Blockchain technology, known for its decentralized, tamper-proof, and secure transparency characteristics, has been widely applied in distributed ledger systems. The consensus mechanism, a core component of blockchain, has attracted significant research attention. Existing studies on improving the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism are primarily conducted in simulated environments, lacking practical implementation on production blockchain platforms. This paper applies an improved DPoS consensus mechanism based on the vague sets of the EOSIO blockchain platform. By optimizing the underlying code and smart contracts, the functionality of casting dissenting votes by voting nodes is introduced. The voting outcomes are expressed using vague sets, and a transformation model between vague sets and fuzzy sets is utilized to calculate the fuzzy membership degrees of candidate nodes. These degrees are then used to rank the candidates and select block producers, significantly enhancing the fairness and rationality of the voting process and enabling a more intelligent node selection process. In this study, 25 server nodes were deployed across five global cities on the Huawei Cloud platform to construct a fully functional EOSIO blockchain. Experimental results demonstrate that all nodes in the improved EOSIO system are capable of synchronously displaying block information and achieving consensus. The proposed enhanced EOSIO system exhibits the same efficient consensus performance and more flexible voting mechanism, offering a novel solution for the practical application of blockchain technology.
Traditional voting systems struggle with scalability, security, and transparency, making blockchain a promising solution due to its decentralization and immutability. However, Proof-of-Work (PoW) is inefficient for large-scale voting due to high energy consumption. This project leverages Proof-of-Stake (PoS) as an energy-efficient alternative, ensuring security and scalability. It maintains voter confidentiality, prevents duplicate voting through a one-vote token mechanism, and uses a staked cryptocurrency verification process. Smart contracts automate voter registration, vote validation, and result tabulation, minimizing human error. Performance analysis highlights improvements in transaction speed, adaptability, and fraud prevention, demonstrating PoS as a secure, scalable, and transparent solution for modernizing voting systems while enhancing accessibility and trust.
The decentralized digital ledger known as blockchain technology presents a viable remedy for the security flaws in conventional voting procedures. Blockchain can be utilized to develop a more dependable and trustworthy electronic voting system by utilizing its immutability, transparency, and security properties. This work investigates the use of Ethereum and Solidity to construct a blockchain-based electronic voting application. Smart contracts are used by the system to guarantee vote integrity and avoid duplicate voting. Each voter is given a finite number of tokens, or gas, by the system, which effectively prevents vote-rigging. This paper addresses the ramifications of a blockchain-based web-based voting application for democratic elections going forward and offers a concrete example of it. The findings demonstrated a user-friendly interface that linked individual voter accounts using cryptographic hashes and displayed election results. The system maintained confidentiality and transparency while efficiently collecting votes in real time.
An E-voting framework utilizing decentralized technology can establish a secure and transparent environment for elections, where voters can confidently cast their ballots knowing that their votes are final and untampered with. Blockchain's decentralized structure ensures that votes are recorded accurately, preventing interference from external actors. In a protected Evoting framework, each vote becomes part of an immutable, distributed ledger, allowing for peer-to-peer validation of transactions. This ensures that each voice counts as the only, unchanging record. The results can be reported immediately as soon as the voting process is completed. Voting is a critical process carried out in democratic societies, usually through secret voting documents or other similar methods. However, traditional voting systems are often plagued by problems such as voting manipulation, low turnout and logistics challenge. To solve these problems, we propose implementation of decentralized voting platforms that offer advanced security, efficiency and confidence in the election process
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Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The proliferation of numerous portable mobile devices has made mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) systems a promising new trend. Traditional MCS systems typically outsource sensing tasks to the data aggregator (e.g., cloud server). They collect and analyze the provided sensing data through an appropriate truth discovery (TD) method to identify valuable data sets. However, existing privacy-preserving MCS systems lack transparency, enabling data aggregators to deviate from the specified protocols and allowing malicious users to provide false or invalid sensing data, thereby contaminating the resulting data sets. The lack of transparency and public verifiability in MCS systems undermines widespread adoption by preventing data requesters from confidently verifying data integrity and accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a transparent and privacy-preserving mobile crowd-sensing system with truth discovery (TP-MCS) constructed using zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) and the Merkle commitment tree. This scheme enables data requesters to effectively verify the correctness of the truth discovery service while ensuring data privacy. Furthermore, theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that this scheme is secure and efficient.
Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, electronic voting has gradually become an inseparable part of people's lives. However, it has also raised a series of severe privacy and trust challenges. The immutable and publicly transparent characteristics of blockchain are a perfect fit for the development of electronic voting systems, effectively eliminating voters' concerns about ballot tampering.At the same time, zero-knowledge proofs enable the prover to show they possess certain information to the verifier, without disclosing the actual details. It is important to note that with the rapid development of quantum technology, traditional cryptographic schemes face unprecedented security threats. To address this challenge, We present a quantum-resistant blockchain solution for electronic voting, incorporating zero-knowledge proofs. Compared to conventional elliptic curve-based zero-knowledge proof schemes, our proposed solution is based on RLWE, ensuring voter privacy, and uses BFV fully homomorphic encryption technology to implement a blockchain-based electronic voting protocol, ensuring the system’s high availability, security, and anonymous voting. Security analysis and performance testing, along with comparisons to existing similar solutions, show that our scheme has advantages in terms of security and robustness, making it highly practical.
M. K. Ghosh, Chirag Dinesh Jain, Raju Halder, Joydeep Chandra
Phishing scams on the Ethereum network have become a serious threat, especially with the influx of new users into the cryptocurrency market. Current detection methods are mainly focused on long-term consistent transaction patterns with smooth temporal dynamics. However, these methods often struggle to differentiate between phishing and non-phishing users, whose behaviours may appear deceptively similar. Additionally, they face challenges such as network sparsity and data leakage, leading to significant performance limitations. To address these issues, we introduce TEMPER, a novel sequential learning framework designed to jointly capture the subtle distinctions between long- and short-term user behaviours and their correlations to provide more comprehensive insights. TEMPER effectively generates distinguishable user embeddings, enabling the accurate identification of phishing users. Unlike previous approaches, TEMPER mitigates data leakage through a novel sequential transaction sampling algorithm and addresses network sparsity with short-term temporal learning. Through extensive experimentation on three real-world Ethereum datasets, TEMPER demonstrates its efficacy by achieving a 3-4% improvement in the F1-Score compared to existing baseline models, representing a significant advancement in Ethereum phishing user detection.
Mrs. P Maraeswari, Navya Sri Vangala, Anu Chandana Chiluuri, Mohammad Sameer · 6 authors
Abstract: The default voting procedure has many inefficiencies such as issues with effectiveness, security, and transparency. These problems erode the confidence and credibility in the electoral frameworks which fosters conflict and skepticism towards the legitimacy of governance. A solution for voting problems is Secure Sphere, a decentralized ballot system that employs the Ethereum blockchain. Through block technology, Secure Sphere guarantees that its voting process is utterly transparent, secure, and un hackable. Votes are protected against unauthorized additions by casting them on the Ethereum blockchain. This approach mitigates most problems associated with traditional voting systems such as vote tampering and recounting, misrepresentation, and cyber threats. Moreover, the voting process is further secured by the application of cryptographic techniques. The principal feature of Secure Sphere is smart contracts which are vital in automating the voting process. Each vote is verifiable and counted, therefore, once cast, a vote becomes irrevocable. Because of these contracts the system is enhanced to enable real time vote verification, thus rendering the votes straightforwardly auditable. Therefore, both voters and election officials are able to independently confirm the outcomes.
In Ethereum, private transactions, a specialized transaction type employed to evade public Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network broadcasting, remain largely unexplored, particularly in the context of the transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms. To address this gap, we investigate the transaction characteristics, (un)intended usages, and monetary impacts by analyzing large-scale datasets comprising 14,810,392 private transactions within a 15.5-month PoW dataset and 30,062,232 private transactions within a 15.5-month PoS dataset. While originally designed for security purposes, we find that private transactions predominantly serve three distinct functions in both PoW and PoS Ethereum: extracting Maximum Extractable Value (MEV), facilitating monetary transfers to distribute mining rewards, and interacting with popular Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications. Furthermore, we find that private transactions are utilized in DeFi attacks to circumvent surveillance by white hat monitors, with an increased prevalence observed in PoS Ethereum compared to PoW Ethereum. Additionally, in PoS Ethereum, there is a subtle uptick in the role of private transactions for MEV extraction. This shift could be attributed to the decrease in transaction costs. However, this reduction in transaction cost and the cancellation of block rewards result in a significant decrease in mining profits for block creators.
In response to the issues of high transaction transparency and regulatory difficulties in blockchain account-model transactions, this paper presents a supervised blockchain anonymous transaction model based on certificateless signcryption aimed at ensuring secure blockchain transactions while minimizing both computational and communication overhead. During the transaction process, this approach utilizes certificateless public key signcryption without bilinear pairs to generate anonymous user identities, achieving strong anonymity of user identities and confidentiality of transaction amounts. It employs the Paillier homomorphic encryption algorithm to update transaction amounts and uses the FO commitment-based zero-knowledge proof scheme to validate transaction legality. Additionally, adopting a publicly verifiable secret threshold sharing scheme for hierarchical regulatory authority reduces the security risk of a single regulator storing the regulatory key. This model not only meets the privacy and timely update requirements of account-based blockchain transactions but also effectively regulates abnormal transactions. Rigorous security analysis and proofs demonstrate that this model possesses excellent anonymity, traceability, forward security, and backward security. When compared to similar schemes, the computational cost is reduced by at least 33.18%, effectively fulfilling the requirements for security.
