Blockchain Papers

Qiuyu Zhang, Guo-rui Wu, Rui Yang, Jiayan Chen

No abstract is available for this record.

Said El Kafhali

In a democratic regime, voting is crucial to making collective decisions. Unfortunately, although this activity has great significance and value, little effort has been made to improve the way we vote. Paper ballots are still the most used method, although this method is relatively simple, brings many inconveniences, and represents a contradiction to the modern world and its advances. This paper mostly focuses on a review study of blockchain-based voting systems. It aims at identifying the strategies and the guidelines as well as provides a comprehensive end-to-end electronic voting system based on blockchain, with the help of cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy. The novelty of this paper is that we tackle the limitations of electronic voting systems found in the literature, including cost, identity management, and scalability problems. Our purpose is to provide key elements for organizations on how to design their proper electronic voting system based on blockchain technology.

Sweta Gupta, Kamlesh Kumar Gupta, Piyush Kumar Shukla

ABSTRACT Voting has always been a crucial topic of public attention for democratic reasons. The ease of use and low cost are the result of e‐voting being frequently used for such important decision outcomes. However, the tremendous authority and intervening data in current e‐voting systems make it risky and difficult to achieve correct equity and clarity in e‐voting. So, by combining e‐voting with blockchain technology, these issues can be resolved while providing reorganization and intervention‐resistant characteristics. A voter's improper manipulation, frequent voting, or non‐party voting, may also undermine fairness. A verifier is therefore required to check the e‐voting mechanism in order to ensure its effectiveness and control the process equality and fairness. In this paper, a Blockchain‐based e‐Voting Mechanism (BVM) is developed for providing the end to end security and fairness for transparent voting. This mechanism also provides a zero‐knowledge proof (ZP) based verifier to inspect the voting procedure against voter's mis‐operations and uses a novel Improved Master‐key Administration (IMA) based public key cryptography to attack prevention. The utilization of blockchain technology ensures transparency, anonymity, confidentiality, authentication, tamper resistance, and a high level of data integrity, making it a promising choice for modernizing and enhancing the electoral process. Also, the performance of BVM has been compared with similar voting mechanisms and analyzed based on time complexity, security analysis, performance factors like delay and throughput, and anti‐attack examination.

K. Britto Alex, Kannan Selvan

No abstract is available for this record.

Zeming Wei, Jiawen Fang, Zhicheng Hong, Yu Zhou · 9 authors

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that possesses characteristics such as decentralization, tamper resistance, and programmability. However, while blockchain ensures transaction openness and transparency, transaction privacy is also at risk of being exposed. Therefore, this paper proposes the blockchain transaction privacy protection method based on the stealth address and the note mechanism to address the privacy leakage risk in blockchain public environments. Firstly, the proposed method generates a random seed known only to the parties involved based on the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol, ensuring the privacy of transactions. Then, it utilizes the Note Commitments table to maintain the binding relationship between the stealth address and the corresponding note, enabling efficient transfer and verification of note ownership. The uniqueness of the stealth address is utilized as an invalidation identifier for notes in the Nullifier table, ensuring efficient verification of the correctness of note invalidation identifiers. Additionally, this method employs Pedersen commitment and Bulletproofs range proof to generate proof of the legality of transaction amounts, enabling the concealment of transaction amounts and facilitating private transactions between the parties involved. Finally, this paper presents a detailed performance analysis, implementation, and testing of the method. From the results, it can be concluded that the method proposed can effectively prevent fraudulent behavior by various transaction participants and ensure the security, privacy, and integrity of the transaction. Critical processes consume only milliseconds, and the related commitments and proofs are also minimal, which is crucial for controlling transaction costs. At the same time, this method achieves a completely decentralized privacy transaction solution.

