S Remya, Manu J. Pillai, Preethi Ann Jacob, Sruthi Suresh · 5 authors
Certificateless Proxy Re-Encryption (CL-PRE) eliminates certificate management and private key exposure risks for blockchain data sharing, but existing schemes have critical security vulnerabilities and performance limitations. This research work presents comprehensive security analysis and performance evaluation of CL-PRE schemes for blockchain applications. The primary contribution is discovering a critical public key replacement attack against Wang et al.’s CL-PRE scheme, where Type I adversaries completely compromise message confidentiality by substituting legitimate public keys with adversary-controlled keys, enabling ciphertext decryption without private keys and violating IND-CCA security. The systematic performance evaluation of pairing-free PRE schemes for blockchain environments is conducted through extensive benchmarking of three schemes implemented in Go. Results show self PRE achieves superior security but incurs 13.7% higher execution time than certificateless schemes. To address vulnerabilities, this work proposes a secure CL-PRE framework with enhanced validation mechanisms. The Ethereum implementation reduces on-chain storage by 40% while maintaining provable security. The framework achieves 14.1% better performance than existing secure schemes and reduces gas costs by 14.3%. These findings establish security benchmarks and practical guidelines for blockchain developers, emphasizing rigorous cryptographic analysis importance for decentralized access control advancement.
B a c k g r o u n d . The study addresses the rapid expansion of data processed within distributed digital ecosystems, where traditional centralized storage models introduce risks due to single points of failure and limited transparency in monitoring changes. The need is emphasized for secure, resilient, and verifiable mechanisms capable of protecting sensitive information in dynamic multi-user environments. M e t h o d s . A hybrid blockchain architecture integrating public and private ledgers is developed. A mathematical model of decentralized data protection is formalized, digital signatures, smart contracts, and cryptographic hashing are applied, and a functional prototype is implemented using Hyperledger Fabric with the RAFT consensus algorithm to validate secure access and ensure transaction integrity. R e s u l t s . Analytical modeling and simulation experiments involving networks of 10–100 nodes demonstrate increased system resilience by approximately 20–25% while maintaining stable transaction latency. The implemented model reliably detects unauthorized access attempts and modification actions and shows compliance with international standards, including ISO/IEC 27001 and GDPR. C o n c l u s i o n s . The findings confirm that blockchain-based architectures can significantly enhance data security in distributed environments and surpass traditional centralized protection models. The proposed framework ensures integrity, transparency, and traceability with minimal performance degradation, making it suitable for financial, governmental, medical, and corporate systems. Further development is considered promising in the context of integrating machine learning, quantum resistant cryptography, and cloud infrastructures.
The rapid evolution of digital identity verification demands solutions that balance security, privacy, and efficiency. The electronic know your customer (eKYC) is a technological integration for client identification. It automates the process, reducing costs related to traditional know your customer (KYC). This includes eliminating paper-based document management, reducing manpower needs, and minimizing human errors. This systematic literature review (SLR) uses the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) model to investigate the revolutionary potential of blockchain-based electronic KYC (eKYC), focusing on self-sovereign identity (SSI) and Decentralized Identifiers (DID). The evaluation summarizes the current state by critically assessing 44 selected research works from an initial pool of 367. Our findings show that decentralized eKYC improves security with tamper-proof credentials and cryptographic verification. SSI and DID give users control over their data and selective disclosure. However, there are key limitations: 1) a focus on financial applications, ignoring Internet of Things (IoT) integration; 2) a lack of comprehensive technical analysis on scalability and interoperability; and 3) limited real-world case studies on regulatory compliance and challenges. This work combines insights from research and industry, highlighting the need for regulatory collaboration, hybrid architectures for scalability, and user-centric design. In addition, most identity management solutions are based on Ethereum (33%), followed by Hyperledger (18%). Around 51% of solutions use smart contracts, with banking (23%) and the financial industries (19%) being the primary adopters. It emphasizes the importance of standardized eKYC protocols, technical evaluations, and interdisciplinary collaboration for practical adoption across sectors.
The rise of quantum computing threatens to break many of the cryptographic systems that secure today’s digital world. In response, researchers are developing new tools designed to remain secure in a post-quantum future. Most of the promising candidates for post-quantum digital signatures rely on security assumptions based on lattices or properties of hash functions. Another promising approach transforms secure multi-party computation protocols into zero-knowledge proofs, which are then turned into digital signatures. This technique, known as multi-party computation in-the-head (MPCitH), offers strong security properties and flexibility for distributed applications. This thesis investigates whether MPCitH digital signatures can be efficiently adapted for use by two cooperating parties to jointly produce a signature. Here we show how to construct two-party signatures based on syndrome decoding in-the-head (SDitH) signatures. We propose a provably secure scheme that achieves the smallest known communication overhead among two-party MPCitH signatures, while resulting in a signature size approximately double that of a single-prover variant. This result provides a new data point in the design space of multi-party MPCitH signatures and post-quantum digital signatures in general.
The rapid growth of the metaverse has led to a scattered ecosystem in which digital assets are deployed on different blockchain platforms. This disintegration creates significant challenges for interoperability, as users need secure, decentralized, and privacy-preserving protocols to enable interoperability between chains. Existing solutions typically depend on centralized exchanges or third-party relays, introducing a single point of failure and potential privacy risks. We propose MAM (Metaverse Asset Management), a novel user-centric protocol utilizing zkSNARK technology (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) that enables seamless movement of metaverse assets across various blockchain platforms. MAM’s architecture ensures privacy by generating all zkSNARK proofs locally on the user’s machine, ensuring that sensitive data, including private keys and asset metadata, never leave the device. The protocol employs a secure one-time setup to distribute the global circuit-specific proving key, ensuring the permanent destruction of toxic-waste data. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that MAM achieves a constant and minimal proof size (192 bytes), low gas cost (281,107 Gas per verification), and an end-to-end asset transfer latency under 15 seconds, outperforming recent alternatives such as MetaOpera and MAP. Static security analysis confirms the robustness of MAM’s smart contracts against the most significant vulnerability types. This research enhances the state-of-the-art of privacy-preserving and scalable cross-metaverse interoperability, providing a practical approach for fully decentralized digital asset management and transfer across the Metaverse.
Rojalina Priyadarshini, Rhishav Pandey, K C Ankit, Deepesh Bhandari · 7 authors
Verifying the legitimacy of original documents such as educational degree certificates is crucial. If these are found to be fraudulent, it can cause significant disruptions in the hiring process, resulting in substantial productivity losses. The researchers suggested several proposals to preserve these certificates. However, the challenge is still to have an integrated, tamper-proof and low-cost solution where the certificate issuer and the certificate itself are validated in a single platform. This paper proposes an integrated solution that uses a decentralized blockchain-based certificate verification and issuer validation system. In addition to this, it will protect the certificates from being tampered with. To search faster, hash function mapping has been employed. The proposed solution is experimentally validated by creating a blockchain network using Ethereum where each peer node represents an entity of a certificate verification system such as a validator, certificate issuer, certificate holder and the end-user of the client. The performance of the designed solution is measured by the execution and transaction cost in terms of gas consumption. A comparative analysis has been performed on similar types of tasks reported in the existing work performed on the same platform. It has been observed that the cost incurred for adding a certificate is minimal for the proposed approach. Furthermore, the searching time for the certificates is minimized by using a hash-based searching methodology. The results show that the search time has drastically gone down when certificates are not available.