Kode Lakshmi Durga Sindhujasri, Kaduputla Manogna, Sutrayeth Hari Yuktha Nanda, Baligiri Thandava Krishna · 5 authors
Abstract: Elections play a fundamental role in any democratic system, and ensuring their integrity is of utmost importance. Traditional voting methods, such as paper ballots and Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), suffer from various limitations, including security vulnerabilities, vote tampering, low voter turnout, delays in result processing, and a lack of transparency. Digital voting solutions offer convenience but raise concerns regarding data security and susceptibility to cyber threats. Blockchain technology presents a promising solution to these challenges by providing a decentralized, transparent, and tamperproof framework for conducting elections. As a distributed ledger system, blockchain records transactions in an immutable and verifiable manner, ensuring the integrity of votes. Key features such as decentralization, cryptographic security, transparency, and anonymity make blockchain a robust choice for secure e-voting. In this paper, we propose and implement a blockchainbased e-voting system using Ethereum smart contracts and Web3.js. Our system enforces single-use voting credentials, preventing duplicate votes, and leverages gas fees to mitigate fraudulent voting attempts. Additionally, we develop a web-based application that demonstrates the practical implementation of blockchain voting, discussing its advantages, challenges, and limitations in real-world scenarios
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the development and popularization of Internet technology, the issue of network security has become increasingly serious. Network security management has become an urgent problem to be solved. Blockchain technology, as a decentralized, secure, and unalterable distributed ledger technology, is nowadays frequently used in the field of network security management. However, the performance and scalability of blockchain have been bottlenecks in its application. Through an in-depth analysis of the key technologies of blockchain and their application cases in network security management, this chapter summarizes the characteristics, advantages, and limitations of different blockchain technologies used in network security management, and concludes the challenges and problems encountered by blockchain technology in network security management: such as technology maturity, data security, and privacy protection. To solve these problems, a scalable model for managing network security, leveraging blockchain technology to enhance efficiency and trustworthiness is constructed by combining artificial intelligence means such as machine learning and deep learning, and the scalability problems such as low transaction efficiency, high time delay, and low throughput existing in the network security management of blockchain technology are solved, providing new solutions for network security management.
Vaishnav Pradeep Menon, Aluru Sai Tharshith, Priyanshu Aryan, Kirti S. Pande · 5 authors
The solution offered by Blockchain technology fixes electronic voting problems by tackling the vulnerabilities of Votes, eliminating transparency problems, and improving EVM machine scalability issues. This study creates a dual voting system that unites Ethereum smart contracts for both protected candidate enrollment and voting confirmation along with authentication functions and election results counting. This framework incorporates an oversight feature for election officials who can monitor votes live so they can verify operations while improving both security and transparency. The Ganache implementation of the prototype required $\mathbf{3 8 7, 9 5 7}$ gas units for each vote to maintain decentralization as well as optimize resource usage. This frame- work links blockchain innovation to offline voting procedures to create an operable solution that substitutes standard voting technologies. Future developments will include work on both scalability improvements and user accessibility enhancements together with the integration of zero-knowledge-proof technology to guarantee voter privacy at the operational level of this framework.
Traditional voting systems face challenges such as lack of trust, susceptibility to tampering, and inefficiencies in election management. This paper presents an Android-based blockchain-powered e-voting system that ensures a secure, verifiable, and tamper-resistant electoral process. The system integrates Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts, and an Android interface to enable a decentralized voting mechanism. Experimental evaluation was conducted using Ganache for local blockchain simulation and Truffle for smart contract deployment. Performance testing with 10 sample voters across four political parties (DMK, ADMK, BJP, NTK) demonstrated instantaneous vote registration, with an average processing time of less than 1 millisecond. The system ensures immutability, as each vote is recorded with a unique transaction hash, preventing unauthorized alterations. Additionally, gas consumption per vote was measured between 21,000 - 30,000 gas units, ensuring cost efficiency. By leveraging blockchain’s decentralized structure and cryptographic security, the proposed system eliminates vote manipulation risks and enhances voter anonymity. The results indicate that this system is a scalable and efficient alternative to conventional e-voting methods, providing real-time vote tracking and verifiable election outcomes.
Achieving fairness, verifiability, and abandon resistance poses challenges within e-voting protocols. This paper introduces a privacy-preserving self-tallying e-voting system leveraging blockchain technology. The system supports diverse e-voting models, including ‘Yes/No’, approval voting with multiple candidates, and score voting. By employing linearly homomorphic time-lock puzzles (LHTLPs) along with verifiable delay functions (VDFs) and zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge schemes (zk-SNARKs), the proposed system ensures crucial security properties, including voter anonymity and eligibility, as well as ballot privacy and validity. It also provides efficient individual and universal verifiability (end-to-end verifiability), and dispute-freeness. More importantly, the system demonstrates fairness and abandon resistance. Furthermore, the evaluation of the proof-of-concept implementation on the Ethereum blockchain indicates that on-chain gas costs are either fixed or increasing slowly and logarithmically with the number of voters.
