Abstract Blockchain is gaining popularity as a potential solution for the decentralized management of public information. A number of interesting solutions have been proposed by independent developers around the world to promote blockchain as a promising platform to potentially accelerate democratic processes and achieve certain public values in reforming digital governance. This could be reflected in facilitating direct citizen participation in digital politics, promoting greater civic cooperation and engagement in political discussions, boosting the role of civic commentary and even collaborative decision‐making in e‐government. In this regard, the article critically elaborates on the potential of this technology to promote political dimensions of public sector reforms in a post‐positivist manner, resorting to the analysis of concrete e‐participation cases in a number of public areas where the potential has already been realized and the opinions of professional software developers who are currently engaged in building various blockchain‐driven data management solutions in the e‐government area. This paper identifies, debates, and draws on what benefits and risks public policy can yield from the implementation of blockchain governance.
Blockchain-empowered federated learning (FL) has provoked extensive research recently. Various blockchain-based federated learning algorithm, architecture and mechanism have been designed to solve issues like single point failure and data falsification brought by centralized FL paradigm. Moreover, it is easier to allocate incentives to nodes with the help of the blockchain. Various centralized federated learning frameworks like FedML, have emerged in the community to help boost the research on FL. However, decentralized blockchain-based federated learning framework is still missing, which cause inconvenience for researcher to reproduce or verify the algorithm performance based on blockchain. Inspired by the above issues, we have designed and developed a blockchain-based federated learning framework by embedding Ethereum network. This report will present the overall structure of this framework, which proposes a code practice paradigm for the combination of FL with blockchain and, at the same time, compatible with normal FL training task. In addition to implement some blockchain federated learning algorithms on smart contract to help execute a FL training, we also propose a model ownership authentication architecture based on blockchain and model watermarking to protect the intellectual property rights of models. These mechanism on blockchain shows an underlying support of blockchain for federated learning to provide a verifiable training, aggregation and incentive distribution procedure and thus we named this framework VeryFL (A Verify Federated Learninig Framework Embedded with Blockchain). The source code is avaliable on https://github.com/GTMLLab/VeryFL.
Bitcoin has been launched for over a decade and made an increasing impact on the world’s financial order, which attracted extensive attention of researchers. 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) was prososed, which could collect as many Bitcoin nodes as possible. For reachable nodes, the authors designed an algorithm BRF (Bitcoin Reachable-nodes Finding) based on node activity evaluation, which reduced the nodes to be detected and greatly shortened the detection time. For unreachable nodes, the authors trained a dicision tree model BUF(Bitcoin Unreachable-nodes Finding) to identify unreachable nodes based on attribute features from massive node addresses. Experiments showed that BNS performed better than the website "Bitnodes" in total number and efficiency. Based on the experimental results, the authors analyzed the real network size, node "churn" and geographical distribution.
In an era marked by technological advancement, the demand for secure and transparent electronic voting systems has surged. This paper advocates for the integration of blockchain technology to construct an immutable and trustworthy online e-voting system. Leveraging blockchain's decentralized architecture and the capabilities of platforms like Ethereum with its Turing-complete programming language and smart contracts, this proposal addresses concerns surrounding traditional offline voting mechanisms, including transparency and fraud. The paper underscores the necessity for collaborative efforts between governments and security experts to establish robust security standards in the development of error-resistant e-voting systems. Additionally, it acknowledges the ongoing efforts of organizations like Follow My Vote, Polys, Agora, Polyaz, Voatz, and Luxoft in providing secure blockchain-based e-voting solutions. While acknowledging the potential benefits of online voting, such as cost-efficiency and enhanced voter turnout, the paper acknowledges challenges, including issues of receipt-freeness, coercion resistance, scalability, maturity, and public acceptance, which require further consideration to realize the full potential of blockchain-based e-voting systems in bolstering the future of democracy.
