of signatures for batch verification exceeds 11, the computational cost of the proposed scheme is more efficient than some comparative schemes. Based on this, the article suggests the optimal cycle for batch verification in the DSRC’s BSM and vehicle proximity payment applications while maintaining a zero-trust security posture.
Advances in Web 3.0 technologies, such as blockchain and AI, are increasing demand for stronger authentication solutions. This study introduces a decentralized digital passport system based on blockchain and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The method converts user identity data into hashed images, combines them, and stores them in distributed storage. A smart contract then registers the image address and user details as an NFT on the blockchain, forming a secure digital passport. This method enhances security, transparency, and decentralized data management. NFT-based digital passports can significantly improve authentication efficiency and security, even with repeated verification, while simplifying access to systems requiring authentication.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ensuring security, transparency, and trust in electronic voting systems is a critical challenge in modern democracy. Traditional e-voting systems are often centralized, making them vulnerable to cyber threats, data manipulation, and insider attacks. Additionally, reliance on intermediaries increases costs and introduces potential points of failure. To address these challenges, this study proposes a blockchain based e-voting system using the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts to establish a tamper-proof, decentralized, and automated voting process. By leveraging blockchain’s immutability and cryptographic security, the proposed system eliminates the risk of unauthorized alterations, ensuring every vote remains verifiable and irreversible. The system is designed to be cost-effective, scalable, and accessible, reducing reliance on human intervention and enhancing voter confidence. This study evaluates the system's performance using simulated election scenarios, focusing on key metrics such as security, efficiency, and user-friendliness. Additionally, we explore potential enhancements, including biometric authentication and layer-2 scalability solutions, to further improve accessibility and system robustness. The findings of this research contribute to the advancement of secure digital voting technologies, offering insights valuable for governments, policymakers, and researchers in the field of e-governance.
Electronic voting (e-voting) has emerged as a transformative technology in the modern digital era. Many countries across the world are using e-voting systems in different types of elections, from political to non-political. One of the primary goals of e-voting is ensuring both verifiability and privacy simultaneously, which we refer to as security. Verifiability is a security feature that guarantees voters can confirm their vote is reflected in the final election result, while privacy guarantees that no one is able to link a vote to the voter who cast it. Verifiability needs to hold only for the duration of the election, whereas privacy needs to extend beyond the election period, even decades after the election. This property, known as everlasting privacy in the literature, ensures that even computationally unbounded adversaries cannot compromise voter privacy, securing elections against future advances in computing, including quantum computing. Researchers have proposed a wide variety of protocols to achieve this ambitious goal in secure e-voting, however, these protocols differ significantly, making the analysis and state-of-the-art complicated. In this thesis, we first address this fragmentation by systematically analyzing all existing e-voting protocols designed to ensure everlasting privacy. We map out the relationships and dependencies among these protocols, evaluate their security and efficiency under realistic assumptions, and identify unresolved challenges in the field. Our work provides a foundational reference for researchers aiming to design secure e-voting systems with everlasting privacy, paving the way for privacypreserving elections in the post-quantum era. Building on these insights, we propose a novel e-voting system that integrates the best practices from prior research while addressing their limitations. Leveraging the Hyperion scheme as a foundation, we develop an enhanced protocol that not only guarantees everlasting privacy but also introduces everlasting receipt-freeness and coercion mitigation. Unlike existing systems like Selene and Hyperion, which rely on computational assumptions for privacy, our protocol offers privacy even against adversaries with unlimited computational power. In secure electronic voting systems with everlasting privacy, the focus is on futureproofing privacy, while sometimes election verifiability relies on the computational soundness of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), which are vulnerable to quantum adversaries. Therefore, a key technical challenge is designing e-voting systems with efficient post-quantum cryptographic primitives to secure both privacy and verifiability against quantum attacks. In this thesis, we advance the state of post-quantum ZKPs by focusing on the ZKPs proposed by Jain et al., which are based on the conservative Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) assumption. We optimize the efficiency of these ZKPs, achieve formal security verification using EasyCrypt, and uncover flaws in existing implementations, demonstrating their vulnerability to malicious provers. Additionally, we construct the first code-based ZKP of shuffle, enabling a verifiable and privacy-preserving e-voting protocol with mixing-based tallying. Our e-voting system ensures both verifiability and vote privacy through the computational difficulty of decoding random linear codes, marking it as the first verifiable code-based e-voting system.