Rishi Tyagi, Priyanshu Mundyal, Mohd. Savej, Ejaz Ahmad
The title of our project is “Online Discussion Forum with e-voting capabilities”. We intend to help organizations and institutions alike, to have a ready-to-onboard platform for their election requirements. These requirements might plunge from a plethora of situations, ranging from an election for the best teacher in a school to an election for the most favored dish in a restaurant. Various groups within an organization can enroll and establish their presence in the system to participate in both polling activities and general discussions. The backend of this web-application will be developed using assembly language and the frontend using React JS. Since INDIA is the largest democracy in the entire world so our inspiration of having a very fair elections came from this fact, also the development of the country depends on the honest government which is chosen by fair elections. We have attempted to put forth an application that is beyond legacy apprehensions that pop-up to the surface during the election fervor. Ostensibly, there is not an exact application to compare with. However, a famous one exists which ardently promotes discussion but discourages voting. Another one is fundamentally a messaging application, but it allows the users post polls in message groups. We have noted the crucial points from both the applications and incorporated the good of both the worlds.
Prajwal Prakash Dalvi, Jayant Mehare, Amol Zade, Amit Gaikwad
Blockchain technology is becoming a great innovation at today's date due to its transparency, security and reliability. With the advancement in every aspect of life blockchain with its decentralized and distributed ledger system aims to provide immutability in digital transaction across the globe with the help of block structure joined together that stored the data in the form of hash. The data stored in block is next to immutable as if tried to change in a single block the hash of every block in the chain will change which makes it easy to identify. Due to its security and transparency the study describes its use in the e-voting system revolutionizing voting system with more security and transparency reducing logistic problem, solving storage issues, solves the problem of using extra man power in the large democracy like India.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
M. S. Minu, K. S. Dattatreya, J. Mitesh, G. Raghunath · 6 authors
Elections in university settings frequently have difficulties with transparency, security, and accessibility. Traditional voting systems are prone to various issues, such as manipulation and logistical complexities. Over the past few years, blockchain technology has arisen as a hopeful remedy to tackle these obstacles, offering a transparent, secure, and decentralized avenue for conducting electronic voting (e-voting). This project presents a conceptual architecture for implementing a blockchain-based e-voting system tailored specifically for university-level elections. The suggested framework utilizes the intrinsic characteristics of blockchain to ensure the honesty and equity of the voting procedure. Key components of the architecture include a distributed ledger for recording votes, smart contracts for enforcing voting rules and conducting tallying, and a user-friendly interface for voters to cast their ballots securely.
The adoption of e-government services has transformed public administration by providing digital access to government resources and services. However, ensuring the privacy and security of citizens' sensitive data remains a critical challenge. Privacy-enhancing cryptographic techniques offer promising solutions to safeguard data confidentiality, integrity, and user anonymity in e-government applications. This article explores various cryptographic methods such as homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multi-party computation that can bolster privacy in digital government services. We present a comprehensive analysis of their applicability, strengths, and limitations within e-government frameworks. Additionally, a detailed graph illustrates the comparative efficiency and privacy guarantees of these techniques in practical deployment. The study concludes with recommendations for integrating advanced cryptography to enhance trust, transparency, and compliance in secure digital governance.
Dong Liu, Juan S. Giraldo, Peter Pálenský, Pedro P. Vergara
Model-free power flow calculation, driven by the rise of smart meter (SM) data and the lack of network topology, often relies on artificial intelligence neural networks (ANNs). However, training ANNs require vast amounts of SM data, posing privacy risks for households in distribution networks. To ensure customers' privacy during the SM data gathering and online sharing, we introduce a privacy preserving PF calculation framework, composed of two local strategies: a local randomisation strategy (LRS) and a local zero-knowledge proof (ZKP)-based data collection strategy. First, the LRS is used to achieve irreversible transformation and robust privacy protection for active and reactive power data, thereby ensuring that personal data remains confidential. Subsequently, the ZKP-based data collecting strategy is adopted to securely gather the training dataset for the ANN, enabling SMs to interact with the distribution system operator without revealing the actual voltage magnitude. Moreover, to mitigate the accuracy loss induced by the seasonal variations in load profiles, an incremental learning strategy is incorporated into the online application. The results across three datasets with varying measurement errors demonstrate that the proposed framework efficiently collects one month of SM data within one hour. Furthermore, it robustly maintains mean errors of 0.005 p.u. and 0.014 p.u. under multiple measurement errors and seasonal variations in load profiles, respectively.