Blockchain Papers

Mukesh Soni, Dileep Kumar Singh

No abstract is available for this record.

Zhe Tu, Huachun Zhou, Kun Li, Haoxiang Song · 5 authors

Abstract It is well known that the Sixth Generation (6G) communication system integrating multiple access networks promotes the internet of everything world-widely. However, due to the differentiated underlying network protocols, it is difficult to find a general authentication solution to support various authentication methods in different access networks. Blockchain is a new technology that supports network heterogeneity, which provides a potential solution for differentiated authentication. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based differentiated authentication mechanism for 6G Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets), which can efficiently authenticate user identities through scheduling different authentication methods. Particularly, we analyze the authentication architecture of 6G HetNets and put forward a blockchain-based differentiated authentication framework. Besides, to improve the scalability of user authentication, it is the first time to use various blockchain authentication contracts to represent different authentication methods. Meanwhile, a differentiated authentication management contract is proposed to uniformly manage different authentication contracts to realize differentiated identity authentication. Based on the evaluation of the prototype system, the proposed mechanism can dynamically provide differentiated authentication services (e.g. EAP-MD5, 5G-AKA) with low additional time (milliseconds levels) cost.

Awaneesh Kumar Yadav, An Braeken, Manoj Misra, Madhusanka Liyange

The next generation of mobile communication systems must be secured because of the ongoing entrance of numerous security attacks. Thus, to secure the underlying network, the 3GPP has designed an authentication and key agreement protocol, 5G-AKA, to safely and stably access the mobile services. However, some recent observations indicate that 5G-AKA has numerous shortcomings such as perfect forward secrecy violation, malicious Serving Network (SN), de-synchronization attack, privacy theft, stolen device, and denial of Service (DoS) attacks when the user uses the roaming mobile services. Considering the shortcomings of existing protocols and the requirement to offer increased security, we propose a provable secure, efficient 5G-AKA authentication protocol using the blockchain. The security features of the proposed protocol are examined using the Real-Or-Random (ROR) logic and Scyther tool. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated, which shows that it is the least costly compared to its counterparts in terms of computational and communication costs. In addition, the comparison of the Ethereum blockchain depicts that the proposed protocol takes less transaction and execution costs compared to its counterparts.

Mahmoud A. Shawky, Abdul Jabbar, Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Ali Imran · 7 authors

This letter proposes a group key distribution scheme using smart contract-based blockchain technology. The smart contract’s functions allow for securely distributing the group session key, following the initial legitimacy detection using public key infrastructure-based authentication. For message authentication, we propose a lightweight symmetric key cryptography-based group signature method, supporting the security and privacy requirements of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Our discussion examined the scheme’s robustness against typical adversarial attacks. To evaluate the gas costs associated with smart contracts functions, we implemented it on the Ethereum main network. Finally, comprehensive analyses of computation and communication costs demonstrate the scheme’s effectiveness.

Chaoyang Li, Yanbu Guo, Mianxiong Dong, Gang Xu · 7 authors

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays an essential role in collecting and managing personal medical data. In recent years, blockchain technology has put power in traditional IoMT systems for data sharing between different medical institutions and improved the utilization of medical data. However, some problems in the information transfer process between wireless medical devices and mobile medical apps, such as information leakage and privacy disclosure. This paper first designs a cross-device key agreement model for blockchain-enabled IoMT. This model can establish a key agreement mechanism for secure medical data sharing. Meanwhile, a certificateless authenticated key agreement (KA) protocol has been proposed to strengthen the information transfer security in the cross-device key agreement model. The proposed KA protocol only requires one exchange of messages between the two parties, which can improve the protocol execution efficiency. Then, any unauthorized tampering of the transmitted signed message sent by the sender can be detected by the receiver, so this can guarantee the success of the establishment of a session key between the strange entities. The blockchain ledger can ensure that the medical data cannot be tampered with, and the certificateless mechanism can weaken the key escrow problem. Moreover, the security proof and performance analysis are given, which show that the proposed model and KA protocol are more secure and efficient than other schemes in similar literature.

