Blockchain Papers

Keigo Kimura, Mitsuyoshi Imamura, Kazumasa Omote

With the recent proliferation of blockchains, identifying security risks to them has become an important issue. Among the various types of cyberattacks against blockchains, the blockchain poisoning attack involves the storing of malicious data in the blockchain to compromise it. One scenario is an attack that distributes forgeries of digital content traded and managed using Non-Fungible Token (NFT) on the blockchain. Currently, concomitant with the growing interest in NFT-based content trading, blockchain poisoning attacks on NFT trading and their effects have also increased. In this study, we examined the issues that may lead to attacks in the process from generation to distribution of digital content using NFT from the viewpoint of flexibility and interoperability of the content. Consequently, we discovered that there are two types of attack risks in NFT trading using malicious content: fake attacks and reuse attacks. As a countermeasure against these attacks, we propose a method for verifying the authenticity of the content itself using a decentralized scheme. The proposed method ensures the confidentiality of contents by using deep learning as an irreversible transformation operation in the distributed scheme and for privacy protection.

Shipra Ravi Kumar, Mukta Goyal

Since the last two decades, the problem of check theft and the data breaches from centralized systems has gotten worse. In this study, we looked at how blockchain technology is employed in identification systems and how it may be applied to verify an identity’s veracity and legitimacy. The drawbacks of the conventional identification systems were examined in depth, and the advantages of using a Blockchain-based identity system were discussed, including the removal of the middleman and the need for long wait times for verification, authorization, and attestation. Nobody can alter their identification data because the nodes in a blockchain are supposed to be immutable, and because asymmetric cryptography is utilized while sharing data, personal information is kept secure. We were able to effectively establish an identity wallet-a node in a chain on the Ethereum platform-and test a self-sovereign identification system for a single person.

Naina Qi, Yong Yuan, Fei–Yue Wang

With the rapid development of blockchain technology and industries, scalability has been widely realized as one of the primary and urgent concerns for the large-scale adoption of blockchain, especially for cryptocurrencies. In this respect, directed acyclic graph (DAG) proves to be an elegant solution to scaling blockchain but suffers from weak consistency and security issues. In this article, we designed a novel DAG-BLOCK architecture for blockchain-enabled cryptocurrency markets in order to improve the scalability. In our work, DAG is used to replace the Merkel-tree-based transaction structure within the block, and a novel design of open blocks is proposed to enable user nodes to participate in verifying the transactions in blockchain systems. On this basis, we designed a new segmented market structure, in which each miner serves only a group of users instead of all users, so as to reduce miners’ workload and thus scale transaction processing capabilities. Our work can help improve the scalability of cryptocurrencies via evolving the underlying blockchain systems to graph-based distributed ledgers and is expected to shed new light on designing blockchain-based decentralized markets.

Chao Lin, Xinyi Huang, Jianting Ning, Debiao He

The rapid development and wide application of blockchain not only highlight the significance of privacy protection (including anonymity and confidentiality) but also the necessity of auditability. While several ingenious schemes such as MiniLedger and traceable Monero supporting both privacy protection and auditability have been proposed, they either provide incomplete privacy protection (only achieving anonymity within a small set or only providing confidentiality but not anonymity), or involve additional auditing conditions such as reaching threshold transaction volume or requiring permissioned nodes to serve as the manager, or restrict to specific blockchain types such as Monero. To mitigate these issues, this article proposes a generic anonymous, confidential, and auditable transaction system (named ACA), which is compatible with both UTXO-based permissionless and permissioned blockchains. Core technologies of ACA include designed traceable anonymous key generation and publicly verifiable authorization mechanisms from existing cryptographic tools (i.e., public key encryption, partially homomorphic encryption, and accumulator) as well as the meticulous designed signatures of knowledge and smart contract. To demonstrate the entity of our proposal, we first prove its security including authenticity, anonymity, confidentiality and soundness, and then provide an instantiation to evaluate its performance. The final implementation and benchmarks show that our proposal can still gain performance advantage even adding more functionalities.

Xiubo Liang, Junhan Wu, Chaoqun Hong

Blockchain-based implementations of non-fungible tokens represent ownership of specific digital objects and are indivisible, irreplaceable and unique. However, there are currently two problems: 1) Due to the low throughput rate of the blockchain system, it cannot meet the needs of large-scale scenarios of non-fungible tokens assets. As the core technology of blockchain scaling, Layer2 has become an important factor affecting the performance of blockchain. 2) The current liquidity mechanism of non-fungible tokens greatly limits its liquidity. Therefore, this paper combines cryptographic zero-knowledge proof technology with off-chain scaling technology to design and implement a system architecture that can significantly improve the liquidity of non-fungible tokens. Firstly, this paper proposes a zk-rollup based off-chain scaling architecture RBHLT, on top of which a high liquidity protocol for non-fungible tokens is implemented. Analysis and experimental results show that RBHLT enables higher liquidity of non-fungible tokens while reducing transaction costs.