Çağatay Korkuç, Nilay Aytas Korkmaz, Yasin Genç, Ahmet Akkoc · 6 authors

Summary With the development of technology, data has become more accessible. The storage of critical and valuable information is getting harder and harder with the increase of cyber attacks and vulnerabilities of network and internet. The centralized storage of data causes security and privacy problems. As a remedy to these problems, blockchain has occurred. The reliability, transparency, integrity and confidentiality of the data have been increased with the blockchain technology. Blockchain maintains the immutability of the data with cryptographic hash algorithms. The data is kept in distributed structures with the consensus algorithms so that it is not lost. Projects and studies using blockchain technology have shown that data stored in centralized structures is not as reliable as data that is distributed and secured by cryptographic algorithms, smart contracts, and consensus. The data of flights, which is a critical data, has a great place in world transportation. The parameters inside the black boxes guide us on why the aircrafts have crashed: whether the responsibility belongs to the manufacturer, to the pilot, or to the aircraft technicians. In this way, the real reasons of the accident may be determined and measures can be taken for the accidents that may occur afterwards. In addition, the safe delivery of all black box data to the interested parties and its storage in a way that is immutable will not only benefit to the manufacturer's self‐development by processing the data, but also help flight companies to find optimum flight data. Both the flight companies and the manufacturer will be able to read the black box data, thus the suspicion of data manipulation will be eliminated and the data will become more transparent. In this study, a system is proposed in which an aircraft's black box data can be saved safely and securely with the help of blockchain technology.

Zhimei Yang, Changgen Peng, Chongyi Zhong, Yangyang Long

No abstract is available for this record.

Tengyun Jiao, Zhiyu Xu, Minfeng Qi, Sheng Wen · 6 authors

A smart contract is a computerised transaction agreement that carries out predefined terms without human involvement or third-party intermediaries. It serves as a trust intermediary in several industries, including finance, insurance, and supply chain management, in the blockchain 2.0 era. With the increasing interest in smart contracts, security has become a serious problem. Examining typical vulnerability types and vulnerability detection methodologies is of special importance. In this research, a comprehensive evaluation of common smart contract security vulnerabilities is conducted, and a three-tier threat model is then provided to classify the vulnerabilities. In addition, we examine fourteen existing smart contract analysis tools for finding vulnerabilities and classify them according to the main technique they apply. This article is designed to serve as a reference for people who wish to analyse deployed code and enhance existing detection techniques. At the conclusion, open issues and future research paths regarding smart contract vulnerability detection are presented.

Yinqiu Liu, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato, Jiawen Kang · 8 authors

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence- Generated Content (AIGC) has brought daunting challenges in the areas of service latency, security, and trustworthiness. Recently researchers have presented the edge AIGC paradigm, effectively optimizing the service latency by distributing AIGC services to edge devices. However, AIGC products are still unprotected and vulnerable to tampering and plagiarization. Moreover, as a kind of online non-fungible digital property, the free circulation of AIGC products is hindered by the lack of trustworthiness in open networks. For the first time, in this article, we present a blockchain-empowered framework to manage the lifecycle of edge AIGC products. Specifically, leveraging fraud proofability, we first propose a protocol to protect the ownership and copyright of AIGC, called Proof-of-AIGC. Then, we design an incentive mechanism to guarantee the legitimate and timely execution of the funds- AIGC ownership exchanges among anonymous users. Furthermore, we implement a multi-weight subjective logic-based reputation scheme with which AIGC producers can determine which edge service provider is trustworthy and can reliably handle their services. Through the use of test data, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach. Last but not least, we discuss important open directions for further research.

Yunwei Guo, Haochen Liang, Liehuang Zhu, Keke Gai

Payment channels serve as an effective solution to the scalability problem of cryptocurrencies, which significantly increase transaction rates by allowing users to conduct large-scale offline transactions off-chain without posting everything to the blockchain. However, the existing payment channels lack privacy protection for the transaction amount and the linking relationship between the two parties to the transaction. Therefore, in order to address the scalability and privacy issues of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, this paper proposes a zk-SNARKs-based anonymous payment channel (zk-APC), which supports an unlimited number of off-chain payments between the payer and the payee and protects the privacy of the participants. Specifically, the proposed scheme achieves relational anonymity and amount privacy for both on-chain and off-chain transactions in the payment channel through utilizing zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARKs) and commitment schemes. This paper proves that the proposed method is more effective than similar schemes through a performance evaluation.

Da-Wei Zhou Da-Wei Zhou, Su-Zhen Cao Da-Wei Zhou, Xiao Zhao Su-Zhen Cao, Dandan Zhao · 5 authors

<p>To solve the problems of existing e-auction protocols such as semi-trustworthiness of outsourced third parties, collusive attacks among participants, unsatisfactory decentralized structure, and inability of public verification, we propose an efficient first-price sealed e-auction protocol under a secure multi-party computational malicious model. First, the protocol combines the additive homomorphism of the ElGamal cryptographic algorithm to achieve a decentralized structure and eliminate the problem of semi-trustworthiness of outsourced third parties; it uses (n, n) threshold encryption and decryption techniques to solve the problem of collusion attacks among participants and uses Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) technology to achieve public verifiability of auction results. Additionally, the protocol proposes a method to quickly find the maximum value of the data encoding, which can avoid multiple processing of confidential data and thus effectively reduce the number of communication rounds. The combination of zero-knowledge proof and ideal/realistic simulation paradigm proves that the protocol in this paper is resistant to up to n-1 party collusion attacks and satisfies the security of the secure multi-party computational malicious model. Finally, after theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, the protocol not only satisfies higher security performance but also has greater overall operational efficiency.</p> <p> </p>

Xin Wang, Achyut Shankar, Keqin Li, B. D. Parameshachari · 5 authors

As 6G communication technology advances, there is a growing trend of incorporating blockchain technology, which has already demonstrated its effectiveness in multiple areas. Merging blockchain technology with 6G communication opens up novel prospects for consumer electronics, facilitating the creation of secure, private, and decentralized networks, along with pioneering applications and services. We explore the synergistic incorporation of blockchain with 6G communication networks to enable secure and decentralized connectivity tailored for consumer electronics. To this end, a multi-party, dependable framework comprising intelligent edge servers, blockchain consensus, and resource-constrained electronic devices is proposed. Analytical models characterize the system’s unique cost and incentive tradeoffs, accounting for factors like energy, latency, credibility, and capacity. We analyze symmetric and asymmetric information scenarios, providing insights into optimal resource allocation strategies in different knowledge conditions within the network. Extensive simulations validate gains over benchmarks across mobile augmented reality gaming and distributed machine learning workloads, achieving over 90% offloading efficiency within 50ms latency targets as infrastructure scales up to 100 edge servers and 2000 devices. These results establish the feasibility of blended edge intelligence, cryptography, and wireless advancements in realizing next-generation consumer solutions spanning metaverse, ambient computing, and industrial IoT while preserving user control.

Kausthav Pratim Kalita, Debojit Boro, Dhruba K. Bhattacharyya

Abstract The rise of technology has resulted in the evolution of data generation at a rapid speed. With the high increase in the volume of data, it has become necessary to store it using reliable and scalable data management systems. Blockchain offers a storage structure that ensures the security and reliability of the stored data. Smart contracts further enhance the technology by enforcing more stringent record management activities. In recent times, there has been widespread utilization of IPFS in conjunction with blockchain technology. This utilization facilitates the establishment of decentralized and distributed data storage, as well as the connection of blockchain transactions to external data, thereby enhancing scalability and reducing storage expenses within blockchain applications. This paper introduces an effective collaborative ecosystem called SSE_CIB, where images undergo multiple operations including quantization before getting uploaded to IPFS. The image‐related details are stored in the blockchain to keep track of record entries. In our approach, a watermarking process has also been included to ensure the protection of copyright. Further, the images undergo block‐wise rotation based on a secret key and bit‐wise operation with a key image for enhanced security and protection. The work is implemented and tested using real‐life images in an Ethereum environment incorporated with a smart contract that enables proper execution of transactions.

Yiwen Zheng

Bitcoin Core serves as the foundational software responsible for verifying and validating all transactions and blocks within the Bitcoin blockchain, hence upholding the security and integrity of the whole Bitcoin network. This study extensively examines the internal mechanisms, structure, and conceptual framework of Bitcoin Core. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the Bitcoin Core architecture, with a focus on evaluating its capacity to fulfill the rigorous demands of a decentralized Bitcoin network. This study not only provides a comprehensive understanding of the essential elements that drive the Bitcoin network, but it also explores the numerous factors that have a substantial impact on the operational availability of Bitcoin nodes. All of these factors are essential for ensuring the efficient operation of the Bitcoin network, encompassing the physical environment, architectural designs of nodes, and maintenance requirements. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the underlying mechanisms of Bitcoin, shedding light on its inherent robustness and the factors that contribute to its consistent performance within the ever-changing landscape of digital currencies. The objective of this endeavor is to furnish a detailed exposition of the mechanics of Bitcoin, so enhancing its prevalence and familiarity among individuals.

Najib Saab, Mahmoud El Samad

With a focus on the two most important cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, this chapter explains the significance of blockchain in today's environment and analyzes its implementation in both networks as well as investigates how they work, describing their transactions, unique characteristics, benefits, and necessities, noting how Ethereum addressed some of Bitcoin's shortcomings with the introduction of smart contracts. They both depended on the proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanism at first, which Ethereum has moved to proof of stake (PoS) in its new upgrade as Ethereum 2.0. They examine the benefits and differences of these consensus protocols and other ones that deserve consideration and shed light on how they both have dealt with their challenges and drawbacks. Moreover, they analyze the prospects and likely improvements in blockchain technology, as they hope to illustrate the potential of blockchain along with Bitcoin and Ethereum to spark future innovation and address contemporary difficulties through their capabilities and network applications.

Arash Heidari, Nima Jafari Navimipour, Hasan Dağ, Samira Talebi · 5 authors

Abstract In recent years, the proliferation of deep learning (DL) techniques has given rise to a significant challenge in the form of deepfake videos, posing a grave threat to the authenticity of media content. With the rapid advancement of DL technology, the creation of convincingly realistic deepfake videos has become increasingly prevalent, raising serious concerns about the potential misuse of such content. Deepfakes have the potential to undermine trust in visual media, with implications for fields as diverse as journalism, entertainment, and security. This study presents an innovative solution by harnessing blockchain-based federated learning (FL) to address this issue, focusing on preserving data source anonymity. The approach combines the strengths of SegCaps and convolutional neural network (CNN) methods for improved image feature extraction, followed by capsule network (CN) training to enhance generalization. A novel data normalization technique is introduced to tackle data heterogeneity stemming from diverse global data sources. Moreover, transfer learning (TL) and preprocessing methods are deployed to elevate DL performance. These efforts culminate in collaborative global model training zfacilitated by blockchain and FL while maintaining the utmost confidentiality of data sources. The effectiveness of our methodology is rigorously tested and validated through extensive experiments. These experiments reveal a substantial improvement in accuracy, with an impressive average increase of 6.6% compared to six benchmark models. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates a 5.1% enhancement in the area under the curve (AUC) metric, underscoring its ability to outperform existing detection methods. These results substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed solution in countering the proliferation of deepfake content. In conclusion, our innovative approach represents a promising avenue for advancing deepfake detection. By leveraging existing data resources and the power of FL and blockchain technology, we address a critical need for media authenticity and security. As the threat of deepfake videos continues to grow, our comprehensive solution provides an effective means to protect the integrity and trustworthiness of visual media, with far-reaching implications for both industry and society. This work stands as a significant step toward countering the deepfake menace and preserving the authenticity of visual content in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Jide Kehinde Adeniyi, Sunday Adeola Ajagbe, Abidemi Emmanuel Adeniyi, Pragasen Mudali · 7 authors

Voting aims to provide the best decision or select the most selected option for the largest group of voters. Malicious parties gaining access, and otherwise tampering with election results, or the votes make this effort counterproductive. To alleviate this, this study examined the introduction of blockchain. The transparent and immutable nature of the blockchain makes this data impossible to alter and allows the election results to be transparent. To further increase the transparency of the system while keeping voters anonymous, a biometric based cryptography was introduced. The biometric was introduced as the source for the private key for each voter while a public was generated to act as the identity of the voter. The biometric trait of each individual is unique and cannot be forged, hence the identity of the voter is secured. The public key available cannot be traced by to the private key, hence, identity of the voter is anonymous. The system showed an encouraging performance after testing.

Yang Tian, Xin Liao, Li Dong, Yang Xu · 5 authors

Recent years have witnessed the booming growth of 5G and 6G technology, which has brought unprecedented massive data transmission, causing severe privacy issues. However, traditional information encryption and multimedia covert communication fail to protect the identities of communication parties and the originality of messages. The emergence of blockchain provides a promising solution to solve these problems. Its anonymity manages to hide the identities of communication parties, and immutability ensures the message is undestroyable. However, the existing blockchain-based covert communication schemes suffer the issues of low embedding capacity and high time cost. In this paper, an amount-based covert communication scheme over the blockchain is proposed, in which a unique coding method is devised for hiding messages into transaction amounts to improve the embedding capacity. Compared with existing address-based methods, the proposed scheme can apply any address and reduce the time of obtaining special addresses. Besides, we innovate the way to prove the concealment by calculating the relative entropy of the transaction amount between Bitcoin and the proposed scheme. The security of our method is demonstrated by comparing the probability of attackers acquiring secret messages under different adversary capabilities. The experimental results verify that the proposed approach outperforms the existing schemes regarding embedding capacity, time costs, number of transactions, concealment, and security.

Xingxing Chen, Qingfeng Cheng, Weidong Yang, Xiangyang Luo

No abstract is available for this record.

Tongzhou Shen, Liehuang Zhu, Feng Gao, Zhuo Chen · 6 authors

As a decentralized network infrastructure, the data sent to the blockchain are public and temper-evident. The cover of massive normal transactions in a blockchain network is ideal for constructing a stable and reliable covert channel to achieve one-to-many group covert communication. Existing blockchain-based covert communication schemes face challenges in balancing concealment, embedding rate and filtering efficiency, making them unsuitable for direct extension to group scenarios. Adopting a key-leakage scheme can increase the channel capacity while maintaining high concealment from external adversaries. However, it will also expose more knowledge to the receiver. A malicious receiver has the ability to steal a sender’s identity or replay historical transactions to control the entire channel. In this paper, we define the capabilities of malicious receivers in blockchain-based group covert communication scenarios and propose a group covert communication scheme resistant to transaction forgery attacks. Theoretical analysis and experiments prove that our covert transactions do not have any transaction correlativity, ensuring the unique authenticity of the sender’s identity while maintaining supreme concealment compared with the existing schemes. The precision and recall of machine learning detection results can reach 0.57–0.62 (0.5 is the ideal value).

Pei Zhang, Qingfeng Cheng, Mingliang Zhang, Xiangyang Luo

Covert communication is a crucial technology that hides information in the redundant structure of the file and transmission through public channel to achieve the secure delivery of information. The blockchain network, with the characteristics of anonymity, decentralization and tamper-proofing, can make up for the shortcomings of multimedia-based covert communication, which include the easy exposure of the identity for both parties, the vulnerability to destruction during communication and the weak robustness of the channel. Therefore, the blockchain network is an ideal channel for covert communication. Nevertheless, the existing covert communication methods face certain challenges based on blockchain, such as the lack of a secure channel for transferring the master key, low embedding capacity, and weak detection resistance. In view of this, this paper proposes a covert communication method based on Shamir threshold and STC mapping, which is suitable for public chain networks. The proposed method first decomposes the master key into sub-keys by introducing Shamir scheme, and the sub-keys are shared with the help of transaction amounts on a blockchain. Then, a mapping relation is established to ensure that the transaction amounts carrying the secret are evenly distributed. Finally, secret information is hidden in the mapping relationship and the transaction amount is interwoven, which is published to the blockchain through transactions to complete covert communication. The introduction of Shamir threshold breaks the limitation that master key cannot be safely transmitted due to the lack of a secure channel in the research of covert communication based on blockchain, thereby enhances the security of the method. Meanwhile, Shamir threshold scheme based on public chain, can solve the issue that the master key cannot be reconstructed due to dishonest participants providing invalid subkeys on traditional network. In addition, the proposed STC mapping can not only improve the detection resistance but also increase the embedding capacity. A series of experimental results illustrate that the proposed method is more resistant to detection, and the embedding efficiency is enhanced by 27.56 times compared with existing public chain-based covert communication methods, effectively reducing the number of transactions and saving resource consumption.

Wooyoung Son, Soonhong Kwon, Sung-Heun Oh, Jong‐Hyouk Lee

As the demand and diversity of digital content increase, consumers now have simple and easy access to digital content through Over-the-Top (OTT) services. However, the rights of copyright holders remain unsecured due to issues with illegal copying and distribution of digital content, along with unclear practices in copyright royalty settlements and distributions. In response, this paper proposes an automated OTT service copyright distribution management system using the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) to safeguard the rights of copyright holders in the OTT service field. The proposed system ensures that the rights to exercise copyright transactions and agreements, such as trading of copyright, can only be carried out when all copyright holders of a single digital content agree based on the Threshold Schnorr Digital Signature. This approach takes into account multiple joint copyright holders, thereby safeguarding their rights. Furthermore, it ensures fair and transparent distribution of copyright royalties based on the ratio information outlined in ODRL. From the user’s perspective, the system not only provides services proactively based on the rights information specified in ODRL, but also employs zero-knowledge proof technology to handle sensitive information in OTT service copyright distribution, thereby addressing existing privacy concerns. This approach not only considers joint copyright holders, but also demonstrates its effectiveness in resolving prevalent issues in current OTT services, such as illegal digital content replication and distribution, and the unfair settlement and distribution of copyright royalties. Applying this proposed system to the existing OTT services and digital content market is expected to lead to the revitalization of the digital content trading market and the establishment of an OTT service environment that guarantees both vitality and reliability.

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

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

Ali Eghmazi, Mohammadhossein Ataei, René Landry, Guy Chevrette

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