Siddhant Thapliyal, Mohammad Wazid, Devesh Pratap Singh, Ashok Kumar Das · 6 authors

The healthcare sector is a very crucial and important sector of any society, and with the evolution of the various deployed technologies, like the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and blockchain it has numerous advantages. However, in this section, the data is much more vulnerable than others, because the data is strictly private and confidential, and it requires a highly secured framework for the transmission of data between entities. In this article, we aim to design a blockchain-envisioned authentication and key management mechanism for the IoMT-based smart healthcare applications (in short, we call it SBAKM-HS). We compare the various attributes of the proposed SBAKM-HS and other existing schemes to demonstrate that SBAKM-HS outperforms other existing schemes. The conducted security analysis and formal security verification via Scyther automated validation tool prove the security of the proposed SBAKM-HS against various possible potential attacks. Next, a real-tested implementation of SBAKM-HS is provided to observe its impact on the performance of the system.

Gousia Nissar, Riaz Ahmed Khan, Saba Mushtaq, Sajaad Ahmed Lone · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Sanjeev Kumar Dwivedi, Ruhul Amin, Satyanarayana Vollala, Muhammad Khurram Khan

The traditional handover authentication protocols in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) suffer from important issues like single source of trust, Single-Point-of-Failure (SPoF), and fails to provide robust authentication due to several potential threats. In state-of-the-art of handover authentication, it takes high computation and communication overhead. The main aim of this paper is to integrate blockchain technology into the VANET system and to design a robust handover authentication protocol to solve the above-mentioned challenges. In this article, we design blockchain-based mutual authentication and session key agreement protocols for intra-vehicular and inter-vehicular (handover case) scenarios by implementing the hash function and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). We also validate the proposed model by using the Scyther tool and Real-Or-Random (ROR) oracle, standard model. The proposed scheme confirms security against all applicable attacks during security analysis. Furthermore, a detailed comparative analysis reveals that the proposed method has low communication and computation overheads and achieves more functionality features and security attributes than the relevant schemes.

Ismail Afia, Riham AlTawy

No abstract is available for this record.

Aparna Singh, Geetanjali Rathee

No abstract is available for this record.

M. Zhang, Yu Chen, Chuanzhou Yao, Zhichao Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Garima Thakur, Pankaj Kumar, Deepika, Srinivas Jangirala · 6 authors

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.

Dimitris Kolonelos, Mary Maller, Mikhail Volkhov

No abstract is available for this record.

John Stuart

Avec la montée en puissance des ordinateurs quantiques, il est plus important que jamais de démontrer que les protocoles cryptographiques sont sécuritaires contre des adversaires quantiques. De plus, l'objectif de tout cryptographe est d’assouplir certaines hypothèses, en particulier celles qui restreignent la capacité de l’adversaire à effectuer de longs calculs. Dans cette thèse, un système multi-parties est utilisé pour créer deux preuves Zéro-Knowledge (ZK), celles-ci opèrent en temps polynomial et sont sécurisées. De plus, elles n’ont aucune restriction calculatoire pour aucune partie, même pour les adversaires qui partagent une intrication quantique. Une preuve ZK permet à une partie de prouver à une autre partie d’un fait sans révéler aucune connaissance autre que la véracité du fait. Par exemple, une telle preuve pourrait être utilisée pour permettre à un client de prouver son identité à un guichet bancaire sans donner des renseignements confidentiels tel que son numéro d'identification personnel. Un des principaux outils utilisés lors d’une preuve ZK est le schéma de mise en gage. Celui-ci est essentiellement un outil numérique permettant à un expéditeur de sceller un message dans un coffre-fort et de l’envoyer à un destinataire. Ensuite, quand l'expéditeur veut que le destinataire lise le message, la clé du coffre fort lui est envoyée. Ceci permet au message de rester inconnu du receveur jusqu'à ce qu’il reçoive la clé de l'expéditeur. De plus, l'expéditeur ne peut pas changer le message une fois le coffre-fort envoyé. Au cours de cette thèse, les propriétés homomorphiques d’un schéma multi-parties de mise en gage sont utilisées pour permettre au destinataire d’effectuer des opérations sur le gage. Ceci donne ainsi des preuves ZK pour deux problèmes NP-complets, les problèmes de la somme de sous-ensembles et 3-SAT

Yousra Belfaik, Yassine Sadqi, Yassine Maleh, Safi Said · 6 authors

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.

