Blockchain Papers

Chengtang Cao, Sung‐Kwan Mo, Zongzheng Huang

No abstract is available for this record.

Dr. Emily R. Thompson

Blockchain-based voting systems have emerged as a promising solution to address issues of transparency, immutability, and trust in electoral processes. However, ensuring the security and privacy of votes remains a major challenge. This paper explores the integration of advanced cryptographic protocols, including zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation, to safeguard voter privacy and system integrity in blockchain voting architectures. We analyze the strengths and limitations of these protocols and propose a hybrid cryptographic framework designed to enhance security, verifiability, and scalability. A comparative analysis using simulation data illustrates the trade-offs between security guarantees and computational efficiency. Our findings underscore the critical role of cryptography in enabling trustworthy, transparent, and tamper-resistant blockchain voting systems suitable for modern democratic processes.

Lejun Zhang, Xucan Zhang, Siyi Xiao, Zexin Li · 7 authors

Ethereum, as one of the most active cryptocurrency trading platforms, has garnered significant academic interest due to its transparent and accessible transaction data. In recent years, phishing scams have emerged as a serious criminal activity on Ethereum. Although most studies model Ethereum account transactions as networks and analyze them using traditional machine learning or network representation learning techniques, these approaches often rely solely on the latest static transaction records or use manually designed features while neglecting transaction histories, thus failing to fully capture the dynamic interactions and potential trading patterns between accounts. This article introduces an innovative multiperspective cascaded dynamic graph neural network model named DMPCG, which extracts phishing transaction data from authoritative databases like blockchain explorers to construct transaction network graphs. The model elevates the analysis from the microscopic features of nodes to the macroscopic dynamics of the entire network, integrating the attributes of static snapshot graphs with the evolution of dynamic trading networks, significantly enhancing the accuracy of phishing detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the DMPCG method achieves an impressive precision of 92.6% and an F1-score of 90.9%, outperforming existing baseline models and traditional subgraph sampling techniques.

Yan Watequlis Syaifudin, Silvia Prada Aprilia, Salies Apriliyanto, Dinda Rizqiyatul Himmah · 7 authors

The e-voting system, which is based on blockchain technology, greatly improves the security, transparency, and integrity of electronic voting. This is achieved by using a decentralized ledger system that distributes the recording of votes, allows for public verification, and maintains voter anonymity through cryptographic methods. This resilient method guarantees that once a vote is submitted, it is securely recorded and cannot be changed without the agreement of network members, thereby protecting the integrity of elections. Built on the private Go Ethereum (Geth) network, this study implements an e-voting system that features validator nodes for transaction verification, user-friendly mobile applications for voter interaction, and comprehensive smart contract capabilities that define the voting process rules. The mobile application guides users from launching the app and authenticating their identity to selecting candidates and securely recording their votes, ensuring seamless connectivity to the blockchain and incorporating essential verification steps. Furthermore, the implementation process includes meticulous setup of Ethereum nodes, smart contract development, and thorough testing for functionality, performance, and security. The evaluation focuses on aspects like maintaining data transparency, user authentication, and resilience against unauthorized access, demonstrating high user satisfaction with the app's performance. Ultimately, this blockchain-based system addresses modern electoral challenges, ensuring a secure, transparent, and reliable voting experience that fosters trust among all stakeholders involved.

Rui Ma, Seemantula Nischal, Shreyas Karnik, Shridhar BG · 5 authors

Abstract: A decentralized voting system utilizing blockchain technology offers a transformative approach to traditional election processes. This innovative method addresses several challenges, including low voter turnout, security vulnerabilities, lack of transparency, potential vote tampering, and delays in result processing. This paper focuses on the design and development of a smart contract-based online voting system, leveraging the Ethereum blockchain as its foundation. The proposed system eliminates the necessity for intermediaries by utilizing blockchain's immutable and distributed ledger, thereby securing votes and facilitating a fully auditable voting process. Smart contracts are employed to automate voter registration, ballot generation, and vote counting, which helps minimize errors and enhance operational efficiency. Furthermore, the Ethereum network enforces a one-vote-per-voter policy through the Gas token mechanism, effectively preventing duplicate voting and ensuring the integrity of elections. A proof-of-concept application is presented and tested with simulated voting data, demonstrating the system's capability to maintain anonymity while ensuring the integrity of the voting process. This research highlights the potential of blockchain technology to bolster voter confidence, increase participation, and reduce election costs.

B. Sujatha, Yarrampati Ganesh, N. Leelavathy, R. Tamilkodi · 7 authors

Objectives: A blockchain-based E-Voting system shall be designed to secure and make transparent voting through biometric and facial recognition for voter authentication with the help of smart contracts to automate electoral processes. Methods: The research used the Ethereum blockchain technology with smart contracts to automatically schedule elections, register voters, and declare election results. Volunteers controlled information relating to the voter, which included name, email address, phone number, biometrics, and facial images. All this was available for authenticated access. The IPFS contained all this for decentralized and immutable record-keeping. Findings: This E-Voting system is therefore proposed based on enhancing the security as well as the transparency brought about in the electoral processes. Using smart contracts that are developed with Ethereum prevents manipulation and provides integrity regarding data. Studies show the IPFS storage system leads to complete decentralization together with immutability-a critical flaw seen in systems of traditional voting. One can ensure the participation will be done by only voters who are verified, much improvement compared to the level of reliability as well as integrity offered through the various methods applied within the current electoral processes. These study results reinforce blockchain's effectiveness in ensuring that voting applications are secure as well as tamper-proof. Novelty: A blockchain and IPFS-based secure, decentralized voting solution to maintain data integrity and transparency. Keywords: Blockchain, E-Voting, Secure Voter Authentication, Smart Contracts, Online Voting, Election Automation

Xinxin Xing, Yizhong Liu, Qianhong Wu, Zhenyu Guan · 8 authors

In Web 3.0’s pursuit of a decentralized and user-autonomous network, traditional access control methods, such as central servers and weak decentralized algorithms, are insufficient regarding security, fault tolerance ability, and scalability. To solve this, we first design a decentralized multi-committee attribute-based encryption, X-ABE, to address the weak decentralization and low fault tolerance in Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption (MA-ABE). X-ABE replaces MA-ABE’s fragile attribute authorities with robust attribute committees, each composed of multiple nodes. By developing dual-wrapped shares techniques, we address the increased dimensionality challenge of secret sharing while maintaining only 1 distributed key generation instance. Also, a formal security definition and proof under the partial adaptive model are given using dual system encryption. Second, X-LOCK, an X-ABE based decentralized access control utilizing consensus plus sharding, is proposed for Web 3.0, to achieve full decentralization, consistency, fault tolerance, user autonomy, and scalability. Third, X-ABE-R is proposed for attribute revocation and is demonstrated in X-LOCK-R with sharding blockchain as an immutable revocation ledger. Fourth, a formal definition and comparative analysis of X-ABE’s fault tolerance abilities are demonstrated, covering aspects of liveness and safety, along with the complexity analysis. Fifth, practical evaluations are conducted, demonstrating that while improving fault tolerance, the overhead remains acceptable.

Zongbo Hu

The Borda Count method, a widely used ranked voting system, is known for its fairness and simplicity. However, when applied to large-scale voting systems, it faces challenges related to computational complexity, scalability, and system reliability. This paper proposes an optimization model for the Borda Count method by integrating blockchain consensus mechanisms, including Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), aiming to enhance the voting process's efficiency, accuracy, and fault tolerance.We explore how blockchain technology can address the computational challenges of Borda Count, ensuring secure, transparent, and decentralized voting while maintaining high system reliability. By leveraging blockchain's immutability and consensus mechanisms, the proposed model significantly reduces computational overhead, increases the robustness of the system against node failures, and improves the accuracy of the voting results.This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the Borda Count method and blockchain consensus mechanisms, outlines a novel optimization algorithm, and provides a theoretical evaluation of the model's performance. We conclude by discussing the advantages of integrating blockchain with Borda Count for distributed voting systems and suggest potential directions for future research.

Adam L. Hooker, Wenjian Huang, Shalini Kapali Kurumathur, Nishant Vishwamitra · 5 authors

The (ab)use of encryption and compression in hiding illegal digital content complicates efforts by law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to procure evidence to support the elements of proof required in criminal prosecution. This reinforces the importance of designing solutions to determine the file type of an encrypted file (e.g., videos and still images in the context of illegal picture investigations), which can be used to build probable cause in a court order application to have the file decrypted. While machine learning (ML) has shown immense capabilities in several detection tasks, the suitability of ML for detecting file types in encrypted or compressed files has not been explored. Furthermore, since detecting file types in real-world LEA applications is a high-stake decision-making problem, existing ML techniques that do not provide prediction uncertainty are not as useful. In this work, we take the first step toward detecting file types in encrypted or compressed files using ML for LEA applications based on their Byte Frequency Distributions (BFD). We then compose a dataset1of BFDs of 300,000 encrypted and compressed data from 12,000 diverse files for five different file types. We conduct an in-depth analysis of our dataset and demonstrate the utility of ML techniques in detecting file types of content in encrypted and compressed files based on BFDs. Informed by these findings, we present our proposed framework, eDefender, designed to facilitate the detection of file types in encrypted and compressed files for LEA applications, by employing uncertainty quantification of detection scores based on ensembling. eDefender successfully flags directories with encrypted or compressed image/video-type files with an F1-score of 90.7%.

Duc Bui Tien, Nam Tran Ba, Hong Khanh Vo

Traditional voting systems face numerous challenges, including security vulnerabilities, transparency issues, and operational inefficiencies, which undermine public confidence in electoral processes.Blockchain technology offers a promising solution with its immutable, decentralized, and cryptographically secure framework, addressing these critical issues.This paper presents a blockchainbased voting system implemented across multiple Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) platforms, including Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, Polygon, and Celo.The system leverages smart contracts for secure vote management and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for voter authentication, ensuring the uniqueness and authenticity of each vote.Our research includes a comprehensive evaluation of the system's performance, focusing on transaction costs, processing speed, and scalability.The findings demonstrate the potential of blockchain technology to efficiently handle large volumes of electoral data while maintaining security and integrity, thereby enhancing the reliability and transparency of voting systems.

Stanisław Barański, Ben Biedermann, Joshua Ellul

Voting is a cornerstone of collective participatory decision-making in contexts ranging from political elections to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Despite the proliferation of internet voting protocols promising enhanced accessibility and efficiency, their evaluation and comparison are complicated by a lack of standardized criteria and unified definitions of security and maturity. Furthermore, socio-technical requirements by decision makers are not structurally taken into consideration when comparing internet voting systems. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a trust-centric maturity scoring framework to quantify the security and maturity of seventeen internet voting systems. A comprehensive trust model analysis is conducted for selected internet voting protocols, examining their security properties, trust assumptions, technical complexity, and practical usability. In this paper we propose the Internet Voting Maturity Framework (IVMF) which supports nuanced assessment that reflects real-world deployment concerns and aids decision-makers in selecting appropriate systems tailored to their specific use-case requirements. The framework is general enough to be applied to other systems, where the aspects of decentralization, trust, and security are crucial, such as digital identity, Ethereum layer-two scaling solutions, and federated data infrastructures. Its objective is to provide an extendable toolkit for policy makers and technology experts alike that normalizes technical and non-technical requirements on a univariate scale.

S Mohanan Pillai, Darshan Lahamage, Shreya Gurav, Dayanand Ambawade

India, the world’s largest democracy, faces significant challenges in conducting free and fair elections due to the prevalence of vote tampering, booth capturing, and rigging. To address and solve these challenges, a blockchain-based e-voting system will be developed that is secure, transparent, and accessible to all eligible voters in India. The decentralized nature of blockchain, combined with the transparency and security of smart contracts written in Solidity, will ensure that the voting process is tamper-proof and transparent. The system will be developed and tested on Ethereum testnet, and the complexity of existing systems will be simplified into a simple smartphone application that can be accessed by all eligible voters in India. The system will remove dependency on crypto wallets like Meta-mask, the backend api’s are developed using node.js, express.js and web3.js. SHA-3 will be used for hashing and encryption purposes. The frontend will be developed using React Native, ensuring a user-friendly and accessible interface. The successful implementation of this blockchain-based e-voting system could revolutionize the democratic process in India, making it more accessible, secure, and transparent, and setting an example for other countries to follow.

Xie Nannan, Mu Linyang, Wang Yangfan, Ma Yubo

No abstract is available for this record.

Marco Gomes, Luís Costa, Patrícia Anjos Azevedo

No abstract is available for this record.

Gholamreza Ramezan, Eladio Robles Casas, Ben Beath, Jake Godfrey

No abstract is available for this record.

R. Menaka, M. Gowthami, S. Hemalatha, B. Jeevananthan · 6 authors

A Block-Chain based Balloting device incorporating Smart-Contracts and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Consensus approach to improve election protection, transparency, and efficiency. Electorate serve as validators and also cast ballots as well, for the verification of integrity and validity of votes. The PoS technique establishes network reliability, while Smart-Contracts for the automation of voting process, imposing rules, and ensures that vote counts are precise and visible. Using this Block-Chain technology, the issues like rip-off, manipulation, and lacking transparency can be overcome from traditional voting system. Smart-Contracts and Proof-of-Stake together make strong foundation for system security.

Yekta Kocaoğullar, Eric Osterweil, Lixia Zhang

The Domain Name System (DNS) has been providing a decentralized global namespace to support all Internet applications and usages over the last few decades. In the recent years, a number of blockchain-based name systems have emerged with the claim of providing better namespace decentralization than DNS. The community at large seems uncertain with regard to which of these systems is the best in providing decentralized Internet namespace control. In this paper, we first deconstruct the design of DNS, identify its three essential components and explain who controls each of them. We then examine the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) as a representative example of blockchain-based naming systems, gauge the degree of its decentralization. Finally, we conduct a comparative analysis between DNS and ENS to assess the validity and affordability of each design and the (de)centralization in their namespace control and name system operations.

G. Somasekhar, Sreedhar Jinka, Chinna Kullayappa Kanekal, Anusha Marouthu

Traditional voting schemes are often overwhelmed by problems such as deception, influence, and incompetence, which can be resolved by applying blockchain technology with transparency, decentralization, and immutability. This study proposes a safe and indisputable digital voting system with blockchain technology to maintain the integrity of the voting procedure. The reliability and privacy of the voting procedure are upheld with distributed ledger technology and cryptographic techniques. The essence of the proposed method is the immutability of the blockchain ledger, which ensures a tamper-proof record of each cast vote, promoting transparency and offering a way of audit for free verification. The proposed method employs cryptographic protocols to protect individual votes while preserving complete transparency and verifiability of the voting procedure. The InterPlanetary Filesystem (IPFS) is applied to ensure data integrity. Moreover, the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) consensus algorithm is utilized to remove glitches in distributed settings. The proposed approach provides a decentralized platform where voters can cast their votes from anywhere without difficulty using an internet connection, eliminating the need for physical ballot papers and polling stations. Using immutable ledger and cryptographic security aspects in blockchain, the reliability of the voting procedure can be protected while maintaining voter anonymity and confidentiality. Finally, it is shown that the proposed scheme outweighs other existing approaches.

Alex Berke, Tobin South, Robert Mahari, Kent Larson · 5 authors

Tax returns contain financial information of interest to third parties: public officials are asked to share financial data for transparency, companies seek to assess the financial status of business partners, and individuals need to prove their income to third-parties.Tax returns also contain sensitive data such that sharing them in their entirety undermines privacy.We outline how zero-knowledge cryptography may be applied to address this tension by allowing individuals and organizations to make provable claims about select information in their tax returns without revealing additional information, in a way that can be independently verified by third parties.We highlight key system goals and design specifications for this zero-knowledge tax disclosure system (zkTax) and present a prototype implementation.The prototype consists of three distinct services that can be distributed: a tax authority that provides signed tax documents; a Redact & Prove Service that enables users to redact tax documents and produce a zero-knowledge proof attesting the provenance of the redacted data; and a Verify Service to check the validity of claims.We demonstrate how zkTax could be implemented with minimal changes to existing tax infrastructure, allowing the system to be extensible to other contexts and jurisdictions.This work provides a practical example of how distributed tools leveraging cryptography can enhance existing government or financial infrastructures, providing immediate transparency alongside privacy without system overhauls.

Yuhao Jin, Zhuo Zhang, Yang Lin

This study aims to explore a method for the de-anonymization of Bitcoin addresses based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA).Although Bitcoin, as a decentralized cryptocurrency, offers user privacy protection, its anonymity has also been exploited by criminals, leading to an increase in illegal activities such as money laundering and terrorist financing.To address this challenge, we propose a novel deanonymization framework that constructs a formal context using Bitcoin transaction data and generates the corresponding concept lattice.By extracting the attribute weight vectors for each category, our model can effectively classify Bitcoin addresses, thereby identifying potential high-risk addresses.

Max Harrison, Thomas Haines

No abstract is available for this record.

Baowei Wang, Fengxiao Guo, Yuting Liu, Bin Li · 5 authors

Abstract Voting plays a vital role in democratic societies. Adopting electronic voting can effectively increase voter participation and significantly reduce the financial burden on the organizers. In recent years, with the prevalence of blockchain technology, numerous blockchain-based electronic voting schemes have emerged. Compared with traditional electronic voting schemes, they have more favorable security features. However, existing schemes generally suffer from inefficient voting procedures, limited functionality, and dependence on specific blockchain platforms, making them challenging to deploy in diverse voting scenarios. This paper proposes an efficient and versatile electronic voting scheme on blockchain that addresses these problems using our proposed smart contract-based aggregated blind signature, zero-knowledge proofs, and threshold encryption scheme. In the paper, the scheme’s various features, including security, are analyzed in detail, and the scheme is deployed and tested on the Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum blockchain platform. The experiment results demonstrate that the voting scheme satisfies the security requirement, and it has outstanding advantages in performance.

Siddhanth Prafulla Pathak, Akkaraju Sailesh Chandra, G. Lohitha, Mini Jain · 7 authors

The use of electronic voting technologies has grown in popularity as a way to make elections more secure and accessible. The implementation of blockchain-based encrypted identity management in electronic voting is explored in this study, which also offers a solid option to improve the reliability and credibility of voting systems. This study explores the possibilities for anonymous and transparent electronic voting while preserving voter privacy and anonymity by incorporating blockchain technology. It has always been challenging to create an electronic voting system that properly satisfies the requirements of administrators. This problem is now being resolved by blockchain technologies, which provide a distributed database with irreversible, encrypted identity management and secure transactions. A fascinating advancement in the realms of data 64innovation, dependability, and transparency is distributed ledger technology. Distributed ledger technology is commonly used in public blockchain. Virtually limitless potential for earning from sharing economies are provided by blockchain technology. This project aims to determine whether blockchain technology can be used to create electronic voting devices are used as a service.

Elsi Ahmadieh, Nour El Madhoun

The decentralized, distributed ledger, a fundamental aspect of blockchain technology, plays a pivotal role in various sectors, including electronic voting (e-voting) systems. When considering e-voting, the significance of blockchain technology in boosting the security, transparency, and integrity of the entire process is evident. This ranges from the initial steps of user registration and authentication to the final stages of voting and result validation. Unlike conventional voting systems, which are plagued by issues such as fraud, tampering, and a lack of transparency in the result tallying and viewing processes, not to mention the delays, blockchain-enabled e-voting mitigates these challenges within government frameworks. It ensures a secure, tamper-proof, and transparent procedure, where each vote is recorded as an immutable transaction, thereby enhancing the process’s reliability. This paper explores the integration of voice recognition and fingerprinting using blockchain technology for enhancing the security of e-voting systems, comparing alternative authentication methods, and emphasizing the need for a multimodal approach to achieve better security and reliability of the voting systems.