Youssef Lamriji, Mohammed Kasri, Khalid El Makkaoui, Abderrahim Beni‐Hssane
Blockchain (BC) technology has recently gained significant popularity due to its ability to provide a secure and decentralized platform for data storage and transactions. There are tens of thousands of BC-based cryptocurrencies and apps. However, the proof of work consensus mechanism used by most BC networks requires significant energy consumption, leading to concerns about its environmental impact. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, the estimated annual electricity consumption of Bitcoin mining in 2022 was approximately 107.65 TWh. This paper provides a recent comparative study of BC consensus mechanisms (CMs). We overview BC technology, consensus mechanisms, and mining algorithms. We investigate the energy and time consumption of the PoW consensus mechanism by executing the SHA-256 mining algorithm at different difficulty levels. Finally, we present new mining approaches to reduce or recycle energy consumption.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Natarajan Balakrishnan, S Aruna, D Akshaya, P. Karthikeyan · 5 authors
Voting is a fundamental right for every citizen in a country to express their views and select their representatives for shaping the society. However, the current voting process is vulnerable to security breaches and frauds. To address this issue, e-voting systems have emerged using the blockchain technology. By utilizing this technology, the voting process can become more secure, transparent, and fraud-proof. For every vote, separate blocks are created and decentralized to maintain transparency and accuracy in the voting process. The blockchain technology, working on a peer-to-peer network, guarantees secure and transparent record-keeping and verification of each vote. Additionally, the system’s immutability property ensures the voting process’s protection. The data is stored in encrypted blocks with hash values, and smart contract concepts detect fake votes and multiple voting attempts. This research work presents an in-depth explanation of how the blockchain algorithm records voting results and voter information at every election location, highlighting the technology’s fundamental structure and characteristics for electronic voting.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain has already been used in developing many applications, including cryptocurrencies and NFTs. With the help of blockchain and smart contracts, a Decentralized E-Voting System can be developed. A Decentralized E-Voting System is used for activities like voting, verifying the user’s details, adding candidates, starting and ending the election, self-tallying the total number of votes, and giving the results of the elections. A system using blockchain is more secure, faster, transparent, and immutable. The existing systems for voting are less secure as they use EVMs and VVPATs, which can be tampered with. The existing systems are also slower than the proposed model in terms of the time taken to announce the results. There are other problems like Vote Rigging, Polling Booth Capture, and Voting Manipulation. With the increasing risk of cyberattacks, it is of utmost importance to have an online voting system capable of withstanding these attacks. A blockchain-based e-voting system will enable user confidentiality using encryption. The platform is created on the Ethereum network that makes use of smart contracts written in the Solidity programming language. Truffle, Ganache and Metamask are the tools used to create a Decentralized E-Voting System.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Covert channels serve the construction of cyberspace security. By realizing the secure transmission of data, it is widely used in political and financial fields. Blockchain covert channels have higher reliability and concealment compared to traditional network-based covert channels. However, existing blockchain covert storage channels need to create a large number of transactions to transmit covert information. Creating transactions requires a transation fee, which means that the implementation of blockchain covert storage channels requires a high cost. Besides, created transactions remain on-chain permanently, leading to the threat of covert information being detected. To overcome these limitations, we propose a blockchain covert timing channel framework. Specifically, we utilize inv and getdata messages in the Bitcoin transaction broadcast as carriers and propose three modulation modes to achieve covert channels without cost and leaving no trace. We evaluate the concealment of our modes by K-S, KLD tests, and machine learning approaches. Experimental results show the indistinguishability between traffic carrying covert information and normal traffic. Our channels promise a capacity of 2.4 bit/s.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This study investigates how blockchain, a decentralized ledger technology that has garnered popularity due to its potential to revolutionize industries, uses cryptography technology. In the article, the main ideas of cryptography-such as encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and public-key cryptography-as well as their applications in blockchain technology are discussed. The significance of cryptography in the blockchain is examined in the paper, with a focus on protecting user data privacy, maintaining data integrity, and authenticating transactions. By using encryption algorithms to scramble data so that only authorized parties can decrypt it, cryptography guarantees that data is protected from unauthorized access. Data integrity is protected by hashing algorithms because any alterations to the data would produce a new hash value. Transactions are authenticated using digital signatures and public-key encryption, ensuring that only authorized parties carry them out. The study also looks at the cryptographic limitations of blockchain, like the possibility of quantum attacks on public-key cryptography, which might jeopardize the security of blockchain systems. The paper's discussion of future research paths and potential areas for advancement in cryptography technology to maintain the security and robustness of blockchain systems comes to a close.