Adnan Shahid Khan, Mohd Izzat Bin Yahya, Kartinah Zen, Johari Abdullah · 8 authors

Cell-Free mMIMO is a part of technology that will be integrated with future 6G ultra-dense cellular networks to ensure unlimited wireless connectivity and ubiquitous latency-sensitive services. Cell-Free gained researchers’ interest as it offers ubiquitous communication with large bandwidth, high throughput, high data transmission, and greater signal gain. Cell-Free eliminates the idea of cell boundary in cellular communication that reduces frequent handover and inter-cell interference issues. However, the effectiveness of the current authentication protocol could become a serious issue due to the dynamic nature of Cell-Free in densely distributed, high number of users, high mobility, and frequent data exchange. Secondly, secure communication may be achieved in such a dynamic environment at the expense of high authentication overhead, high communication and computational costs. To address the above security challenges, we proposed a lightweight multifactor mutual authentication protocol for Cell-Free communication using ECC-based Deffie Hellman (ECDH). This scheme utilizes timestamping, one-way hash function, Blind-Fold Challenge scheme with public key infrastructure. The proposed cryptosystem integrates with blockchain technology using proof of staked (POS) as a consensus mechanism to ensure integrity, non-repudiation and traceability. The proposed scheme can enforce the mitigation of several major security attacks on communication links such as spoofing attacks, eavesdropping, user location privacy issues, replay attacks, denial of service attacks, and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, which is one of the significant features of the scheme. Furthermore, this scheme contributes to reducing authentication, communication, and computational overheads with an average of 32.8%, 52.4% and 53.2% better performance respectively as compared baseline authentication protocols.

K. Tanaka, Takaaki Mizuki

No abstract is available for this record.

Zaher Haddad

No abstract is available for this record.

Mostefa Kara, Konstantinos Κarampidis, Zaoui Sayah, Abdelkader Laouid · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Wenpin Tang, David Yao

We study a mechanism design problem in the blockchain proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. Our main objective is to extend the transaction fee mechanism (TFM) recently proposed in Chung and Shi (SODA, p.3856-3899, 2023), so as to incorporate a long-run utility model for the miner into the burning second-price auction mechanism $\texttt{BSP}(γ)$ proposed in Chung and Shi (where $γ$ is a key parameter in the strict $γ$-utility model that is applied to both miners and users). First, we derive an explicit functional form for the long-run utility of the miner using a martingale approach, and reveal a critical discontinuity of the utility function, namely a small deviation from being truthful will yield a discrete jump (up or down) in the miner's utility. We show that because of this discontinuity the $\texttt{BSP}(γ)$ mechanism will fail a key desired property in TFM, $c$-side contract proofness ($c$-SCP). As a remedy, we introduce another parameter $θ$, and propose a new $\texttt{BSP}(θ)$ mechanism, and prove that it satisfies all three desired properties of TFM: user- and miner-incentive compatibility (UIC and MIC) as well as $c$-SCP, provided the parameter $θ$ falls into a specific range, along with a proper tick size imposed on user bids.

M. Indushree, Manish Raj, Vipul Kumar Mishra, R. Shashidhara · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

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.

Mina Namazi, Ross Duncan, Xiaojie Zhu, Erman Ayday

Individuals are encouraged to prove their eligibility to access specific services regularly. However, providing various organizations with personal data spreads sensitive information and endangers people's privacy. Hence, privacy-preserving identification systems that enable individuals to prove they are permitted to use specific services are required to fill the gap. Cryptographic techniques are deployed to construct identity proofs across the internet; nonetheless, they do not offer complete control over personal data or prevent users from forging and submitting fake data. In this paper, we design a privacy-preserving identity protocol called "zkFaith." A new approach to obtain a verified zero-knowledge identity unique to each individual. The protocol verifies the integrity of the documents provided by the individuals and issues a zero-knowledge-based id without revealing any information to the authenticator or verifier. The zkFaith leverages an aggregated version of the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya (CL) signature scheme to sign the user's commitment to the verified personal data. Then the users with a zero-knowledge proof system can prove that they own the required attributes of the access criterion of the requested service providers. Vector commitment and their position binding property enables us to, later on, update the commitments based on the modification of the personal data; hence update the issued zkFaith id with no requirement of initiating the protocol from scratch. We show that the design and implementation of the zkFaith with the generated proofs in real-world scenarios are scalable and comparable with the state-of-the-art schemes.