Stake voting is a voting system where the vote cast by a voter is proportional to their account balance/asset. We propose the first implementation of an efficient, fully-decentralized, universally-verifiable stake voting system with perfect voter privacy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we design a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) for equality of plaintexts of 2 different ciphertexts encrypted under different encryption schemes, one under ElGamal encryption scheme and another under Paillier encryption scheme. We believe that ours is the first ZKP design for this problem statement. Second, we implement a publicly-verifiable Stake voting system using the ZKP design by enforcing perfect privacy to voters and correctness of election results. Our voting system is applicable to many situations like shareholder/stockholder voting in companies. We have also provided the financial and computational breakdown feasibility of our implementation on Ganache local blockchain.
Covert communication technology serves as a crucial tool for safeguarding not only the content of communication but also the identities of the parties involved. In this regard, blockchain emerges as a promising solution due to its decentralized nature, flood propagation of data, and inherent anonymity features. This makes blockchain an ideal candidate for covert communication channels, effectively addressing the weaknesses associated with traditional covert communication methods susceptible to detection, tracing, and interruption. However, the current efforts encounter obstacles like limited practicality, constrained channel capacity, and insufficient concealment capabilities, impeding their broad adoption in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose DarkTrans, a blockchain-based covert communication scheme consisting of an address binary tree and a novel embedding mechanism. The address binary tree as a dynamic label method enables rapid recognition of specific transactions by the recipient, rendering detection by third parties challenging. The embedding mechanism encodes secret messages into transaction values for transmission to augment channel capacity, which can be practically realized within an Ethereum private blockchain. Our experiments with three aspects demonstrate that, compared with the existing scheme, DarkTrans achieves a low embedding time and a high channel capacity. Additionally, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and sample entropy analysis are conducted to validate the robust concealment of this scheme.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yuping Yan, George Shao, Dennis Song, Mason Song · 5 authors
Blockchain transactions have gained widespread adoption across various industries, largely attributable to their unparalleled transparency and robust security features. Nevertheless, this technique introduces various privacy concerns, including pseudonymity, Sybil attacks, and potential susceptibilities to quantum computing, to name a few. In response to these challenges, innovative privacy-enhancing solutions like zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and stealth addresses (SA) have been developed. Among the various schemes, SA stands out as it prevents the association of a blockchain transaction's output with the recipient's public address, thereby ensuring transactional anonymity. However, the basic SA schemes have exhibited vulnerabilities to key leakage and quantum computing attacks. To address these shortcomings, we present a pioneering solution - Homomorphic Encryption-based Dual-Key Stealth Address Protocol (HE-DKSAP), which can be further extended to Fully HE-DKSAP (FHE-DKSAP). By leveraging the power of homomorphic encryption, HE-DKSAP introduces a novel approach to safeguarding transaction privacy and preventing potential quantum computing attacks. This paper delves into the core principles of HE-DKSAP, highlighting its capacity to enhance privacy, scalability, and security in programmable blockchains. Through a comprehensive exploration of its design architecture, security analysis, and practical implementations, this work establishes a privacy-preserving, practical, and efficient stealth address protocol via additively homomorphic encryption.
Cryptocurrency phishing scams is a significant treat to Ethereum, one of the most popular blockchain platforms. Most of existing Ethereum phishing detection methods are based on traditional machine learning or graph representation learning, which mostly rely on only statistical and structural features in local scope. In this paper, we propose Multi-transaction-view Graph Attention Network (MTvGAT), a novel phishing scam detection model that can make use of transaction patterns of different scopes. To obtain global-view information, we apply graph clustering and construct the global-view graph with multiple clusters, including all the nodes of the original transaction network. To obtain local view information, we apply neighborhood sampling, and construct local-view graphs with target nodes and their neighborhood nodes. Then, node features, edge features, and attention coefficients are aggregated to merge multi-view information into representation of nodes. We further combine global-view and local-view representations to finally identify phishing addresses from target nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform existing ones with significant improvement.
Dec 17, 2023·2023 IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing & Communications, Data Science & Systems, Smart City & Dependability in Sensor, Cloud & Big Data Systems & Application (HPCC/DSS/SmartCity/DependSys)
In recent years, the cryptocurrency platform becomes a prime target of various cybercrimes. Criminals use phishing fraud to commit massive scams on Ethereum (one of the most widely used cryptocurrency platforms), which poses a significant threat to the security of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In this context, the use of Ethereum transaction information to detect and identify phishing fraud accounts is essential to ensure a secure and regulated trading platform. However, the previous proposals do not explore the behavior patterns of phishing accounts in depth, and also lack interpretability. To address this problem, we propose a novel and interpretable Ethereum phishing fraud detection method by extracting more fine-grained and interpretable account transaction features. The key idea is to extract both the spatial structure and temporal behavior patterns of the Ethereum transaction network as the “Translets” features via the highly interpretable attribute sub graphs and subsequences. Based on these features, a classifier with good interpretability is adopted, and the proposed interpreter is combined to interpret the detection outputs. The experimental results on real-world Ethereum phishing fraud account datasets demonstrate that our method not only has advantages in precision, recall, and F1 score but also provides interpretability in recognizing Ethereum phishing accounts.
Bitcoin’ s anonymity greatly protects users’ privacy, but it also makes regulation difficult. In Bitcoin, a random number generates a public-private key pair, the public key generates an address, and the private key is used for digital signatures. Users can generate multiple pairs of public and private keys to trade with multiple bitcoin addresses. Discovering the relationships between these addresses and clustering the addresses of individual users helps infer the identity of the addresses. By analyzing the association of addresses in UTXO , it is found that multiple input addresses of a transaction are controlled by the same user, and thus the bitcoin addresses can be clustered. The transactions between the user data obtained after clustering are communality, so the Louvain algorithm is further used to analyze the relationship between users, the visual results are used to present the association between users, and the impact of the number of users on the algorithm results is analyzed. Finally, the Leiden algorithm proposed to solve the problem that Louvain algorithm may have poor connectivity or even disconnection between communities is used to discover the community of the clustered user data. Compare the results of Leiden algorithm and Louvain algorithm and analyze the difference between the two results.
Non-Fungible tokens (NFTs) are a special type of token that has a unique ID and can be held or traded as a crypto asset by Ethereum users. For the current NFT standard, NFT owner’s account address is stored in plaintext by blockchain. Once a user’s real identity and account address is known, his NFT holdings are also exposed. In practice, one may consider the NFT holdings to be private. In this paper, we propose the first solution to achieve anonymous NFT on Ethereum in a trustless environment. The owner address of an NFT will be hidden while the NFT can be continuously traded without revealing the addresses of buyers and sellers. Furthermore, we prove that our scheme preserves privacy against all entities in the trading system and builds an implementation to evaluate its performance. The result shows our solution is suitable for application.
Yuyan Sun, Sun Enbo, Zhao Erfan, Liu Yangyang · 6 authors
In recent years, the field of blockchain technology has witnessed significant growth, particularly in its extensive application within the financial sector. However, this progress has also brought a concerning issue whereby an increasing number of users are becoming vulnerable to phishing scams. Many extant studies are focused on this issue; nonetheless, a paucity of emphasis has been placed on the comprehensive characterization of Ethernet transaction data from multiple perspectives which enhances the precision and generalization capabilities of the model. Consequently, within the context of this paper, we introduce an innovative detection model. In an effort to mitigate overhead while ensuring the acquisition of substantial information, we initially preprocess Ethernet transaction data and establish transaction subgraphs. Then, we leverage a graph autoencoder to amalgamate local structural information, global structural information, and node features within the graph, culminating in the detection of phishing scams. Our model significantly enhances detection accuracy by exploiting multi-view features. We implemented this method on the dataset from TSGN, and the results show that the accuracy of our method is 95.39%, which is at least 4.07% higher than other related methods.
T. Judgi, R. Anitha, Stanzin Padma, G. Nishanthi · 5 authors
The usage of a technology known as blockchain, which offers an advantage in terms of technology and is becoming more prevalent in the industries of digital money and monetary transaction. The blockchain is used to keep track of transactions, and these records may be used to verify that a contract’s terms are legitimate. The simple accessibility of blockchain applications that are built on top of other types of technology, such as the electronic voting system, is the major emphasis of this research. As an illustration, the traditional way of electronic voting has been afflicted by a variety of issues and limits for a very long time. In order to build a trustworthy electronic voting system, a decentralized application that is helped by blockchain technology has been developed. This application offers improved equality, honesty, and adaptability in comparison to the current method. This research presents a novel secured distributed database for the purpose of storing information pertaining to voters. The information pertaining to each voter will be saved in the database in conjunction with a secret key and an electronic signature. In the first part of this article, we investigate how well a selection of well-known blockchain frameworks function when used as a blockchain service. Then, as a solution to these issues, we provide a cutting-edge electronic voting system that is based on blockchain technology. This study analyses the deployment of a blockchain-based technology that enhances election security while lowering related costs in order to investigate the possible uses of distributed ledger technology. In conclusion, but certainly not least, the blockchain-based technology allows reliable durability, secrecy, and accountability, which improves system stability and security and lowers the cost of organizing elections on a national scale.
Siti Fatimah Az Zahra Binti Mohd Nizam, Goh Eg Su, Noor Hidayah Zakaria
Voting is synonymous with general elections especially for countries with democratic system. In an effort to slow down the spread of Covid-19, there is a significant rise in digitalization, and this includes voting. However, concerns regarding security and integrity of the entire system have been raised. The implementation of blockchain in voting is believed can help alleviate the issues raised since blockchain are immutable and decentralized. The usage of smart contract that stores states and run when certain conditions are met can get rid of the possibility of database manipulation while still maintaining anonymity. Unfortunately, implementing an Ethereum-based blockchain is expensive as each transaction cost can cost up to thousands of US dollar. Hence, this study focuses on developing an E-Voting blockchain based prototype using a local chain platform that performs the same operations as blockchain but uses a fake currency which results in a more feasible and cost-effective result. In this context, the objectives of this study were to design and develop the smart contract that satisfies the voting requirement and lastly; to evaluate the performance and security of the developed smart contract; to test the functionality of this study’s prototype. The prototype of this study was developed using a combination of Web 2.0, PHP, MySQL, Express.js and Web 3.0, specifically Ganache, Remix IDE and MetaMask. After the development and integration phases, the prototype was evaluated and validated using unit testing, which tested each function and modules individually before being integrated to ensure full functionality of each module. A total of 20 voters were gathered to test the prototype for the user acceptance testing section of the prototype of this study which shows the viability and usability of the product. E-Voting blockchain based prototype successfully achieved the objectives and solved the problems stated in the proposal. Despite the limitations, there are still expected future works to improve the system in future. Blockchain technology has the potential to grow gradually over the next few years and its technological complexity will be able to be adapted by the users.
Democracy, a system of governance founded on the principle of citizen representation, has become prevalent worldwide. Elections are crucial components of democratic systems, and it is essential to guarantee transparent, secure, and impartial election processes to maintain citizens’ trust in the government. However, the lack of transparency and security in democratic elections has raised concerns about their legitimacy and fairness. Creating a secure e-voting system that provides fairness, anonymity, transparency, and flexibility has been a significant challenge, despite the increasing adoption of technology worldwide. Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) offer time and effort-saving benefits compared to traditional paper ballots but are susceptible to challenges that compromise the integrity of the electoral process. To address these challenges, we have proposed a Blockchain based E-voting system. This system provides a secure, decentralized platform where votes are recorded on an immutable ledger. It enables real-time vote counting, overcoming the time-consuming and error-prone nature of traditional methods. The proposed approach involves using Hyperledger Fabric and Chaincode to develop a scalable, maintainable, and cost-effective e-voting system within a customized private Blockchain network. This system adheres to the principles of Zero Knowledge Proof, ensuring accurate vote accounting and safeguarding the credibility and legitimacy of democratic elections.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Over the past few years, there has been a profound evolution in decentralization methodologies, owing largely to the emergence of novel decentralized technologies like blockchain. In the realm of online social media, a paradigm shift has been suggested with the introduction of blockchain-based online social media (BOSM), heralding a potential future for social media platforms wherein users are duly rewarded for their valuable contributions. Despite the widespread adoption of these platforms by millions of users, it is crucial to acknowledge that their decentralization remains incomplete. One prevailing issue within existing blockchain systems resides in the vulnerability of the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm, which is susceptible to manipulation by the few selected nodes. Anticipating the demands of the forthcoming generation of social media, the pivotal imperative lies in establishing decentralization as its foundational hallmark. In this paper, we present Sociala, an incentivized blockchain-based framework tailored for writers. To effectively address the pitfalls of centralization and minimize the likelihood of nefarious node selection, we proffer an enhanced multi-step DPoS consensus algorithm, which is referred as modified DPoS (mDPoS). This advanced algorithm embraces both the tenets of randomness and diversity, coupled with the inclusion of input from general users, culminating in fortified system stability.
The emergence of blockchain has ushered in a significant transformation in information systems research. Blockchain’s key pillars such as decentralization, immutability, and transparency have paved the path for extensive exploration in various research domains. This particular study is focused on electronic voting, aiming to improve voting procedures by making better use of the benefits offered by blockchain technology. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, we highlight the potential benefits of blockchain-based electronic voting systems such as transparency, security, and efficiency. However, several challenges, such as scalability, personal data confidentiality, and ensuring robust identity verification, persist. Addressing these issues is necessary to unlock the full potential of blockchain-based electronic voting systems, thereby fostering the development of trustworthy election systems in the future.
Blockchain technology has emerged as a compelling field of study over the past decade. Nevertheless, certain blockchain-based protocols, particularly those reliant on permissioned blockchains, continue to be under the governance of a central authority (CA). This central authority possesses extensive control capabilities, including the facilitation of user network access, as well as the establishment, connection, and revocation of users to and from the network. Consequently, the majority of policies within these protocols are centrally administered by a singular party. This paper introduces an architectural framework and a specific protocol denoted as the ”Anonymous Reporting System with No Central Authority” (ARSnCA) on a public blockchain infrastructure. This design aims to mitigate the challenges posed by untrusted privileged insiders to the ARSnCA. It is hypothesized that this approach can enhance system reliability, fault tolerance, and foster trust among network members. To eliminate the central authority, a concept termed the virtual blockchain (VBC) is implemented as an embedded permissioned blockchain within a permissionless blockchain. Following the removal of the CA, the authorities previously held by the central authority are transferred to the members of the VBC. Comparative analysis and evaluation of the ARSnCA protocol demonstrate a performance advantage, with speeds that are 62% and 92% faster than reporting protocols based on ring signatures and other protocols included in the comparison.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
S Varalakshmi, Dhananjay Kumar Yadav, K R Varalakshmi
Because of the combination of cloud computing and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) the information technology sector can now implement cutting-edge safety standards. This article examines the application cases, benefits, and underlying mechanisms that improve security when distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are integrated with cloud computing. These aspects, when combined, contribute to the greater security of the cloud. The “Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts Algorithm” offers a revolutionary method for deploying smart contracts while protecting user privacy. This data includes health records and financial information. Line plots, scatter plots, and box plots are examples of modern visualization techniques used in the presentation of the findings. These graphs demonstrate the advantages of the proposed technique over the more common options presented. The proposed method's memory, accuracy, and precision have all been shown to improve, proving its efficacy in achieving the goal of boosting security. Furthermore, it has a very fast runtime and a high F1-Score, suggesting the product's usefulness and usability. To summarize, the integration of cloud computing and DLTs constitutes a significant achievement in the field of data security. The findings of this study shed light on the potential benefits of this type of integration and laid a solid foundation for establishing additional safety safeguards. The technique presented here is a practical solution to the challenge of strengthening digital security, and it is supported by complex algorithms and mathematical calculations.
Tharindu Sadaruwan Perera, Anodya Nimthara Garusinghe, Tharaka Shameera De Silva, T. Senevirathne · 6 authors
The election of a country holds significant importance, as it plays a pivotal role in the advancement and growth of a nation. Ensuring the safety and integrity of an election is a concern closely tied to national security. Electoral mechanisms in Sri Lanka and many other regions remain conventional and vulnerable. Despite the evolution of democracy, voting processes continue to rely on manual methods using paper ballots and pens. Although e-voting machines have emerged, these systems carry a substantial risk of manipulation and are susceptible to issues such as malfunction and breakdown, as well as unauthorized breaches. Addressing these challenges can be achieved by embracing cutting-edge technology, specifically blockchain, to establish a voting procedure that is both dependable and transparent. This paper presents a voting platform built upon the principles of blockchain with the aim of digitalizing the voting process while ensuring dependability, security, and user-friendly functionality. The ballots submitted by voters are recorded on the blockchain, making them immutable and safeguarded against possible manipulation. The system's capacity can be expanded to suit the needs of any election. Participants can access the system using biometric authentication methods, which will make the voting process more secure. Therefore, this system illustrates the potential of utilizing blockchain technology, including distributed systems, Ethereum, and smart contracts, to provide a secure, trustworthy, and transparent voting system for contemporary elections.
B. Deelaka Perera, N. S. Wellappuli Arachchige, Mahawaththe Kodithuwakkuge N. T., M. P. S. Randunu · 6 authors
E-voting utilizing blockchain technology is an emerging solution that has the potential to transform the electoral process due to its features like anonymity, privacy protection, and non-repudiation. Integrating voting applications into smart contracts on the blockchain introduces a computational expense known as gas. This research paper focuses on presenting methodologies to reduce gas fees associated with contract deployment and execution. The experimentation is conducted using Ethereum blockchain and Solidity smart contract, with Remix IDE serving as the testing environment. Our proposed solution includes a simplified voting contract facilitating candidate registration, vote storage, and preventing multiple votes from the same user. The findings demonstrate an overall reduction of 19.18% in deployment costs and 0.95% for single vote execution costs notably, as the number of transactions increases. the overall impact of these optimizations is anticipated to produce a much greater reduction in gas fees for single transactions. These results offer insights into optimizing gas fees in e-voting applications, enhancing the viability and efficiency of blockchain-driven voting systems.
Guocheng Zhu, Debiao He, Haoyang An, Min Luo · 5 authors
Abstract After the Ethereum DAO attack in 2016, which resulted in significant economic losses, blockchain governance has become a prominent research area. However, there is a lack of comprehensive and systematic literature review on blockchain governance. To deeply understand the process of blockchain governance and provide guidance for the future design of the blockchain governance model, we provide an in-depth review of blockchain governance. In this paper, first we introduce the consensus algorithms currently used in blockchain and relate them to governance theory. Second, we present the main content of off-chain governance and investigate two well-known off-chain governance projects. Third, we investigate four common on-chain governance voting techniques, then summarize the seven attributes that the on-chain governance voting process should meet, and finally analyze four well-known on-chain governance blockchain projects based on the previous research. We hope this survey will provide an in-depth insight into the potential development direction of blockchain governance and device future research agenda.
Bitcoin was launched over a decade ago and has made an increasing impact on the world’s financial order, which has attracted the attention of researchers all over the world. The Bitcoin system runs on a dynamic P2P network, containing tens of thousands of nodes, including reachable nodes and unreachable nodes. In this article, a detection system, BNS (Bitcoin Network Sniffer), which could collect as many Bitcoin nodes as possible is proposed. For reachable nodes, the authors designed an algorithm, BRF (Bitcoin Reachable-Nodes Finding), based on node activity evaluation which reduces the nodes to be detected and greatly shortens the detection time. For unreachable nodes, the authors trained a decision tree model, BUF (Bitcoin Unreachable-Nodes Finding), to identify unreachable nodes based on attribute features from a large number of node addresses. Experiments showed that BNS discovered an average of 1093 more reachable nodes (6.4%) and 662 more unreachable nodes (2.3%) than the well-known website “Bitnodes” per day. It showed better performance in total nodes and efficiency. Based on the experimental results, the authors analyzed the real network size, node “churn”, and geographical distribution.
Phishing scams have become the most serious type of crime involved in Ethereum. However, existing methods ignore the natural camouflage and sparse distribution of phishing scams in Ethereum leading to unsatisfactory performance, and they are also limited by the data scale which cannot be applied to real-world dynamic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a Transaction Graph Contrast network (TGC) to enhance phishing scam detection performance on Ethereum. TGC inputs subgraphs instead of the entire graph for training, which eases the model’s requirements for machine configuration and data connectivity. Motivated by phishing nodes are surrounded by normal nodes, we design the comparison between node-level to help phishing nodes learn the unique properties of themselves different from their neighbors. Observing the small number and sparse distribution of phishing nodes, we narrow the distance between phishing nodes by comparing node context-level structures, so as to learn universal transaction patterns. We further combine the obtained features with common statistics to identify phishing addresses. Evaluated on real-world Ethereum phishing scams datasets, our TGC outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in detecting phishing addresses and has obvious advantages in large-scale and dynamic scenarios.
Mansoor Ahmed Jumani, Du Yujie, Muhammad Owais Khan
A key component of democratic governance in modern countries is the election process. But due to worries about things like polling booth capturing, data manipulation, and vote rigging, a general mistrust in the electoral process has evolved. Because they put election data under the authority of outside organizations, both the traditional and computerized voting systems now in use lack the required transparency. Voters have few options to verify that election administrators will carefully and accurately count their votes due to a lack of openness. To create an electronic voting (e-voting) system that upholds the ideals of fairness and security, it is imperative to take advantage of developing technology, particularly blockchain. When correctly applied, blockchain technology's public distributed ledger holds the potential to make tampering almost impossible. In this regard, our research suggests a decentralized electronic voting system that makes use of blockchain technology as a remedy to deal with the aforementioned issues. Through the elimination of the possibility of centralized election control, this approach seeks to reduce the dangers connected with conventional election procedures and increase voter confidence. The suggested method offers a tamper-proof, transparent, verifiable, economical, and reliable voting process through the distribution of control across several governing and non-governing bodies. This paper examines the development and implementation of such a blockchain-based electronic voting system, shedding insight on how it may enhance the openness and accessibility of democratic elections in contemporary societies.
Leon Witt, Usama Zafar, KuoYeh Shen, Felix Sattler · 7 authors
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in Artificial Intelligence, facilitating the parallel training of Artificial Neural Networks on edge devices while safeguarding data privacy. Nonetheless, to encourage widespread adoption, Federated Learning Frameworks (FLFs) must tackle (i) the power imbalance between a central authority and its participants, and (ii) the challenge of equitably measuring and incentivizing contributions. Existing approaches to decentralize and incentivize FL processes are hindered by (i) computational overhead and (ii) uncertainty in contribution assessment [1]), limiting FL's scalability beyond use cases where trust between participants and the server is established. This work introduces a cutting-edge, blockchain-enabled federated learning framework that incorporates Federated Knowledge Distillation (FD) with compressed 1-bit soft-labels, aggregated through a smart contract. Furthermore, we present the Peer Truth Serum for Federated Distillation (PTSFD), which cultivates an incentive-compatible ecosystem by rewarding honest participation based on an implicit yet effective comparison of worker contributions. The primary innovation stems from its lightweight architecture that simultaneously promotes decentralization and incentivization, addressing critical challenges in contemporary FL approaches.