Proof-of-useful-work (PoUW), an alternative to the widely used proof-of-work (PoW), aims to re-purpose the network’s computing power. Namely, users evaluate meaningful computational problems, e.g., solving optimization problems, instead of computing numerous hash function values as in PoW. A recent approach utilizes the training process of deep learning as “useful work”. However, these works lack security analysis when deploying them with blockchain-based protocols, let alone the informal and over-complicated system design. This work proposes a distributed proof-of-deep-learning (D-PoDL) scheme concerning PoUW’s requirements. With a novel hash-traininßg-hash structure and model-referencing mechanism, our scheme is the first deep learning-based PoUW scheme that enables achieving better accuracy distributively. Next, we introduce a transformation from the D-PoDL scheme to a generic D-PoDL blockchain protocol which can be instantiated with two chain selection rules, i.e., the longest-chain rule and the weight-based blockchain framework (LatinCrypt’ 21). This work is the first to provide formal proofs for deep learning-involved blockchain protocols concerning the robust ledger properties, i.e., chain growth, chain quality, and common prefix. Finally, we implement the D-PoDL scheme to discuss the effectiveness of our design.
Recently, the Digital Twin (DT) technology has procured a lot of attention because of its applicability in the manufacturing and space industries. The DT environment involves the formation of a clone of the tangible object to perform simulations in the virtual space. The combination of conceptual development, predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and simulation characteristics of DT has increased the utilization of DT in different scenarios, such as medical environments, healthcare, manufacturing industries, aerospace, etc. However, these utilizations have also brought serious security pitfalls in DT deployment. Towards this, several authentication protocols with different security and privacy features for DT environments have been proposed. In this article, we first review a recently proposed two-factor authentication protocol for DT environments that utilizes the blockchain technology. However, the analyzed scheme is unable to offer the desirable security and cannot withstand various security attacks like offline password-guessing attack, smart card stolen attack, anonymity property, and known session-specific temporary information attack. We also demonstrate that an attacker can impersonate the analyzed protocol’s legal user, owner, and cloud server. To mitigate these security loopholes, we devise an effective three-factor privacy-preserving authentication scheme for DT environments. The proposed work is demonstrated to be secure by performing the informal security analysis, the formal security analysis using the widely recognized Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and the Real-or-Random (ROR) model. A detailed comparative study with the existing competing schemes including the analyzed scheme demonstrates that the devised framework furnishes better security features while also having lower computation costs and comparable communication costs than the existing schemes.
The primary innovation we pioneer -- focused on blockchain information security -- is called the Safe-House. The Safe-House is badly needed since there are many ongoing hacks and security concerns in the DeFi space right now. The Safe-House is a piece of engineering sophistication that utilizes existing blockchain principles to bring about greater security when customer assets are moved around. The Safe-House logic is easily implemented as smart contracts on any decentralized system. The amount of funds at risk from both internal and external parties -- and hence the maximum one time loss -- is guaranteed to stay within the specified limits based on cryptographic fundamentals. To improve the safety of the Safe-House even further, we adapt the one time password (OPT) concept to operate using blockchain technology. Well suited to blockchain cryptographic nuances, our secondary advancement can be termed the one time next time password (OTNTP) mechanism. The OTNTP is designed to complement the Safe-House making it even more safe. We provide a detailed threat assessment model -- discussing the risks faced by DeFi protocols and the specific risks that apply to blockchain fund management -- and give technical arguments regarding how these threats can be overcome in a robust manner. We discuss how the Safe-House can participate with other external yield generation protocols in a secure way. We provide reasons for why the Safe-House increases safety without sacrificing the efficiency of operation. We start with a high level intuitive description of the landscape, the corresponding problems and our solutions. We then supplement this overview with detailed discussions including the corresponding mathematical formulations and pointers for technological implementation. This approach ensures that the article is accessible to a broad audience.