This research delves into the intricacies of Bitcoin, a decentralized peer-to-peer network, and its associated blockchain, which records all transactions since its inception. While this ensures integrity and transparency, the transparent nature of Bitcoin potentially compromises users' privacy rights. To address this concern, users have adopted CoinJoin, a method that amalgamates multiple transaction intents into a single, larger transaction to bolster transactional privacy. This process complicates individual transaction tracing and disrupts many established blockchain analysis heuristics. Despite its significance, limited research has been conducted on identifying CoinJoin transactions. Particularly noteworthy are varied CoinJoin implementations such as JoinMarket, Wasabi, and Whirlpool, each presenting distinct challenges due to their unique transaction structures. This study delves deeply into the open-source implementations of these protocols, aiming to develop refined heuristics for identifying their transactions on the blockchain. Our exhaustive analysis covers transactions up to block 760,000, offering a comprehensive insight into CoinJoin transactions and their implications for Bitcoin blockchain analysis.
Price discrimination has been empirically exposed where e-commercial platforms aim to gain additional profits by charging customers with different prices for the same product/service. This situation becomes even worse in nowadays’ Big Data era, giving the chance for service providers to leverage artificial intelligence technologies to have the deep analysis of personalized patterns, urgently calling for solutions to prevent such discriminated behaviors to protect customers’ rights. This article aims to defend against price discrimination by developing a secure and privacy-preserving solution, provable for e-commerce fairness. Using a newly designed cryptographic accumulator and public bulletin board, our system, called FairECom, allows an auditor (i.e., a customer or third-party auditor) to verify if customers are experiencing price discrimination. In particular, FairECom enables a customer to check if his payment to a product/service is identical to other customers through a privacy-preserving challenge-response protocol, for implementing the price transparency against discrimination. We implement a prototype using an Ethereum-based public bulletin board to conduct the system evaluation. Our evaluation indicates that FairECom can integrate with existing APIs provided by Ethereum and incur acceptable costs when deploying to the e-commercial systems.
Md. Rahat Hasan, Ammar Alazab, Siddhartha Barman Joy, Mohammed Nasir Uddin · 9 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently attracted much interest from researchers due to its diverse IoT applications. However, IoT systems encounter additional security and privacy threats. Developing an efficient IoT system is challenging because of its sophisticated network topology. Effective access control is required to ensure user privacy in the Internet of Things. Traditional access control methods are inappropriate for IoT systems because most conventional access control approaches are designed for centralized systems. This paper proposes a decentralized access control framework based on smart contracts with three parts: initialization, an access control protocol, and an inspection. Smart contracts are used in the proposed framework to store access control policies safely on the blockchain. The framework also penalizes users for attempting unauthorized access to the IoT resources. The smart contract was developed using Remix and deployed on the Ropsten Ethereum testnet. We analyze the performance of the smart contract-based access policies based on the gas consumption of blockchain transactions. Further, we analyze the system’s security, usability, scalability, and interoperability performance.
Abstract The proliferation of IoT devices has influenced end users in several aspects. Yottabytes (YB) of information are being produced in the IoT environs because of the ever-increasing utilization capacity of the Internet. Since sensitive information, as well as privacy problems, always seem to be an unsolved problem, even with best-in-class in-formation governance standards, it is difficult to bolster defensive security capabilities. Secure data sharing across disparate systems is made possible by blockchain technology, which operates on a decentralized computing paradigm. In the ever-changing IoT environments, blockchain technology provides irreversibility (immutability) usage across a wide range of services and use cases. Therefore, blockchain technology can be leveraged to securely hold private information, even in the dynamicity context of the IoT. However, as the rate of change in IoT networks accelerates, every potential weak point in the system is exposed, making it more challenging to keep sensitive data se-cure. In this study, we adopted a Multi-level Blockchain-based Secured Framework (M-BSF) to provide multi-level protection for sensitive data in the face of threats to IoT-based networking systems. The envisioned M-BSF framework incorporates edge-level, fog-level, and cloud-level security. At edge- and fog-level security, baby kyber and scaling kyber cryptosystems are applied to ensure data preservation. Kyber is a cryptosystem scheme that adopts public-key encryption and private-key decryption processes. Each block of the blockchain uses the cloud-based Argon-2di hashing method for cloud-level data storage, providing the highest level of confidentiality. Argon-2di is a stable hashing algorithm that uses a hybrid approach to access the memory that relied on dependent and independent memory features. Based on the attack-resistant rate (> 96%), computational cost (in time), and other main metrics, the proposed M-BSF security architecture appears to be an acceptable alternative to the current methodologies.
This paper will explore the ability to implement Blockchain technology within electronic voting systems. The goal of this paper is to present an overview and high-level practical solution for this development. To achieve this, aim the Estonian electronic voting system will be used as a base which we will enhance with the functionalities of smart contracts. In the research it will be made a comparison between two of the biggest Blockchain platforms – Ethereum and Cardano, which will help the scientists choose the right system. In conclusion, a small piece of smart contact code will be presented in addition to the summary, placed at the end of the document.
Payment channel hubs (PCHs) serve as a promising solution to achieving quick off-chain payments between pairs of users. They work by using an untrusted tumbler to relay the payments between the payer and payee and enjoy the advantages of low cost and high scalability. However, the most recent privacy-preserving payment channel hub solution that supports variable payment amounts suffers from limited unlinkability, e.g., being vulnerable to the abort attack. Moreover, this solution utilizes zero-knowledge proofs, which bring huge costs on both computation time and communication overhead. Therefore, how to design PCHs that support variable amount payments and unlinkability, but reduce the use of huge-cost cryptographic tools as much as possible, is significant for the large-scale practical applications of off-chain payments.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Information Age, embraced by the 21st century, has seen the rapid adoption of new technologies, including in the election process. However, the security and transparency of both voters and their votes remain a concern with the centralized traditional system. The database can be tampered with, vote rigging, hacking, and booth capturing are possible. Blockchain technology provides a solution based on a decentralized and distributed system, where the database is controlled and owned by multiple users. E-voting is a quick, inexpensive, and effective way to cast a vote. Our proposed V2E system uses a Peer-to-peer network that enhances accountability and security. We will employ distributed ledger technologies to prevent vote faking and design a user credential model based on cryptographically secure Hash Functions to provide authenticity and non-repudiation. Since votes will be updated synchronously to the ledger, vote rigging, hacking, or system destruction will be nearly impossible.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Several countries have been researching digital voting methods in order to overcome the challenges of paper balloting and physical voting. The recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic has compelled the remote implementation of existing systems and procedures. Online voting will ultimately become the norm just like unified payments interface (UPI) payments and online banking. With digital voting or electronic voting (e-voting) a small bug can cause massive vote rigging. E-voting must be honest, exact, safe, and simple. E-voting is vulnerable to malware, which can disrupt servers. Blockchain’s end-to-end validation solves these problems. Three smart contracts-voter, candidate, and voting-are employed. The problem of fraudulent actions is addressed using vote coins. Vote coins indicate voter status. Sidechain technology complements blockchain. Sidechains improve blockchain functionality by performing operations outside of blockchains and delivering the results to the mainchain. Thus, storing the encrypted vote on the sidechain and using the decrypted result on the mainchain reduces cost. Building access control policies to grant only authorized users’ access to the votes for counting is made simpler by this authorization paradigm. Results of the approach depict the proposed e-voting system improves system security against replay attacks and reduces the processing cost as well as processing time.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ethereum developed the idea of a decentralized application to benefit from the capabilities of blockchain technology. Even though blockchain is one of the most talked-about topics in the IT industry right now, most of it is about cryptocurrency hype and its limited application. On the Ethereum platform, decentralized applications can be developed and tested with the help of the Ethereum virtual computer. As more smart contracts are added, it gets stronger. The process of writing code into the blockchain is known as a smart contract. To protect the blockchain&s;s integrity, smart contracts establish a virtual contract between the owner and the user. The contract must be accepted by all users. Transactions on the blockchain are governed using smart contracts. Although electronic voting is popular, it is essential to have a trustworthy and secure online voting platform. A transparent and decentralized voting platform is in high demand in a democratic democracy. An electronic voting platform needs to be safe, offer one vote per person, be open, and be simple to use. Ethereum and its extensive network are the best platforms for developing such applications. We are working on a decentralized, Blockchain-based electronic voting system as part of this project. Several nodes store the voting information of users, and if one node fails or is unavailable, users can retrieve their voting information from other operating nodes. Voting information were managed in a single server in the previous centralized server, and if this server was hacked or went down, all voting details would be inaccessible, and this server might be attacked or hacked, altering vote counting data. Immutable data storage is supported by Blockchain storage, which means that data cannot be altered or hacked because each node in the Blockchain will verify each Block storage with the help of hash codes, and if verification fails, the Blockchain or users will receive notification that data has been changed.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A pivotal feature of IPv6 is its plug-and-play capability that enables hosts to integrate seamlessly into networks. In the absence of a trusted authority or security infrastructure, the challenge for hosts is generating their own address and verifying ownership of others. Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGA) solves this problem by binding IPv6 addresses to hosts' public keys to prove address ownership. CGA generation involves solving a cryptographic puzzle similar to Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work (PoW) to deter address spoofing. Unfortunately, solving the puzzle often causes undesirable address generation delays, which has hindered the adoption of CGA. In this paper, we present Bitcoin-Certified Addresses (BCA), a new technique to bind IPv6 addresses to hosts' public keys. BCA reduces the computational cost of generating addresses by using the PoW computed by Bitcoin nodes to secure the binding. Compared to CGA, BCA provides better protection against spoofing attacks and improves the privacy of hosts. Due to the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network, BCA avoids reliance on a trusted authority, similar to CGA. BCA shows how the PoW computed by Bitcoin nodes can be reused, which saves costs for hosts and makes Bitcoin mining more efficient.
Yang Liu, Zhiyuan Lin, Yuxi Zhang, Lin Jiang · 5 authors
Ethereum, currently the most widely utilized smart contracts platform, anchors the security of myriad smart contracts upon its own robustness. Its foundational peer-to-peer network facilitates a dependable node connection mechanism, whereas an efficient data-sharing protocol constitutes as the bedrock of Blockchain network security. In this paper, we propose NodeHunter, an Ethereum network detector implemented through the application of simulation technology, which is capable of aggregating all node records within the network and the interconnectedness between them. Utilizing this connection information, NodeHunter can procure more comprehensive insights for network status analysis compared to preceding detection methodologies. Throughout a three-month period of unbroken surveillance of the Ethereum network, we obtained an excess of two million node records along with over one hundred million node acquaintances. Analysis of the gathered data revealed that an alarming 49% or more of these node records were maliciously forged.
The application of blockchain technology in electronic voting (e-voting) systems represents a promising solution to the perennial challenges of trust, transparency, and security in electoral processes. This study aims to identify a suitable blockchain protocol that supports trustworthy vote aggregation and has a suitable consensus algorithm to validate vote counting. Our research methodology includes an extensive literature review and a comparative analysis of different blockchain protocols. Considering this, we examine various consensus algorithms such as Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance among others, each of which presents unique strengths and challenges. In addition, this study enriches the existing body of knowledge by proposing a novel algorithm that works at the edge of the network to validate and aggregate votes on the blockchain. This newly proposed algorithm is designed to provide maximum security, reliability, and accuracy while minimizing computational resources and network overhead. Our comprehensive research and innovative proposal serve to strengthen the potential of blockchain protocols and their consensus algorithms in the field of electronic voting systems. The results of this research could significantly influence the development and implementation of secure, transparent, and reliable e-voting systems based on blockchain technology, paving the way for more democratic and accountable voting mechanisms.
Due to the impact of the pandemic and globalization, many governments worldwide have begun to replace paper voting with electronic voting systems. This is primarily intended to increase voting efficiency and reduce personnel costs. However, electronic voting is usually centralized, which creates difficulties in ensuring the integrity of the voting process and protecting voter privacy. As a solution, we propose an efficient and anonymous web3-based voting system that provides incentives. The use of blockchain technology ensures that voting results are stored in a decentralized manner, reducing the possibility of tampering and ensuring vote integrity. To protect voter privacy, our system incorporates stealth addresses to conceal ballot content and lightweight ring signatures to verify voter validity without the risk of double voting. Furthermore, our voting system utilizes smart contracts to encourage voting and self-tallying, resulting in improved transparency. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms several existing e-voting systems, thus providing a robust and secure alternative for governments seeking to improve their voting systems.
Blockchain based E-voting system can be revolution- ary in terms of security and tamper proof, transparent elections and hence empower the democracy. Blockchain E-voting is already implemented at organisational level. But at state/national level it faces challenges such as privacy, stability, latency etc. To counter them we require advanced implementation techniques from multiple disciplines. These techniques are 2-layer-solution, sharding for scalability issue, optimizing consensus algorithm and off-chain transaction for reducing latency, zero knowledge proof, using multiple protocols for user privacy etc. General architecture of blockchain is explained in details which combines election creation, voter registration, voter transaction, tallying the results and vote verification. We have discussed how integrating E-voting with blockchain document verification system can be benificial. It is complicated to implement at state, national level and need additional research and implementation to make blockchain E- voting acceptable in elections across the world. Through research and innovation we can make blockchain voting mainstream.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Network Traffic and Congestion Control
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Salem S. M. Khalifa, Ali Mohamed E. Ejmaa, Abdulmawla Mohammad Ali Najih, Mohamed Abd Arahman Masoud Zneen
A transition to democratic rule is considered the first step down a long road towards Libya’s recovery and prosperity. Thus, it strives to improve the country’s elections by introducing new technologies. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that is characterised by independence and security. Therefore, it has been widely applied in various fields ranging from credit encryption and digital currency. With the development of internet technology, electronic voting (E-voting) systems have been greatly popularised. However, they suffer from various security threats, which create a sense of distrust among existing systems. Integrating blockchain with online elections is a promising trend, which could lead to make an election transparent, immutable, reliable, and more secure. In this paper, we present a literature review and a case analysis of blockchain technology. Moreover, a framework for an E-voting system based on blockchain is proposed. The methodology is adopted on the basis of three activities, they are identification of the relevant literature about E-voting, system modelling, and the determination of suitable technological tools. The framework is secure and reliable. Thus, it could help increase the number of voters and ensure a high level of participation, as well as facilitate free and fair electoral processes
Nov 1, 2023·2023 International Conference on Research Methodologies in Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence and Telecommunication Engineering (RMKMATE)
S. Gnanapriya, M Ram Eshwar, C G Shrikhiran, J Vijay Chandar · 5 authors
Electronic voting has become an increasingly popular topic of discussion in recent years but it has some security issues. Ethereum's smart contract capabilities make it possible to develop tamper-proof and transparent e-voting systems. Smart contracts are self-executing programs that are stored on the Ethereum blockchain, and can be used to automate the process of voting and ensure that the results are accurate and verifiable. This paper explores the use of Ethereum for e-voting, including the advantages and challenges of using this platform for voting. The paper discusses the use of smart contracts for implementing e-voting systems, the security and privacy considerations that must be taken into account, and the potential benefits of using Ethereum for e-voting. The paper also discusses the challenges that must be overcome to ensure the widespread adoption of Ethereum-based e-voting systems, including issues related to scalability, interoperability, and regulatory compliance. In conclusion, this paper argues that Ethereum has the potential to revolutionize the field of e-voting, offering a secure, transparent, and efficient solution for conducting political elections. While there are still many challenges to overcome, the use of Ethereum for e-voting represents an exciting opportunity for governments, businesses, and individuals around the world to participate in democratic processes in a more secure and efficient way.
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques