Blockchain Papers

Shreyansh Sharma, Debasis Das, Santanu Chaudhury

No abstract is available for this record.

Aparna Singh, Surbhi Sharma, Surabhi Solanki, Mamta Narwaria

Biometric authentication provides high convenience with the drawback of privacy leakage, replay attacks, and centralized control over biometric templates. This paper introduces an Ethereum-based decentralized biometric authentication framework that uses Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage, and an on-chain challenge–response protocol. In the proposed model, encrypted biometric templates are stored of-chain in IPFS, whereas their content identifiers (CIDs) are registered in Ethereum smart contracts. Every authentication attempt necessitates a new on-chain nonce and an ECDSA signature of the concatenation of the CID and the nonce, authenticated through Ethereum’s built-in method, ecrecover. The design supports explicit replay protection, revocation, and public auditability. Deployment of the prototype on Ganache and MetaMask reveals that the scheme provides secure, transparent, and tamper-proof authentication with minimal gas consumption on FVC2004 datasets and reasonable storage usage on Ethereum.

Mingzheng Lv, Chen Liang, Baokun Zheng, Tianqing Zhu · 7 authors

The exponential growth of connected devices and embodied intelligent systems in B5G and 6G networks demands secure, adaptive, and autonomous communication among distributed agents. However, ensuring privacy-preserving coordination among these Agentic AI systems remains a major challenge, particularly in decentralized environments where transparency conflicts with confidentiality. To address this issue, we propose a Smart-contract-based Embodied Covert Agent Communication Architecture (SECA), which integrates Ethereum election contracts with image steganography to enable covert, high-bandwidth communication among intelligent agents. In this framework, Blockchain-based agents utilize candidate images as visual carriers to embed encrypted messages, achieving imperceptible data exchange during on-chain interactions. We further design a Stackelberg Minimal Control Algorithm (SMCA) that enables adaptive manipulation of voting agents to ensure communication reliability with minimal control cost. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a transmission bandwidth up to 103× higher than ORIM-based covert channels and passes multiple detection benchmarks (K-S and χ2tests), all without incurring additional gas costs. This work provides a foundational perspective for secure Agentic AI communication frameworks, bridging embodied intelligence, decentralized networking, and covert information transmission in emerging 6G environments.

Chengsheng Yuan, Lvyang Cao, X F Li, Zhili Zhou · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Hyunhum Cho, Ik Rae Jeong

The thriving Non-Fungible Token(NFT) market, despite its innovative redefinition of digital ownership, faces malicious attacks and challenges, notably from widespread wash trading. In this paper, we examine the underexplored relationship between NFT rarity and wash trading.We present a novel approach to NFT market dynamics, by establishing the first comprehensive formal framework for NFT trait systems, including essential definitions, a robust taxonomy, precise rarity calculation, and verifiable properties. Building upon this, we conduct an empirical analysis of NFT rarity and wash trading across 30 collections including 336,133 NFTs, 764,679 transactions, total volume of 14,394,949 in Ethereum. Our findings reveal the strong inverse correlation between a collection’s price-rarity coefficient and its wash trading volume, showing that the top 5 collections with the lowest price-rarity coefficients are overwhelmingly dominated by wash trading, averaging 89.29% of their total volume, in contrast to the vast majority of other collections which exhibited negligible volumes, consistently below 2%. Case studies further highlight the power of this price-rarity analysis as a novel anomaly detection tool: it exposed wash trading-induced distortions in CryptoPunks by detecting an outlier previously undetectable by existing graph-based approaches. We also demonstrate Rektguy’s remarkable resilience—absorbing 20.04% wash volume possibly due to strong rarity-price correlation. Our findings establish rarity as an intrinsic resilience factor against manipulation, fundamentally reshaping approaches to NFT market analysis and robust anomaly detection.

L. B. WANG, Liming Zhang, Ruitao Qu, Tao Tan · 6 authors

Existing vector geographic data transaction schemes are typically merchant-controlled, hindering fair ownership tracing and impartial arbitration. To address this, we propose an asymmetric digital fingerprinting scheme based on smart contracts. In our approach, the user encrypts a proof fingerprint with a public key and sends it to the merchant; the merchant leverages the additive homomorphic property of the Paillier cryptosystem to embed the encrypted user fingerprint into an encrypted portion of the vector data while embedding a tracking fingerprint into the plaintext portion. The combined data is delivered to the user, who uses their private key to decrypt the encrypted part and obtain the plaintext data containing both fingerprints. This design enables tracing of unauthorized distribution without exposing the user’s fingerprint in plaintext, preventing malicious accusations. By leveraging blockchain immutability and smart contract automation, the scheme supports secure, transparent transactions and decentralized arbitration without third-party involvement, thereby reducing collusion risk and protecting both parties’ rights.

H. P. Yu, Yinglong Gao, Shen Su, Zhen Yang · 6 authors

Decentralized storage auditing approaches are designed to ensure data security in dishonest decentralized storage providers. However, the need for data updates introduces new challenges to the design of decentralized storage auditing approaches. Existing approaches can support dynamic auditing for updated files. Unfortunately, they can only deal with block-level updating, which is counter-intuitive and requires conversion from semantic changes to binary changes. Furthermore, existing dynamic auditing approaches require the recalculation of auxiliary auditing information (e.g., auditing authenticators) in data owners, which imposes unnecessary additional burdens on data owners, particularly those with constrained resources in decentralized storage environments. In this paper, we focus on image files and propose iAudit, an efficient pixel-level dynamic image auditing approach in decentralized storage. We first design a novel image authenticator with image pixels for efficient dynamic auditing, which combines convolution operations and polynomial commitment in authenticator construction. Additionally, we build an owner-free dynamic mechanism in dynamic decentralized storage auditing approach by utilizing zero-knowledge proof techniques. In this way, the dynamic operation overheads incurred by auditing can be completely eliminated from the data owners. A prototype of iAudit is implemented, and extensive experimental results demonstrate that iAudit outperforms state-of-the-art works, achieving over a 210× speedup for data owner in dynamic update phase.

Jing Yang, Vijay Govindarajan, Gyanendra Kumar, Achyut Shankar · 8 authors

With the rapid proliferation of smart home cameras, wearable vision devices, and user-generated Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) content, ensuring visual media authenticity, rightful ownership, and tamper detection has become increasingly challenging. We propose Chain-Visage, a blockchain-assisted framework for secure content authentication and tamper tracing in decentralized CIoT multimedia ecosystems. The termChainreflects the consortium blockchain backbone that guarantees immutable provenance, decentralized ownership management, and copyright revocation, whileVisagesymbolizes the unique visual identity of multimedia content achieved through dual-stage visual hash embedding. The proposed framework integrates Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving ownership verification and employs optimized smart contracts to manage visual rights, provenance records, and ownership transfers efficiently. Evaluations on a large-scale dataset of over 10,000 real-world images and 3,850 video clips from diverse CIoT devices demonstrate Chain-Visage’s superior performance, achieving 97.5% traceability accuracy, 93% tamper detection sensitivity, and low verification latency even under resource-constrained environments. This work addresses a critical research gap in secure, privacy-preserving, and energy-efficient multimedia ownership control and tamper-resilient content authentication for next-generation CIoT ecosystems.

Tien Luong Trinh

The rapid expansion of the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market has underscored significant challenges in copyright protection and ownership authentication. While blockchain technology ensures the immutability and transparency of token transactions, the off-chain storage of metadata and original content remains a critical vulnerability, exposing NFTs to risks such as data loss, manipulation, and copyright disputes. In response to these challenges, this study proposes a blockchain-integrated watermarking framework that embeds resilient copyright information into digital assets via a general frequency-domain approach. The watermark is stored off-chain within the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), while its associated Content Identifier (CID) is anchored in a smart contract, ensuring traceability of provenance and verification of authenticity. Comparative experiments with the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method demonstrate the superior robustness of the proposed frequency-domain technique against various attacks, including compression, noise, and image manipulation. The proposed framework significantly enhances copyright protection, facilitates transparent NFT provenance, and provides a scalable foundation for secure digital asset management within blockchain-based ecosystems.

Gandharba Swain, Anita Pradhan, Satish Muppidi, Pramoda Patro · 5 authors

In 2008, the idea of Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, was proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto. It describes a distributed system for managing digital transactions. Based on this idea, the blockchain concept has evolved. Blockchain is a distributed ledger. The ledger is immutable and shareable among all the user nodes. The ledger/blockchain contains several blocks chained by hash values. If we try to modify a block, its hash value will change; the hash value is already stored in the neighbor node, so the neighbor node will not allow it to change. Thus, immutability is achieved. The blockchain is worthy because of its good characteristics, such as data decentralization and a high level of trust. This chapter represents a detailed study on blockchain architecture, consensus mechanisms, and their application in digital image watermarking. Digital image watermarking is used for copyright protection, ownership claim, and image tamper detection. If we use blockchain with watermarking, the technique becomes more secure and robust. Though the applications of blockchain technology in image watermarking are in a nascent stage at present, the disruptive and revolutionary nature of the blockchain will make it a significant force shortly.

ВАДИМ ПОДДУБНИЙ, Олександр Сєвєрінов

The article presents an analysis of the robustness of an authentication scheme based on zero watermarking. The study examines a two-factor authentication scheme that uses "knowledge of something" (a password) and "possession of something" (a digital RGB image) as its factors. The zero watermarking algorithm chosen is based on DWT and K-means transformations, with additional use of the Swish function. The analysis is conducted by considering the theoretical complexity of the algorithm assuming the adversary knows its parameters, such as the password, the hash of the password, the image, the reference watermark, the transformation result, and other parameters. Previous studies have shown a high theoretical robustness of the scheme, which relies on the complexity of the password and the dimensionality of the image. For large image sizes (512×512 pixels and above), a relatively high level of cryptographic resistance is achieved. However, this robustness is not formally proven, and the actual strength may be significantly lower due to the specifics of the images and transformations, which can introduce additional vulnerabilities. The algorithm is subject to a relatively high rate of collision, associated with digital image transformations and matrix multiplications, which weakens its resistance. Authentication schemes and zero watermarking algorithms require further research, formal proof of cryptographic properties, and methods for integration into access control systems, as they can provide a high level of authentication robustness in systems with high noise levels. Additionally, the convenience and low cost of such schemes give them an advantage over other authentication methods. The study provides recommendations for improving the potential characteristics of the algorithm.

Nicholas Tio, Octara Pribadi, Robet Robet

The increasing need for trustworthy digital document verification presents challenges in ensuring authenticity, transparency, and tamper resistance without relying on centralized authorities. This study aims to develop and evaluate a decentralized document notarization system using Ethereum and IPFS that offers secure, transparent, and cost-efficient verification. The system employs modular smart contracts deployed through a factory pattern to create user-specific verifier instances, enabling document submission, revocation, and verification using keccak-256 hashes, ECDSA signatures, and IPFS content identifiers. Methods include contract development, deployment on a local Hardhat network, performance benchmarking, and front-end integration for user interaction. Results show that verifier deployment consumes approximately 1.19 million gas (≈$85 at 20 gwei), document submission around 85 thousand gas (≈$6), and revocation about 50 thousand gas (≈$3.50). Client-side operations such as hashing and IPFS pinning occur in under 50 milliseconds, while real-world blockchain confirmations take 10–30 seconds. The findings demonstrate that decentralized notarization using Ethereum and IPFS is both technically feasible and economically viable. Future enhancements, including Layer 2 rollups, batch notarization, and privacy-preserving features such as encrypted IPFS pinning or zero-knowledge proofs, are proposed to further improve scalability, cost-efficiency, and data confidentiality

Wei Huang, Shuming Jiao, Huichang Guan, Huisi Miao · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Stuti Pandey, Akhilendra Pratap Singh, Dharmender Singh Kushwaha, Ashish Pandey