OpenID Connect (OIDC) is one of the most widely used delegated authentication protocols in web and mobile applications providing a single sign-on experience. It allows third-party applications, called Relying Parties (RP), to securely request and receive information about authenticated sessions and end-users from an identity provider. The OIDC specification defines several parameters, including the client_id, client_secret, authorization code, access token, id token, state, and redirect_uri, as keys to the protocol operation, with significant security and privacy implications. Therefore, securing these parameters is critical to prevent attackers from impersonating legitimate entities, gaining unauthorized access, having complete control over users’ accounts, and/or violating their privacy. To enhance OIDC security and preserve its users’ privacy, we propose a novel model for OIDC based on the Ethereum Blockchain and the non-fungible token (ERC721) standard. To prove the robustness and safety of the proposed system, we perform a detailed security analysis formally using the most widely accepted protocols security verification tools, AVISPA and Scyther, and informally by discussing various attacks. The analysis results show that the proposed system is resilient against well-known attacks. Furthermore, we evaluate the cost and performance of the proposed solution, confirming its affordability and assuring that our approach does not impact the user experience and performance of existing OIDC-based systems. Finally, we conduct a security and privacy comparative analysis with similar existing systems, proving the superiority and efficiency of our proposed Blockchain-based OIDC system.
Ye Tao, Ehsan Javanmardi, Pengfei Lin, Jin Nakazato · 7 authors
Cooperative perception is crucial for connected automated vehicles in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs); however, ensuring the authenticity of perception data remains a challenge as the vehicles cannot verify events that they do not witness independently. Various studies have been conducted on establishing the authenticity of data, such as trust-based statistical methods and plausibility-based methods. However, these methods are limited as they require prior knowledge such as previous sender behaviors or predefined rules to evaluate the authenticity. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a novel approach called zero-knowledge Proof of Traffic (zk-PoT), which involves generating cryptographic proofs to the traffic observations. Multiple independent proofs regarding the same vehicle can be deterministically cross-verified by any receivers without relying on ground truth, probabilistic, or plausibility evaluations. Additionally, no private information is compromised during the entire procedure. A full on-board unit software stack that reflects the behavior of zk-PoT is implemented within a specifically designed simulator called Flowsim. A comprehensive experimental analysis is then conducted using synthesized city-scale simulations, which demonstrates that zk-PoT’s cross-verification ratio ranges between 80 % to 96 %, and 90 % of the verification is achieved in 5 s, with a protocol overhead of approximately 25 %. Furthermore, the analyses of various attacks indicate that most of the attacks could be prevented, and some, such as collusion attacks, can be mitigated. The proposed approach can be incorporated into existing works, including the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ITS standards, without disrupting the backward compatibility.
Open access
3 source records
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Unlike general passwords, user authentication technology using biometric data cannot be lost or forgotten, and it has the advantage of being impossible to forge or falsify by attackers. Since this biometric data contains sensitive information, a safe storage method is needed. However, if biometric data is managed on a central server, it is limited by being vulnerable to integrity infringement attacks by system attackers and persistent infringement attacks on the authentication service. To solve this problem, a model using blockchain-based information security technology is proposed in this paper. The aim is to safely manage the user biometric data by dispersing the storage of the biometric data feature information for user authentication in smart contracts and IPFS using Ethereum. We have verified that it takes an average of 1,472.733 ms and 217.829 ms, to register and authenticate a user in the proposed model and we expect that it will provide a reliable authentication service to the users compared to the existing authentication method in which the biometric data is managed by a single server.
Zengpeng Li, Mei Wang, Vishal Sharma, Prosanta Gope
Vehicle authentication is an essential component validating the vehicle’s identity and ensuring the integrity of transformed data for intelligent transport vehicles (ITS) in the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). Easy to deploy and operate privacy-enhancing vehicle authentication mechanisms are the mainstay for the widespread ITS in the VANET. Very recently, VANET security architectures are constituting by IEEE 1609.2 group, NoW project, the SeVeCom project. However, these approaches heavily depend on the consuming public key infrastructure (PKI) and certification authorities (CA). In this work, walking along the research line, we attempt to design authentication protocols with two diverse factors for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) networks, respectively, without depending on the stumbling block PKI/CA. In addition, a smooth projective hash function (SPHF) (a.k.a., a special case of the designated-verifier zero-knowledge proof system) guarantees any recipient can confirm the authenticity and integrity of the received messages without knowing the authentication factors. Thus, to optimize the communication round, SPHF is used to design a (group) two-factor authenticated key exchange (AKE) with low-interactive communication rounds. The proof-of-concept implementation indicates that the computation and communication overheads introduced by our solution are acceptable in real-world deployments. The security of the proposed approach is validated using Bellare-Pointcheval-Rogaway (BPR) model along with the experimental evaluation and the theoretical analysis.
Arun Sekar Rajasekaran, Azees Maria, R. Maheswar, Josip Lörincz
The Internet of Health Things (IoHT) has emerged as an attractive networking paradigm in wireless communications, integrated devices and embedded system technologies. In the IoHT, real-time health data are collected through smart healthcare sensors and, in recent years, the IoHT has started to have an important role in the Internet of Things technology. Although the IoHT provides comfort in health monitoring, it also imposes security challenges in maintaining patient data confidentiality and privacy. To overcome such security issues, in this paper, a novel blockchain-based privacy-preserving authentication scheme is proposed as an approach for achieving efficient authentication of the patient without the involvement of a trusted entity. Moreover, a secure handover authentication mechanism that ensures avoiding the patient re-authentication in multi-doctor communication scenarios and revoking the possible malicious misbehavior of medical professionals in the IoHT communication with the patient is developed. The performance of the proposed authentication and handover scheme is analyzed concerning the existing state-of-the-art authentication schemes. The results of the performance analyses reveal that the proposed authentication scheme is resistant to different types of security attacks. Moreover, the results of analyses show that the proposed authentication scheme outperforms similar state-of-the-art authentication schemes in terms of having lower computational, communication and storage costs. Therefore, the novel authentication and handover scheme has proven practical applicability and represents a valuable contribution to improving the security of communication in IoHT networks.
Blockchain-based supply chains provide a new solution to decentralized multi-party product management. However, existing methods, including ID-based and cryptographic-based solutions, cannot achieve both counterfeit resistance and decentralization in supply chain management. We argue that this dilemma comes from the disconnection and inconsistency of the data records and physical product entities. This paper proposes RF-Chain, a novel decentralized supply chain management solution that uniquely combines data record authentication and physical-layer RFID tag authentication to effectively achieve credibility and counterfeit resistance. The main contribution of this work is to integrate physical-layer authentication of cheap commodity RFID tags into a blockchain-based information management system, and RF-Chain is the first to do so. The proposed cross-layer authentication can effectively defend against counterfeit attacks without relying on a central key management service. Real-world experiments utilizing the Ethereum (ETH) platform and more than 100 RFID tags demonstrate that RF-Chain is secure, effective, time-efficient, and cost-efficient.
Bithin Alangot, Paweł Szałachowski, Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Souhail Meftah · 7 authors
Decentralized identity (DID) systems aim to give users full control over their identities by using completely decentralized technologies, such as blockchain or distributed ledgers, as identity providers. However, when user credentials are compromised, it is impossible in existing DID systems for the users to detect credential misuse. In this paper, we propose new DID authentication protocols with two properties: auditability and privacy. The former enables the detection of malicious authentication events, while the latter prevents an adversary from linking an authentication event to the corresponding user and service provider. We present two protocols that achieve auditability with varying privacy and performance guarantees. The first protocol has high performance, but it reveals information about the user. The second protocol achieves full privacy, but it incurs a higher performance overhead. We present a formal security analysis of our privacy-preserving protocols by using the Tamarin prover. We implemented them and evaluated their performance with a permissioned blockchain deployed over the Amazon AWS and a local cloud infrastructure. The results demonstrate that the first protocol is able to support realistic authentication workloads, while the second is nearly practical.
Anusha Vangala, Ashok Kumar Das, Ankush Mitra, Sajal K. Das · 5 authors
Precision farming has a positive potential in the agricultural industry regarding water conservation, increased productivity, better development of rural areas, and increased income. Blockchain technology is a better alternative for storing and sharing farm data as it is reliable, transparent, immutable, and decentralized. Remote monitoring of an agricultural field requires security systems to ensure that any sensitive information is exchanged only among authenticated entities in the network. To this end, we design an efficient blockchain-enabled authenticated key agreement scheme for mobile vehicles-assisted precision agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) networks called$AgroMobiBlock$. The limited existing work on authentication in agricultural networks shows passive usage of blockchains with very high costs.$AgroMobiBlock$proposes a novel idea using the elliptic curve operations on an active hybrid blockchain over mobile farming vehicles with low computation and communication costs. Formal and informal security analysis along with the formal security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) software tool have shown the robustness of$AgroMobiBlock$against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, replay, physical capture, and ephemeral secret leakage attacks among other potential attacks. The blockchain-based simulation on large-scale nodes shows the computational time for an increase in the network and block sizes. Moreover, the real-time testbed experiments have been performed to show the practical usefulness of the proposed scheme.
Ezedin Barka, Mohammed Al Baqari, Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache, Jorge Herrera-Tapia
The use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems has emerged with the continuous advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart devices. This is driven by the various advantages for both patients and healthcare providers, including timely and distant alerts, continuous control, and reduced cost, to name a few. However, while providing these advantages, various challenges involving heterogeneity, scalability, and network complexity are still open. Patient security, data privacy, and trust are also among the main challenges that need more research effort. To this end, this paper presents an implementation of a biometric-based blockchain EHR system (BBEHR), a prototype that uniquely identifies patients, enables them to control access to their EHRs, and ensures recoverable access to their EHRs. This approach overcomes the dependency on the private/public key approach used by most blockchain technologies to identify patients, which becomes more crucial in situations where a loss of the private key permanently hinders the ability to access patients’ EHRs. Our solution covers component selection, high-level implementation, and integration of subsystems, was well as the coding of a prototype to validate the mitigation of the risk of permanent loss of access to EHRs by using patients’ fingerprints. A performance analysis of BBEHR showed our system’s robustness and effectiveness in identifying patients and ensuring access control for their EHRs by using blockchain smart contracts with no additional overhead.
Identity management is the process of setting and organizing the roles and access privileges of a user’s identity. The current identity management system is centralized and is controlled by a single entity. Users’ privacy concerns are not in their best interest. Users have very little to no control over their data. The centralized system becomes a single point of failure which is prone to attack that leads to users losing their data privacy if these centralized systems are breached. Therefore we propose a Blockchain-based decentralized Identity Management System that makes use of self-sovereign identity, decentralized identifiers, and verifiable credentials. It also gives users the ability to choose from a very large number of identity providers instead of just a select few corporations. The main advantages of the proposed solution include the elimination of the need for a central authority for identity verification and identity data management, the reduction of time spent on identity verification, the ability to share data with permission, and the ability to verify the origin of the data while sharing.
G. Puthilibai, T. Benil, S. Chitradevi, V. Devatarika · 6 authors
Industrial IoT (IIoT) advances organisations to the next level by tracing and managing all entity activities. Moreover, the deployment, dependency, and interaction of these wireless devices, often known as IoT (Internet of Things) devices, creates a number of privacy and security problems. The usage of sensors in industries helps and decreases man power while increasing quality and lowering production costs. Several attacks might be encountered by different attackers by hacking various sensors activities. In this research, a secure wireless scheme based on Blockchain technology which saves the extracted collections of all data into a number of blocks to preserve transparency and secure all the activities of smart sensors is proposed. Furthermore, the proposed blockchain mechanism's simulation results are tested against different security transmission processes. Furthermore, the obtained results are scrutinised and analyzed over certain metrics like ease of attack detection, probability of attack success and falsification attack to assess the authenticity of IoT devices.
Erhan Ustaoğlu, Selçuk KIRAN, Mahmut Bağcı, İlkim Ecem Emre
Çalışma, NFT (Non-FungibleToken) kavramı ile bu kavramın üzerine kurulu olduğu teknoloji ve kullanım alanlarını araştırmaktadır. Bu araştırmada ilk olarak NFT’nin dayandığı blokzincir teknolojisi incelenmekte ve çalışma biçimi açıklanmaktadır. Ardından bu teknolojinin özellikleri ve popüler kripto paralar dışındaki kullanım alanları irdelenmiştir. Daha sonra NFT’yi bir standart olarak tanımlayan Ethereum platformu araştırılmış ve yine bu platform üzerinde tanımlanan akıllı sözleşmeler açıklanmıştır. Ayrıca NFT kategorileri incelenmiş, dijital sanat alanı ve diğer kategorilerde önerilen uygulamalar için bir literatür taraması yapılmıştır. Ek olarak, oluşturulan sözlük yardımıyla bu alanda kullanılan kavramların Türkçe karşılıklarına dair önerilerde bulunulmuştur. Başta sanat, koleksiyon ve oyun kategorisinde olmak üzere birçok alanda NFT uygulamaları mevcuttur. NFT’lerin özellikle tedarik zincirleri ve nesnelerin interneti alanlarında yaygın olarak kullanım alanı bulacağı öngörülmektedir. Bu çalışma, NFT kavramını, teknolojisini ve kullanım alanlarını bir bütün olarak ele almakta ve açıklamaktadır.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques