Inundating networks with traffic to cripple service availability defines a DDoS attack. Traditional defences, like firewalls and centralized scrubbing centers, can suffer from single points of failure during large-scale attacks. Enter new blockchain technology, with Ethereum probably leading the way in decentralized solutions. Since Ethereum smart contracts enable DDoS detection and enforcement of validation rules, events can be managed automatically, applying rewards or penalties without a central authority. In this way it leverages the positive aspects of crypto-economic mechanisms and reputation systems; giving people an incentive to honestly participate while making abusing the system unprofitable, creating a trustless, transparent, resilient decentralized defence against cyber threats. The architecture of a blockchain-validated system that gates access to services includes a back-end gateway responsible for verifying transactions on the blockchain before processing user queries. The off-chain detection algorithm identifies unexpected traffic spikes that exceed a predefined threshold. Attackers were deterred by cost, the system itself stayed up and running, and the smart contract worked autonomously. The suggested approach maintained 96% access success for authorized users, successfully blocked 92% of DDoS traffic, and guaranteed 98% uptime during simulated attacks. All validated access attempts were 100% immutably recorded on-chain, and attackers had to pay 300% more employs transparent on-chain rules and Ethereum smart contracts to manage access. Because every access attempt is permanently documented on the blockchain, it is difficult to alter logs or stop denial-of-service attacks without detection.
Kanan Huseynov, Ali Shahzaib, István András Seres, János Tapolcai
From a user's perspective, perhaps the most significant difference between traditional banking services and widely used blockchain-based financial systems is that, in the latter, transactions and, either directly or indirectly, account balances and transaction histories are publicly observable. Therefore, a growing number of cryptographic solutions have been proposed to add a privacy layer to such systems. However, the privacy that users actually obtain does not depend solely on the security of the underlying cryptographic protocol: user behavior, transaction amount patterns, and timing decisions can substantially reduce anonymity. In this work, we study behavioral leakage in cryptocurrency mixers, focusing on Railgun on Ethereum. We aim to heuristically estimate the probability that a given deposit and withdrawal transaction belong to the same user. We consider five sources of leakage: characteristic timing patterns, address reuse, proximity in the transaction graph induced by prior public transactions, amount fingerprints that preserve distinctive digit patterns across transaction values, and knapsack type matches in which groups of transaction amounts add up in revealing ways. Our results show that even cryptographically strong privacy systems may suffer substantial anonymity loss due to user behavior and transaction patterns. Our five heuristics are able to uniquely link 17.65% of Railgun withdraw transactions to deposit transactions. We also applied a knapsack solver algorithm that was able to produce a 3.42 bit median anonymity loss for withdraw transactions. This work contributes to a better understanding of the practical privacy limits of mixers and anonymity pools, and points toward safer usage practices and design principles.
This paper presents a blockchain-based electronic voting system designed to address the persistent challenges of transparency, security, and integrity in democratic electoral processes. Traditional voting systems in countries like Nepal suffer from vote manipulation, ballot rigging, logistical inefficiencies, and limited public trust. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a decentralized e-voting application built on the Ethereum blockchain, leveraging smart contracts for tamper-proof vote recording and enforcement of voting rules. The system incorporates multi-factor authentication, combining facial recognition via OpenCV with Voter ID and Date of Birth verification to ensure only eligible voters participate. MetaMask wallet integration enables secure blockchain transactions, while Web3.js facilitates real-time interaction between the frontend and the deployed smart contracts on Ganache. The methodology encompasses data collection, voter authentication, smart contract deployment, and result retrieval. This paper offers a scalable and cost-effective alternative to conventional voting methods, with future scope for public Ethereum deployment and expanded biometric authentication.
Democratic elections rely on trust, transparency, and tamper-resistance -- qualities that conventional and early electronic voting systems have consistently failed to guarantee. This paper presents a Blockchain-Enabled Secure E-Voting Framework with Facial Recognition for Voter Authentication, designed to address persistent vulnerabilities in existing electoral systems. The proposed system integrates a permissioned blockchain ledger with deep-learning-based facial biometric verification to ensure decentralized, immutable vote storage and strong identity assurance. A multi-layer security architecture combines homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and digital signatures to preserve voter anonymity while enabling end-to-end verifiability. Anti-spoofing and liveness detection mechanisms prevent impersonation via photographs, video replays, or deepfake-generated imagery. Smart contracts automate vote counting and result publication, eliminating human involvement in the tallying process. Experimental evaluation demonstrates a facial recognition authentication accuracy of 97.3% and an end-to-end voting transaction latency under 500 milliseconds, with blockchain confirmation averaging 2.4 seconds. The framework is scalable to national-scale elections and applicable to governmental, corporate, and institutional governance contexts.
This dissertation mostly focuses on a block-chain based voting systems. It aims at identifying the strategies and the guidelines as well as provides a comprehensive end-to-end electronic voting system based on block-chain, with the help of encryption private and public techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy. The proposed method is to provide Security and Privacy, Transparency and Trust, Accessibility, Efficiency and Convenience to voters and Security and Fraud Prevention in Election Outcomes. The proposed online voting system using cloud-based hybrid block-chain technology eradicates the flaws that persist in the existing voting system, and it is carried out in three phases: The registration phase, Vote casting phase and Vote counting phase. The integration of SHA-512 encryption ensures that the voter's identity remains confidential and the integrity of the vote is maintained. The system also demonstrates improved security, reduced operational cost, real-time vote counting, and transparency for both voters and election authorities. The proposed method shows better result as compare to other previous method in terms of different result parameters such as block size, encryption, decryption, Block size (64 bits), Word size, hash output and number of Rounds. In the nut shall the proposed method perform better due to SHA 512 technique and provide better security as compare to other methods.
Prof. Suvarna A. Bahir, Tejas Vaidya, Ranjeet Waghmode, , Abhishek Gavand, · 5 authors
Electronic voting systems have gained significant attention due to their ability to improve the efficiency and accessibility of elections. However, traditional voting methods and centralized electronic voting systems face challenges such as vote tampering, lack of transparency, unauthorized access, and delayed result generation. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized and secure solution to address these limitations. This paper presents a Secure Blockchain-Based E-Voting System Using Smart Contracts that leverages Ethereum blockchain technology to provide transparent, secure, and tamper-resistant elections. The proposed system integrates voter authentication, election management, candidate registration, vote recording, and real-time result monitoring within a single platform. Smart contracts developed using Solidity are used to automate election operations and ensure the integrity of voting transactions. The system is implemented using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, FastAPI, MySQL, Ethereum, Ganache, and MetaMask. Votes are securely recorded on the blockchain, preventing unauthorized modifications and improving election transparency. The proposed framework enhances voter trust, reduces dependency on centralized authorities, and simplifies election management. This solution can be effectively used for academic institutions, organizations, and small-scale election environments requiring secure and reliable voting processes. Keywords: Blockchain, Electronic Voting, Ethereum, Smart Contracts, Solidity, Decentralized Voting.
Blockchain-based electronic voting systems have been identified as a solution to enhance the transparency, security, and efficiency of modern electoral processes. However, the existing system has three major problems, which include scalability, privacy issues, and cybersecurity attacks. The researcher proposed an innovative solution to develop an electronic voting system with enhanced security, scalability, and transparency of voters' information. This paper introduced the Hybrid Cryptographic and Enforced Blockchain (HCE VoteChain) framework, which combines Hyperledger Fabric with various sophisticated forms of cryptography, including SHA256 hashing, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES256) encryption, Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and digital signatures, Paillier Homomorphic Encryption, and Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) auditing. The experimental evaluation demonstrated that the system achieved a throughput of 288 Transactions Per Second (TPS) while maintaining an average latency of 2.521 seconds, a transaction speed of 0.13 votes per second, and a data immutability score of 0.999 and security resilience of 10000 and fault tolerance of 0.96, which proved its high reliability and robustness across different operational conditions. The results indicate that the framework suggested is a big step up in terms of security, scalability, and transparency over the existing solutions. Besides, it does not compromise the voter's privacy and auditability. The innovation of this work is the combination of multi-layer cryptographic mechanisms with the permission blockchain architecture to not only come up with a balanced compromise between performance and security but also to make the system capable of handling large-scale real-world digital elections.
We present Aggios, a scalable and privacy preserving proxy voting system designed for frequent and large-scale elections such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), when storing votes on the bulletin board is expensive. To this end, Aggios introduces ‘aggregators’: entities to which voters delegate their votes, and who then post their batched proofs on the public ledger. Aggios achieves strong integrity guarantees: only authorized voters can vote, votes are counted correctly, voters are assured their vote is counted.
THE SS138 PROTOCOL: A DETERMINISTIC INGRESS ARCHITECTURE FOR DISTRIBUTED DATA DRIFT ISOLATION Abstract — This paper introduces the SS138 protocol, an invariant edge gateway architecture designed to isolate and eliminate calculation variance, packet time-series anomalies, and systemic tracking drift before data reaches downstream processing components. The architecture provides an application-layer structural filter, mapping incoming data vectors onto a fixed coordinate system bound by a multi-phase temporal macro framework. By evaluating metrics across structured phase intervals, the protocol achieves deterministic input sanitization and real-time entropy tracking with minimum algorithmic overhead, reducing the attack surface and protecting downstream distributed ledgers from processing failures or data propagation errors. Owner and Developer SquirrelSniper138 from YouTube
Electronic voting requires the simultaneous admission of only legitimate participants, ballot uniqueness, vote confidentiality, storage integrity, and result verifiability. Blockchain alone does not solve these problems, since ledger immutability does not guarantee anonymity, ballot correctness, or reduced trust concentration. The purpose of this work is to develop a parameterizable research framework for electronic voting scenarios with enhanced cryptographic protection, allowing the security level to be varied according to the requirements of a voting scenario. The main contribution of the work is a parameterizable research architecture for composing and experimentally comparing electronic voting configurations with different security and computational profiles. The cryptographic and audit mechanisms integrated into this architecture include blind-signature-based anonymous authorization, encrypted ballot submission, blockchain-style audit, receipt verification, homomorphic tally publication, and threshold-supported tally artifacts. These mechanisms are not proposed as new cryptographic primitives; rather, they are integrated into a reproducible prototype to study how their combination affects verifiability, privacy support, auditability, and computational cost. Compared with basic blockchain-based voting prototypes, this architecture explicitly separates security, privacy, and verifiability profiles and makes their computational cost observable. The implemented prototype is used as an experimental platform for analyzing supported security properties, threat modeling, and computational cost estimation. The results show that authentication, anonymous token issuance, and receipt verification maintain an almost constant cost at the studied scale, while the main cryptographic burden is associated with encrypted ballot submission and threshold-supported tally publication. The scientific novelty of the work lies in constructing a parameterizable architecture that integrates several cryptographic mechanisms and a blockchain audit layer into one reproducible research prototype. At the same time, the proposed approach retains prototype-level limitations associated with the absence of a full zero-knowledge proof stack, independently deployed threshold authorities, and coercion-resistance mechanisms.
Muhammad Umar Janjua, Akshaya Mani, UÄŸur Åžen, Daniel Kaiser
Privacy and anonymity of validators, especially regarding IP address linkability, are essential to protect the Ethereum network from various attacks. Network-level attacks, such as DoS, can interrupt validators and affect the overall security of the Ethereum network. Correlating the IP addresses of validators with their identities, along with knowledge about their action slots can be exploited by attackers to cause network delays, MEV exploitation, and finality risks. Therefore, ensuring the unlinkability of a validator's IP and identity is crucial for maintaining the network's trust and resilience. In this techreport, we first provide a review of the existing network and consensus layer techniques that have been proposed for maintaining validator privacy in the Ethereum blockchain. Secondly, we evaluate a Tor-based protocol named Tor push that helps unlink validator identities (IDs) from their nodes' IP addresses, thereby making it difficult to determine any end-to-end correlation between validator IDs and IP addresses of validators' beacon nodes. To evaluate the effectiveness of Tor push, we present a working, deployed proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation in the Nimbus Ethereum client. Our PoC deployment pushes attestations, aggregations, and block proposals over Tor to the Goerli testnet. Furthermore, we also analyse the security and latency of Tor push. Our experimental results suggest that Tor can be incorporated into the existing Ethereum network with a tolerable latency overhead of 613.82 ms on average and without compromising the overall network performance while enhancing the location privacy of validators in the Ethereum network.
Abstract In the digital age, the reliance on network communication for information exchange has surged, making encrypted network traffic a linchpin of secure digital interactions. However, while encryption safeguards data, it creates hurdles for network management and security surveillance. Conventional deep packet inspection (DPI) falters when faced with encrypted traffic, and existing studies in this area have drawbacks like reliance on trusted third parties and limited detection capabilities. To address these issues, we present a novel zero knowledge proof based encrypted traffic management( $$\mathbb {ZKP}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ZKP</mml:mi> </mml:math> - $$\mathbb {PET}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>PET</mml:mi> </mml:math> ) scheme. By integrating a third-party verifier operating under the honest-but-curious (HBC) model, $$\mathbb {ZKP}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ZKP</mml:mi> </mml:math> - $$\mathbb {PET}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>PET</mml:mi> </mml:math> establishes a trustless verification system that effectively and efficiently curbs metadata leakage. $$\mathbb {ZKP}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ZKP</mml:mi> </mml:math> - $$\mathbb {PET}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>PET</mml:mi> </mml:math> is implemented with two applications: HTTP traffic blocking and blacklist management. For HTTP traffic blocking, the BTHP circuit is developed to extract version details from TLS traffic and verify compliance, enabling precise traffic control. In blacklist management, tailored extraction algorithms for DoT and DoH encrypted DNS traffic are implemented, and Merkle tree based membership proofs are utilized to decide whether to intercept traffic. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that $$\mathbb {ZKP}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ZKP</mml:mi> </mml:math> - $$\mathbb {PET}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>PET</mml:mi> </mml:math> can efficiently enforce diverse network policies on encrypted traffic. It not only safeguards security and privacy but also exhibits outstanding performance, offering a dependable, efficient, and privacy-centric solution for encrypted network traffic management.
Zuodong Wu, Dawei Zhang, Mianxiong Dong, Kaoru Ota
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to enable the free flow of personal data while enhancing individual control. Integrating privacy-preserving data retrieval methods can provide stronger protection for personal privacy. However, existing approaches lack compliance mechanisms aligned with the GDPR, making it difficult in practice to simultaneously satisfy the principles of lawfulness and data minimization, while also exhibiting clear limitations in both security and efficiency. To address these problems, we propose VOLE-PDRAA, an efficient privacy-preserving data retrieval protocol with anonymous authorization based on the Vector-OLE (VOLE). Specifically, VOLE-PDRAA constructs a VOLE-blinded identifier by integrating pseudorandom linear encoding with VOLE-derived correlation vectors, enabling rigorous anonymity guarantees during authorization. Building on this, the protocol incorporates a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZK) to achieve anonymous authorization for the data subject and to generate verifiable informed consent proofs, thereby meeting the principle of lawfulness. Meanwhile, the data controller can verify whether each retrieval request falls within the scope authorized by the data subject without learning any identifiable information, thus maintaining adherence to the data-minimization principle in a post-quantum environment. Furthermore, VOLE-PDRAA utilizes labeled private set intersection (labeled-PSI) to safeguard the confidentiality of identifiers and their associated records under post-quantum security conditions, while enabling large-scale batch retrieval. Our protocol takes a comprehensive security analysis within the Universal Composability (UC) framework. Experimental evaluation validates its superiority through comparison with state-of-the-art work.
Since 2016, Apple has claimed that device analytics collected to improve user experience are protected by differential privacy (DP). Apple's DifferentialPrivacy framework is deployed across its operating systems and handles sensitive signals such as Safari domains, keyboard events, photo attributes, and health-related reports. Because Apple has not open-sourced its privatization algorithms, these privacy claims have been difficult to verify independently. We present a client-side audit of Apple's DP framework on macOS Sonoma 14.2 and Sequoia 15.6. We reverse engineer the shipped binaries, recover Objective-C interfaces, build runtime harnesses that execute Apple's deployed mechanisms, and test whether their outputs match the advertised privacy guarantees. Our audit covers nearly all active deployed mechanisms, including Count Median Sketch, Hadamard-CMS, randomized-response mechanisms, and Prio-style secure aggregation. We find multiple implementation bugs and misconfigurations. Every audited mechanism that relies on floating-point noise fails to meet its advertised DP or zero-knowledge proof guarantee, due to insecure samplers with known floating-point vulnerabilities. We also find secure-aggregation configurations with local DP disabled, exposing pre-aggregation records to any party with access to those logs. Overall, we find DP violations in 5 of 9 audited mechanisms, affecting 87% of data collection in macOS Sonoma and 68% in Sequoia. We also identify public leaked iPhone logs that can be decoded to recover private information, including Safari domains and keyboard emoji signals.
Austin Bennett, Preston Vander Vos, Duc V. Le, Mira Belenkiy
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) run protocol governance by letting token holders vote on proposals. The dominant rule, voting power proportional to wallet balance, concentrates control among a small number of large holders, fueling the token-control governance attacks that have already compromised real protocols. To counter this concentration, the community has turned to anti-plutocratic voting mechanisms such as Quadratic Voting (QV), which assign sublinear voting power per token with the goal of dampening the influence of large holders. We prove that no voting rule that derives power solely from wallet balance can succeed on a permissionless blockchain. Through a costed model of on-chain voting that captures realistic blockchain frictions -- including per-wallet splitting and voting costs, fixed setup costs, and minimum-balance requirements -- we show that whenever a wallet of any size yields nonzero voting power, a Sybil attacker who splits tokens across many wallets achieves total voting power that grows at least linearly in their token holdings. For concave rules actually proposed to dampen governance power -- those that are positive, increasing, and finite -- we show that the optimal strategy yields power that is asymptotically linear in token holdings, regardless of the cost scheme. Instantiating the model on real DAOs reveals attack costs orders of magnitude below the value at stake. Replaying the ten most recent finalized proposals of five major DAOs (ENS, Compound, Uniswap, Arbitrum, and ZKsync) under linear, quadratic, logarithmic, and power-($β= 0.25$) voting, we measure Sybil amplification factors between $1,172\times$ and $4,039\times$ under Quadratic Voting, and exceeding $229,000\times$ under steeper power rules.
Secure voting remains a critical challenge in modern democracies due to concerns over transparency, tampering, and voter trust. This paper proposes a blockchain-based voting system designed to enhance the integrity, security, and reliability of electoral processes. By leveraging the decentralized and immutable nature of blockchain technology, the system ensures that each vote is securely recorded and cannot be altered once submitted. Smart contracts are utilized to automate vote validation and counting, eliminating intermediaries and reducing the risk of human error or manipulation. Cryptographic techniques preserve voter anonymity while ensuring authentication, thereby maintaining both privacy and legitimacy. The distributed ledger allows real-time verification and auditing, increasing transparency and public confidence in election outcomes. Performance analysis indicates that the system is scalable and resistant to common cyber threats such as double voting and unauthorized access.
Vote Chain is a fully implemented, decentralized e-voting application (DApp) built on Ethereum. Existing blockchain-based voting systems often suffer from either high computational overhead due to homomorphic encryption or lack of fully deployable, adversarially tested implementations. To address these limitations, VoteChain employs a keccak256-based commit–reveal protocol to preserve ballot secrecy during the voting phase, with Solidity 0.8.20 smart contracts enforcing all election rules autonomously. Wallet-based authentication via MetaMask eliminates centralized identity management. The system is validated through 14 automated unit tests (all passing in 615 ms) covering correctness, access control, double-voting, hash forgery, and phase-bypass attacks. Per-voter gas cost is approximately 120,000 units (commit and reveal combined). An ablation study confirms the non-redundant contribution of each architectural component. Comparative analysis shows that VoteChain achieves vote privacy without homomorphic encryption while maintaining full decentralization and implementation completeness. The system is evaluated and validated on a local Hardhat network, with the architecture readily extensible to Layer-2 rollups for large-scale elections.
Sinchana Shetty, Tejaswini M R, Kiran Samantha D S, Vijaylaxmi H Manjunatha
Existing electronic voting platforms are persistently centralized repositories, introducing fundamental security challenged by vote manipulation, result falsification, limited weaknesses [1]. Blockchain technology has emerged as a compelling alternative, owing to its cryptographic permanence, data management. This paper proposes and evaluates a fully integrated blockchain-based electoral system built on the Ethereum network, leveraging Solidity smart contracts to address these systemic shortcomings. The proposed architecture adopts a decentralized three-tier design incorporating Web3.js communication bridges and cryptographic validation mechanisms that collectively guarantee immutability, transparency, and end-to-end verifiability throughout all electoral phases. The system incorporates hierarchical role-based access controls, real-time vote tallying, and comprehensive audit trail functionality, while preserving voter anonymity through pseudonymous addressing. Experimental results demonstrate transaction confirmation within 15–20 seconds, with a mean gas consumption of 0.0023 ETH per vote, confirming practical feasibility for medium-scale deployments. A comparative evaluation against conventional centralized e-voting solutions highlights measurable security full-stack Ethereum-based voting platform comprising Solidity improvements and the elimination of single points of failure, balanced against acceptable computational overhead.