Audio piracy detection is increasingly complex in decentralised distribution settings, where mainstream approaches fail to ensure robustness, verifiability, or computational efficiency. Conventional Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems mainly enforce licensed access, but once content is copied or redistributed outside their control they offer little protection. Classical fingerprinting approaches such as MFCC based hashes can detect near-exact duplicates, yet they often fail under signal edits like pitch shifting, time stretching or equalisation. Deep learning embeddings improve robustness but demand heavy computation and centralised resources, making them less suitable for edge or decentralised deployments. These limitations call for a solution that is both edit resilient and verifiable. We propose HashWave, a blockchain-integrated perceptual hashing framework that combines robust audio fingerprinting with tamper-proof verification. The system fuses MFCC, chroma and chroma CENS, CQT, spectral contrast, and lightweight tempo/energy cues, applying operation-aware weighting via [Formula: see text] and constrained DTW for time-scale edits. Evaluated across GTZAN, FMA-A Dataset for Music Analysis, and MUSAN (SLR17) with over twenty signal-processing transformations, HashWave achieves AUC 0.957 and TPR@1%FPR 0.952, outperforming MFCC-only baselines and approaching deep embeddings at lower CPU cost. The blockchain layer, built on Ethereum and IPFS, ensures decentralised hash storage, duplication control, and verifiable authorship with average upload and contract execution times of 0.017 s and 0.044 s. Together, these results establish HashWave as a practical, scalable, and secure framework for piracy detection across streaming, podcasting, and Web3 ecosystems.

Mauro Clavijo-Herrera, Rolando Trujillo-Rasua, Carles Anglés Tafalla

The integrity and traceability of digital photographic evidence represent a critical factor during forensic investigations, especially when this evidence undergoes technical transformations, such as cropping or resolution enhancement. Ensuring that these modifications remain transparent, verifiable, and attributable is essential to maintaining the value of the evidence during an investigation. To meet these requirements, existing systems typically rely on blockchain-based implementations within permissioned networks or provide only limited support for image transformations. As a result, they often lack the flexibility and transparency required for open or decentralized forensic scenarios. In this paper, we propose an endorsement-based image forensics system that leverages public blockchain to record the lifecycle and verify the authenticity of images. Our system employs hybrid encryption to provide confidentiality of uploaded images while simultaneously ensuring that they remain auditable and non-repudiable. The system supports different trust models and enables users to assess the trustworthiness of an image’s provenance data directly and indirectly. Direct trust is achieved by validating an image transformation through reproducible functions or zero-knowledge proofs; indirect trust is enabled through publicly recorded endorsements. Our design achieves low gas costs and provides confidentiality, verifiability, and traceability guarantees, improving upon previous approaches without relying on permissioned infrastructures.

Bareq M. Khudhair, Karrar M. Khudhair, Jasim Gshayyish Zwaid, Falah Amer Abdulazeez · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Kei Yamanaka, M. Mimura, Kazumasa Omote

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have gained attention as a technology for guaranteeing ownership of digital content, leading to rapid market expansion. However, NFTs are limited in that they guarantee ownership only for a single, explicitly designated digital asset. For instance, if an image associated with an NFT undergoes modifications such as resolution reduction or trimming, it falls outside the scope of the NFT’s guarantee. In this study, we propose a new NFT scheme capable of guaranteeing ownership for multiple digital assets that fall within a defined visual similarity threshold. The core of this method lies in replacing conventional cryptographic hash functions with Image Hash functions, allowing the scope of ownership to cover a "range" of similar content rather than a single exact match. This enables highly similar content to be automatically included within the NFT’s scope of guarantee without explicit designation. To verify the feasibility of this scheme, we implemented and evaluated a prototype using four types of Image Hash functions against common image transformations, such as resolution reduction and trimming, on the Polygon blockchain. The results indicate that both Average Hash (aHash) and Perceptual Hash (pHash) are suitable functions, and that the NFT verification process can be performed efficiently. This method provides a novel mechanism to dynamically extend the scope of NFT ownership, paving the way for new potential applications for NFTs.

Ayushman Sharma, Praveen Bohara, Manish Tiwari, Maad M. Mıjwıl · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

T. N. Prabakar, S. Kanchana

The integrity, coupled with the transparency of electoral systems, is vital for the existence of a ‎democratic society if that society is to function well. Often, conventional electronic voting mechanisms ‎are criticized for their security vulnerabilities, with a lack of transparency, together with limited public trust. ‎Blockchain technology has come about to be a possible enabler for trustless and immutable ‎systems. However, such a standard, privacy-preserving, verifiable voting model remains elusive. This ‎work seeks to fill this void with the use of a blockchain e-voting system that uses QR codes to ‎validate voters, cryptographically ensures integrity with the EFFT-SWIFFT hash, and also handles ‎ballots through smart contracts. A feature matrix together with a visual chart was used in a systematic ‎literature review of 28 peer-reviewed papers to analyze and compare authentication methods, ‎transparency techniques, consensus mechanisms, and scalability solutions. Though the analysis reveals ‎that entities greatly underutilize advanced cryptographic primitives such as zero-knowledge proofs and ‎post-quantum hashing, these primitives potentially improve privacy and also verifiability. Present in the ‎proposed model is a multi-layered architecture. Also, the model can offer a secure as well as ‎transparent solution for addressing these gaps. Blockchain-based e-voting can increase trust, reduce ‎fraud, and broaden democratic participation, but it requires real-world validation through pilot projects ‎and usability testing‎.

Trinh Tien Luong, Tạ Minh Thanh

This paper proposes a novel solution for securing digital image ownership and verification within the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem. While existing blockchain systems lack adequate protection for intellectual property, the proposed system employs watermarking to preserve copyrights during NFT minting. It also integrates Merkle Trees for efficient duplication detection and counterfeit prevention. Additionally, the system can identify tampered regions, enhancing duplicate NFT detection. These contributions provide a secure and scalable framework for protecting digital content in the evolving NFT landscape.

Jinze Du, Chundong Wang, Lihai Nie

No abstract is available for this record.

Jucai Yang, Liang Li, Yiwei Gu, Haiqin Wu

The integration of blockchain technology into healthcare presents a paradigm shift for secure data management, enabling decentralized and tamper-proof storage and sharing of sensitive Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, existing blockchain-based healthcare systems, while providing robust access control, commonly overlook the high latency in user-side re-computation of hashes for integrity verification of large multimedia data, impairing their practicality, especially in time-sensitive clinical scenarios. In this paper, we propose FAITH, an innovative scheme for \underline{F}ast \underline{A}uthenticated and \underline{I}nteroperable mul\underline{T}imedia \underline{H}ealthcare data storage and sharing over hybrid-storage blockchains. Rather than user-side hash re-computations, FAITH lets an off-chain storage provider generate verifiable proofs using recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), while the user only needs to perform lightweight verification. For flexible access authorization, we leverage Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE) and enable the provider to conduct ciphertext re-encryption, in which the re-encryption correctness can be verified via ZKPs against the malicious provider. All metadata and proofs are recorded on-chain for public verification. We provide a comprehensive analysis of FAITH's security regarding data privacy and integrity. We implemented a prototype of FAITH, and extensive experiments demonstrated its practicality for time-critical healthcare applications, dramatically reducing user-side verification latency by up to $98\%$, bringing it from $4$ s down to around $70$ ms for a $5$ GB encrypted file.

Md. Biplob Hossain, Maya Rahayu, Samsul Huda, Md. Arshad Ali · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Chenyang Ma, Wei Song, Jeff Huang

Fuzzing is an effective technique to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts. The challenge of smart contract fuzzing lies in the statefulness of contracts, which indicates that certain vulnerabilities can only be manifested in specific contract states. State-of-the-art fuzzers may generate and execute a plethora of meaningless or redundant transaction sequences during fuzzing, incurring a penalty in efficiency. To this end, we present DepFuzz , a hybrid fuzzer for efficient smart contract fuzzing, which introduces a symbolic execution module into the feedback-based fuzzer. Guided by the distance-based function dependencies between functions, DepFuzz can efficiently yield meaningful transaction sequences that contribute to vulnerability exposure or code coverage. The experiments on 286 benchmark smart contracts and 500 large real-world smart contracts corroborate that, compared to state-of-the-art approaches, DepFuzz achieves higher instruction coverage rate and uncovers many more vulnerabilities with less time.