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The maintenance of any confidential records pertaining to education, health, or finance has seen a dramatic rise in the use of advanced technologies.However, because of their uncertainties, current sophisticated technologies have some problems.In terms of anonymity, attack-free security, transparency, dependability, and flexibility, these technologies have some shortcomings.Consequently, a blockchain application can be created to handle the events of a department or college.Decentralization improves the usability and upkeep of this application without adding to the costs incurred by hosting a centralised application on a leased third-party server.This programme does not rely on any third-party storage software because it stores the documents effectively using the IPFS file system.This method allows for seamless communication between students and teachers without the interference of outside programmes like WhatsApp or Google Classroom.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yixiao Gao, Muhammad Saad, Adam Oest, Jean Zhang · 6 authors
Recent years have witnessed the increasing popularity and market value of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), along with the burgeoning of blockchains and metaverse. The media hypes often imply that NFTs are as secure as the underlying blockchains. In this work, we take a first look into the building blocks of NFTs (i.e., ownership certificates stored on-chain and the metadata and digital assets stored on-chain or off-chain), focusing on understanding the new attack surface and safety of these digital assets (rather than the traditional attacks on block-chains). For this purpose, we provide a detailed analysis of the logical structure of the dominant off-chain NFTs, followed by the attack surface analysis. Our study indicates that specific new attacks could be easily mounted on them. To validate our findings, we experiment by minting our own NFTs on Ethereum and demonstrate that we can successfully mount the attacks with trivial or even no cost. The cause of these new attacks is rooted in the current design of NFTs where the digital assets are decoupled from the contracts deployed on the blockchains. We discuss some future research to address these vulnerabilities.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohd Wasim, Charchit Kumar Chauhan, Abhay Pratap Singh, Arushi Gupta
Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we conduct transactions by offering a secure, decentralized, and transparent system. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of a blockchain-based transaction system, highlighting its key features and advantages. We discuss the underlying cryptographic mechanisms and consensus algorithms that ensure the security and integrity of transactions, as well as the various privacy-enhancing features, such as pseudonymity and zero-knowledge proofs. The paper also explores the challenges and limitations of blockchain-based transaction systems and identifies areas for future improvement. This study provides a thorough analysis of the current state of blockchain technology and its potential for transforming the way we conduct transactions, making it an essential resource for researchers, practitioners, and anyone interested in the future of finance and technology.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Nowadays blockchain systems are widely used in many different fields, not only as a kind of payment method, i.e. cryptocurrency, but also as the infrastructure of decentralized applications. A smart contract, which is a program running on the blockchain, e.g. Ethereum, enables decentralized applications without the need for any trusted third party. To deploy a smart contract every miner of the blockchain needs to perform the same function of the smart contract such that they reach a consensus on its final state. Therefore, current blockchain systems are deterministic and non-probabilistic, disallowing any randomness in smart contracts, which is a significant limitation for the applicability of blockchains. A wide range of real-world applications depend on random functions, most obvious examples are games and lottery applications. Various methods have been proposed To address the random number generation problem, such as using a trusted oracle or the block hash. All of those have different disadvantages and advantages. Noticing the lack of concrete guidance for the inclusion of randomness in smart contracts on blockchains, we investigate the state-of-the-art random number generation methods and compare them in several critical aspects including availability, unpredictability, unbiasability, verifiability, scalability, execution time and cost.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Kyungchan Ko, Taeyeol Jeong, Jongsoo Woo, James Won‐Ki Hong
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) is a unique digital token based on blockchain technology, which is used as a means to prove ownership of assets in various areas. With the huge popularity of NFT, the launch of new NFTs attracted many people to mint NFTs. However, because Ethereum has low processing speed and then cannot accommodate the explosive demands, it causes Crypto Gas War, which increases the overall transaction fee and wastes unnecessary gas. In this work, we propose a Raffle-based N FT launch to solve t he C rypto Gas War. We demonstrated that our proposed NFT launch solves this problem but other existing solutions do not solve the problem. Moreover, our NFT smart contract is gas-efficient. Our proposed method reduces the gas usage by 15.5% or more compared to general method, and the efficiency is improved a ccording to increasing the total number of NFTs.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping digital world day by day by integrating several technologies to provide smart services. However, intrinsic features of IoT resulting in a number of challenges, such as decentralization, poor interoperability, privacy, confidentiality, and security vulnerabilities. Several security techniques like encryption, third-party software’s are in use currently to protect users data. Blockchain was initially established for digital crypto currencies with a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus process and the advantage of smart contracts, which enabled distributed trust without the involvement of a third party. Its distributed trust concept paved the way for many other developments, such as the development of new consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Authority (PoA), which aided in the adoption of Blockchain with low computation machines into sectors such as smart industry and smart transportation. Blockchain implementation in IoT can address the security issue, here we proposed a design using Raspberry Pi as edge node (BRIoT).
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
One blockchain technological update thus far includes smart contract functionality implemented in Ethereum. One of its use cases, the ERC721 Non-Fungible Token Standard (NFT), has gained attention from current industries. NFTs demonstrated digital content transactions with guaranteed uniqueness using unchangeable timestamp on the blockchain. However, the functional limitations of NFT assurance are rarely in focus, and contrary to excessive NFT user expectations, security risks that must be addressed include complex issues. One such risk is NFT fraudulent trading using forged content. Specifically, hard forks in blockchains are extremely important triggers for attacks, as they allow the exact same NFT to be operated on multiple chains. This could depreciate NFT value, and presents a risk that must be addressed to ensure sound NFT transactions. In this study, NFT operational issues in the case of a blockchain fork are summarized, and a cross-referencing scheme using network identities is proposed to prevent the impact of a hard fork.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Digital Rights Management and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Supporting the most popular cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin platform allows its transactions to be programmable via its scripts. Defects in Bitcoin scripts will make users lose their bitcoins. However, there are few studies on the defects of Bitcoin scripts. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic investigation on the defects of Bitcoin scripts through three steps, including defect definition, defect detection, and exploitation tracing. First, we define six typical defects of scripts in Bitcoin history, namely unbinded-txid, simple-key, useless-sig, uncertain-sig, impossible-key, and never-true. Three are inspired by the community, and three are new from us. Second, we develop a tool to discover Bitcoin scripts with any of typical defects based on symbolic execution and enhanced by historical exact scripts. By analyzing all Bitcoin transactions from Oct. 2009 to Aug. 2022, we find that 383,544 transaction outputs are paid to the Bitcoin scripts with defects. The total amount of them is 3,115.43 BTC, which is around 60 million dollars at present. Third, in order to trace the exploitation of the defects, we instrument the Bitcoin VM to record the traces of the real-world spending transactions of the buggy scripts. We find that 84,130 output scripts are exploited. The implementation and non-harmful datasets are released.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ring Confidential Transaction (RingCT) protocol is an effective cryptographic component for preserving the privacy of cryptocurrencies. However, existing RingCT protocols are instantiated from one-out-of-many proofs with only one secret, leading to low efficiency and weak anonymity when handling transactions with multiple inputs. Additionally, current partial knowledge proofs with multiple secrets are neither secure nor efficient to be applied in a RingCT protocol.In this paper, we propose a novel any-out-of-many proof, a logarithmic-sized zero-knowledge proof scheme for showing the knowledge of arbitrarily many secrets out of a public list. Unlike other partial knowledge proofs that have to reveal the number of secrets [ACF21], our approach proves the knowledge of multiple secrets without leaking the exact number of them. Furthermore, we improve the efficiency of our method with a generic inner-product transformation to adopt the Bulletproofs compression [BBB+18], which reduces the proof size to 2⌈log2(N)⌉+9.Based on our proposed proof scheme, we further construct a compact RingCT protocol for privacy cryptocurrencies, which can provide a logarithmic-sized communication complexity for transactions with multiple inputs. More importantly, as the only known RingCT protocol instantiated from the partial knowledge proofs, our protocol can achieve the highest anonymity level compared with other approaches like Omniring [LRR+19]. For other applications, such as multiple ring signatures, our protocol can also be applied with some modifications. We believe our techniques are also applicable in other privacy-preserving scenarios, such as multiple ring signatures and coin-mixing in the blockchain.
Cryptography and Data Security
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
As one of the most widely used federated chains, hyperledger fabric uses many cryptographic algorithms to ensure the security of information on the chain, but the ECDSA cryptographic algorithm used in the fabric system has backdoor security risks. In this paper, the authors adopt SM2 algorithm to replace the corresponding ECDSA algorithm for blockchain design based on fabric platform. Firstly, they optimize the part of SM2 signature algorithm process with inverse operation and effectively reduce the time complexity by reducing the inverse operation in the whole process, and the experimental results show that the improved SM2 algorithm improves the signature and verification efficiency by about 5.7%. Secondly, by adding SM2 algorithm template and interface to the BCCSP module of fabric platform to realize the shift value of SM2 algorithm and compare the performance with the native fabric system, the network startup time is reduced by about 29%. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the improved SM2 algorithm, and also the performance of the optimized fabric system is improved.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
R. A. Zamare, Pramey Deshmukh, Chinmay Gulhane, Mohd Meeran Iqbal · 6 authors
The use of E-Voting systems has become popular in these recent years due to the ability of Blockchain environment to provide a more efficient and convenient voting process. Earlier, the security and integrity of e-voting systems has been very concerning, as they are vulnerable to cyber-attacks and manipulation. On the contrary, Blockchain technology provides a decentralized and distributed platform that can ensure the integrity and immutability of data. This research paper proposes an e-voting system based on blockchain technology. The proposed system aims to provide a secure, transparent, and tamper-proof voting process. The system utilizes smart contracts, which automates the voting processes and ensures the accuracy of the results. The system also provides transparency and accuracy, allowing voters to verify their vote and ensuring that the results are accurate and trustworthy. The proposed system will be tested and evaluated to determine its effectiveness and feasibility. The evaluation will focus on the security, scalability, and usability of the system. The security evaluation will test the system's ability to prevent attacks and ensure the confidentiality of the votes. The scalability evaluation will test the system's ability to handle a large number of voters and transactions. The usability evaluation will test the ease of use and accessibility of the system for all types of voters
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
As a new type of digital living space that blends virtual and reality, Metaverse combines many emerging technologies. It provides an immersive experience based on VR technology and stores and protects users’ digital content and digital assets through blockchain technology. However, different virtual environments are often highly heterogeneous in terms of underlying architecture and software implementation technology, which leads to many challenges in scalability and interoperability for blockchains serving the Metaverse. Cross-chain technology is an essential technology to realize the scalability and interoperability of blockchain. However, the current cross-chain technologies all have their own merits and demerits, and there is no cross-chain solution that can be fully applied to any scenario. To this end, in the blockchain-based Metaverse, this article proposes a cross-chain transaction scheme based on improved hash timelock, HCNCT. By combining the notary mechanism, this scheme uses a group of notaries to supervise and participate in cross-chain transactions, effectively solving the problem that malicious users create a large number of time-out transactions to block the transaction channel, which exists in the traditional hash timelock method. Besides, this article uses the verifiable secret sharing method in the notary group, which can effectively prevent the centralization problem of the notary mechanism. Moreover, this article discusses the process of key processing, cross-chain transaction and transaction verification of the scheme, and designs the user credibility evaluation mechanism, which can effectively reduce the occurrence of malicious default of users. Compared with existing solutions, our solution has the advantage of effectively addressing time-out transaction attacks and centralization issues while guaranteeing security. The experiments also verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the development of science and technology, the traditional centralized ballot management will lead to the risk of an opaque voting process and tampering of back-end data, and it can no longer meet the requirements of e-voting transparency and anonymity, while the distributed blockchain technology, with its features of being transparent and tamper-proof, can well solve the problems in traditional e-voting and make the ballot firmly in the hands of users. To make each node reach consensus, each node can access the complete shared ledger, and malicious nodes can analyze the transaction information in the ledger to obtain users’ voting information, which makes anonymity impossible to guarantee. We propose a blockchain technology-based voting record synchronization model and an anonymous authentication model, using zk-SNARK and Merkle tree technology, that achieve user authentication and anonymous voting. In this scheme, the user’s random identity address is inserted into the Merkle tree, and when voting, it is only necessary to prove that the user’s identity address is in the tree to complete anonymous voting without revealing the user’s real identity. This scheme meets the basic requirements of electronic voting and ensures the reliability and security of voting.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Summary Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency system that uses a distributed data structure called blockchain, a log that lists all transaction details accomplished with the currency. The bitcoin network delivers a promising infrastructure for one who makes use of e‐currency in e‐commerce. However, the transaction of bitcoin is highly suffered with some scalability issues that could not be overwhelmed with the prior methodologies. Hence, a novel scalability blockchain tumbling framework is proposed to tackle the scalability issues in which a rake interior blockchain etiquette is designed to increase the number of bitcoin transactions in which peer faction algorithm groups blocks that reduces propagation delay and ravenous algorithm ensure higher credibility of transaction with tamper resistant. However, transaction size of the record is high hence, to manage transaction record a novel batch payment into one transaction approach is utilized to limit the size of the transaction records by initiating a precise block using block summing‐up and chagrin algorithms that collects all trust information about blocks. Thus the proposed framework attains 550 bitcoin transaction within 2 min and latency of proposed model is reduced below 60 s.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Retinal Imaging and Analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that provide unique ownership and authenticity of digital media such as art, music, and collectibles.NFT Marketplace is a blockchain-based platform that enables the creation, trading, and collecting of NFTs.The platform leverages blockchain technology to ensure the authenticity and ownership of NFTs, providing a secure and transparent way to transact digital assets.In this major project report, we explore the NFT Marketplace and its underlying blockchain technology.We provide an overview of the platform's features, including the ability to tokenize any digital asset, create customizable smart contracts, and sell NFTs with low fees and instant trades.We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the platform, including its ease of use, potential for fraud, and scalability challenges.The Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have revolutionized the digital realm, redefining the concept of ownership and trade of unique digital assets.NFTs represent one-of-a-kind tokens, each verifiably and indelibly linked to a specific digital or physical asset, encompassing diverse forms of content, including video, audio, and images.These unique tokens have paved the way for creators to monetize their digital creations while providing collectors with an innovative means to invest, trade, and showcase their multimedia NFT collections.Central to the NFT ecosystem are NFT marketplaces, digital platforms designed to facilitate the creation, sale, and management of NFTs in various multimedia formats.These marketplaces have proliferated, providing creators with the means to mint NFTs, buyers with the opportunity to acquire them, and collectors with platforms to curate and trade their diverse NFT portfolios.We explore the multifaceted world of NFT marketplaces, focusing on their pivotal role in the creation, sale, and management of video, audio, and image NFTs.We analyze the economic implications, including pricing strategies and royalties, while addressing environmental sustainability concerns associated with NFTs.Challenges and opportunities encountered within this dynamic ecosystem are critically examined, including scalability, intellectual property rights, and the emergence of decentralized NFT marketplaces.Through in-depth case studies, we offer insights into the unique features and innovative approaches adopted by leading NFT marketplaces, shedding light on the transformative potential of this digital metaverse.This report serves as a valuable resource for those seeking a comprehensive understanding of NFT marketplaces catering to video, audio, and image NFTs, emphasizing the profound impact these tokens have on the creation, trade, and experience of digital content across various media formats.Navigating this dynamic digital frontier necessitates a nuanced perspective, and our survey aims to provide a holistic view of this rapidly evolving landscape.