Electronic voting systems have long been proposed as a means of modernizing democratic participation by improving accessibility, reducing administrative costs, and accelerating electoral processes. Nevertheless, existing electronic voting architectures frequently rely upon centralized infrastructures that introduce significant challenges concerning transparency, security, auditability, and public trust. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising alternative capable of addressing many of these limitations through decentralization, immutability, and distributed consensus. Despite considerable research activity, many proposed blockchain voting solutions remain conceptual, while relatively few studies present fully implemented and experimentally evaluated frameworks integrating multiple complementary security mechanisms.This study presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a secure blockchain-based electronic voting framework built upon Hyperledger Fabric 2.4. The proposed architecture integrates smart contracts, distributed consensus mechanisms, AES-256 cryptographic vote protection, a conceptual zero-knowledge proof layer, and Merkle-tree-based integrity verification within a permissioned blockchain environment. A functional prototype was implemented in Go chaincode and deployed within a simulated regional election scenario representing the four prefectures of Crete, Greece.The study adopts a Design Science Research methodology and evaluates the proposed framework through a series of functional, security, and scalability experiments. The evaluation examined voter eligibility enforcement, duplicate vote prevention, ballot confidentiality, ledger integrity, auditability, and resistance against five distinct attack scenarios, including unauthorized ballot modification, ballot injection, and timestamp manipulation.The findings demonstrate that the proposed framework successfully preserves voter anonymity, prevents duplicate voting, detects unauthorized modifications in all tested scenarios, and enables transparent and independently verifiable election outcomes. While the results confirm the suitability of permissioned blockchain architectures for secure digital elections, several challenges remain, particularly regarding scalability, endpoint security, legal compliance, and large-scale deployment.Overall, this study contributes both a practical implementation and an empirical evaluation of a blockchain-enabled electoral infrastructure, providing insights into the future development of secure digital democratic systems.
A democratic election is a crucial act in each nation, as it determines the country's future for a specific term. Some of the older voting methods, such as Ballot Paper and EVM (Electronic Voting Machine), have disadvantages such as lack of transparency, poor voter turnout, vote rigging, and many others. Using Blockchain technology and Smart Contracts, it is simple to circumvent the flaws of the Ballot system and EVM. Electronic Voting Powered by Blockchain and Smart Contracts outperforms these antiquated voting methods by delivering secure results in less time and at a lower cost. With E-Voting utilizing Blockchain, prices can be lowered, the necessity for Polling stations and the consumption of resources such as EVMs and Ballot Papers may be decreased, and security can be improved by offering End-to-End Encryption and authenticity. This blockchain-powered e-voting can readily acquire trust due to the transaction's transparency, immutability, and difficulty of modification once hosted, as a result of smart contracts. Using OTP Verification and face verification, the suggested solution is a MERN-based web application with a multitude of upgraded authentication and permission techniques. To improve security, this voting data is saved as a transaction in a Blockchain-based distributed ledger using smart contracts.
Abstract - This paper presents a secure, transparent and tamper-proof decentralized electronic voting system leveraging Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts. Traditional voting systems are prone to manipulation, centralization risks and accessibility issues. This study proposes a blockchain-based architecture that removes the need for intermediaries, utilizes smart contracts for automating election logic and records votes immutably. The prototype is implemented using Solidity, Truffle Suite, Ganache and MetaMask to demonstrate secure authentication, vote casting and real-time result visualization. The system ensures voter anonymity, prevents double voting and enables auditability through public ledger transparency. The paper concludes with testing results and outlines potential scalability and privacy enhancements. Key Words: Blockchain, Ethereum, Voting System, Smart Contracts, Transparency, e-Voting and dApp
Shanmuga Sundaram Palaniswamy, M Jayaprakash, S. Loganathan, E. D. T. · 6 authors
The Internet of Things, commonly known as IoT, has transformed many sectors by allowing devices to connect and communicate effortlessly. Despite these benefits, this connectivity also leads to major concerns regarding privacy and security, especially when it comes to sensitive information. This paper offers an in-depth review of privacy-centric protocols based on blockchain technology that aim to tackle these issues and protect the sharing of IoT data. The research investigates how different blockchain systems (such as public, private, and consortium types), along with smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, and various encryption strategies, can be applied. By analysing numerous case studies and real-life instances, the review assesses how effectively these protocols maintain the confidentiality and integrity of data. It highlights important elements like transaction speed, scalability, and resource allocation. The results suggest that protocols utilizing blockchain provide enhanced data privacy and a lower risk of data breaches compared to conventional methods. For example, smart contracts streamline business transactions, while encryption safeguards data both during transmission and when stored. Nonetheless, issues regarding scalability, integration, and user acceptance still exist. This review offers critical insights for researchers, industry experts, and policymakers focused on enhancing the security of IoT solutions with the help of blockchain technology. This paper evaluates blockchain-based privacy-preserving protocols that facilitate secure IoT data exchange, concentrating on how well they maintain data confidentiality and integrity. By using case studies and practical assessments, the research identifies Hyperledger Fabric as the most effective protocol for IoT applications with high demands. The paper also addresses difficulties concerning scalability, performance, and integration, offering suggestions for future investigation.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract: In modern democracies, secure and transparent voting mechanisms are critical for ensuring public trust and electoral integrity. Traditional voting systems often face challenges such as tampering, identity fraud, and lack of transparency. This paper proposes a Blockchain-Based Voting System designed to address these issues by integrating advanced technologies including Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and the Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain. The system incorporates Aadhaar-based identity verification with OTP authentication to ensure that only eligible citizens can vote, while preserving voter anonymity through the implementation of ZKP. All sensitive data, including votes and candidate information, are recorded on the decentralized Polygon network, ensuring immutability and transparency. IPFS is employed for storing large files such as candidate profiles and voting records in a secure and distributed manner. Smart contracts automate the core election functions such as vote casting, validation, and result declaration, thereby minimizing the risk of human error and manipulation. A modular user interface is provided for both voters and election administrators, facilitating real-time monitoring, seamless authentication, and secure participation. By leveraging blockchain’s trustless architecture and privacypreserving cryptographic protocols, the proposed system aims to modernize the electoral process, enhance voter confidence, and strengthen democratic institutions in the digital age.The architecture ensures end-to-end verifiability, making each vote independently auditable without compromising confidentiality. This integration of privacy, security, and scalability offers a robust foundation for next-generation electoral systems.
Many people do not view elections as a serious worry for democracy, but they are one of the key events for a strong democratic system of a nation. As this study is concerned with the planning, carrying out, and evaluating the goal of the E-Voting system is to improve the scalability, transparency, and dependability of online voting procedures. The authors suggested a paradigm for electronic voting in this study, which might address these problems. The process consists of three primary stages: Development of Prototypes, Smart Contracts, and the Selection of Blockchain Platforms Application. The current web is used to create the prototype development frameworks that guarantee accessibility and usability for a range of users. A good blockchain platform, Ethereum, is selected to implement the component of the distributed ledger, taking into account variables such protection and scalability. The invention of smart contracts in voting is governed by platform-specific languages, and withstand rigorous tests.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yanqi Zhao, Minghong Sun, Min Xie, Xiaoyi Yang · 5 authors
As online application services evolve, an increasing number of users are opting for subscription-based or paywall models to access high-quality content. Anonymous counting tokens (ACTs), which regulate user access while protecting user privacy, are widely adopted in the online paywall model. However, the centralized server of ACT may lead to a single point of failure, thereby exposing users’ privacy. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose threshold anonymous counting tokens with batch proofs (ThrACT) that balance privacy preservation and access count limitation for online paywalls. We define the system model for ThrACT and provide its concrete construction. We utilize the threshold Boneh-Boyen signature to facilitate distributed issuance of anonymous tokens and enable batch issuance. In addition, our ThrACT employs non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to verify the label and token requests while allowing the correctness of multiple blind token shares to be validated simultaneously. We also prove that ThrACT satisfies unforgeable and unlinkable security properties. Finally, we evaluate the computational cost of our ThrACT and compare it with other schemes. The experiment result demonstrates that ThrACT not only supports distributed issuance, batch verification, and counting functionalities but also achieves computational overhead in milliseconds. In particular, when the threshold is set to (3,5), the token issuance time is approximately 9 milliseconds.
Traditional voting systems face significant challenges in transparency, security, and trust, compromising their credibility and effectiveness. To address these issues, this study proposes a lightweight voting system that integrates blockchain technology with a simplified Multifactor Authentication (MFA) model, relying solely on voter ID verification and One-Time Password (OTP) mechanisms. By leveraging blockchain's decentralized and immutable ledger, the system ensures secure, tamper-proof recording of votes while maintaining transparency. The lightweight authentication approach balances security and efficiency, with voter ID verifying eligibility and OTP adding a real-time layer of authentication without the need for additional hardware or complex biometrics. Smart contracts automate voting operations, providing auditable results while reducing reliance on intermediaries. This streamlined integration significantly improved accuracy by 25%, reduced processing times by 30%, and strengthened voter trust by 40% compared to traditional systems. The proposed solution demonstrates a practical, scalable framework for secure and transparent voting, with potential applications in corporate governance, online referenda, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).