Yuanyuan Jiang, Jiting Zhou

With the development of global informatization and digitalization, a large number of digital content works are produced, such as e-books, music, videos and so on. The copyright registration mechanism provided by the traditional third-party copyright management platform can no longer meet the needs of the rapid development trend of digital works. This paper proposes a digital music copyright system based on blockchain. On the Ethereum platform, smart contracts are designed to achieve copyright registration, music authentication and music crowdfunding. Digital signature technology is used to realize the authentication and authorization of transaction information. The Shazam algorithm is used to extract the audio fingerprint. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) stores the extracted audio fingerprint, and the blockchain stores the hash value generated by IPFS. Compared with the existing system, the function of this system is more perfect. And innovatively through smart contract and digital signature technology, this system realizes the authentication and authorization of transaction information. In particular, it ensures the authenticity of the crowdfunding campaign.

Erhan Ustaoğlu, Selçuk KIRAN, Mahmut Bağcı, İlkim Ecem Emre

Çalışma, NFT (Non-FungibleToken) kavramı ile bu kavramın üzerine kurulu olduğu teknoloji ve kullanım alanlarını araştırmaktadır. Bu araştırmada ilk olarak NFT’nin dayandığı blokzincir teknolojisi incelenmekte ve çalışma biçimi açıklanmaktadır. Ardından bu teknolojinin özellikleri ve popüler kripto paralar dışındaki kullanım alanları irdelenmiştir. Daha sonra NFT’yi bir standart olarak tanımlayan Ethereum platformu araştırılmış ve yine bu platform üzerinde tanımlanan akıllı sözleşmeler açıklanmıştır. Ayrıca NFT kategorileri incelenmiş, dijital sanat alanı ve diğer kategorilerde önerilen uygulamalar için bir literatür taraması yapılmıştır. Ek olarak, oluşturulan sözlük yardımıyla bu alanda kullanılan kavramların Türkçe karşılıklarına dair önerilerde bulunulmuştur. Başta sanat, koleksiyon ve oyun kategorisinde olmak üzere birçok alanda NFT uygulamaları mevcuttur. NFT’lerin özellikle tedarik zincirleri ve nesnelerin interneti alanlarında yaygın olarak kullanım alanı bulacağı öngörülmektedir. Bu çalışma, NFT kavramını, teknolojisini ve kullanım alanlarını bir bütün olarak ele almakta ve açıklamaktadır.

Asahi Cantu, Jiahui Geng, Chunming Rong

Today, the global economy is dependent on the Internet and computational resources. Although they are tightly interconnected, it is difficult to evaluate their degree of interdependence. Keeping up with the pace of technology can be a challenging task, mainly when updating the hardware and software infrastructure. Every day, corporations and governments are faced with this issue; most have been victims of cyber attacks, security breaches, and data leaks. The consequences are significant in monetary losses; damage remediation is unattainable, even impossible, in certain circumstances. The repercussions might include reputational damage, legal responsibility, and threats to national security (when attacks are carried out against critical infrastructures to control the resources of a country), to name a few. Similarly, data has become such an integral part of many industries that it is one of the most critical targets for attackers that often is encrypted by ransomware, stolen, or corrupted. Without data, many companies are not able to continue operating as they do. The combination of all these factors complicates the ability of organizations to cooperate, trust, and share information in efforts to research and develop solutions for industry and government.This work proposes a Blockchain-based infrastructure solution provided by “Hyperledger Fabric” technology for companies to securely transmit and share information using the latest encryption and data storage technologies operating on the model of distributed systems and smart contracts. By presenting unique digital assets as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), the infrastructure is able to trust the integrity of the data, while protecting it from counterfeiting. Through the use of a Blockchain-based file storage system known as IPFS, and by connecting all the relevant elements together through a web-based application, it is possible to demonstrate that the implementation of such systems is feasible, highly scalable and a useful tool that many organizations can utilize to create new work systems and worktflows for digital asset management.

Baowei Wang, Bin Li, Yi Yuan, Changyu Dai · 6 authors

Data has become an integral part of the modern world, and its value has led to the creation of new markets for data trading. Protecting the copyright of trading data and ensuring the fairness of transactions present significant challenges in the current trading market. Therefore, we propose a copyright-preserving data trading scheme based on smart contracts and perceptual hashing, called CPDT, which use smart contracts, combined with perceptual hashing, to prevent malicious acts of illegal reselling and to ensure fair transactions. We have also designed a perceptual hashing algorithm for our trading scheme. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the scheme.

Muhammad Bilal Akram Dastagir, Omer Tariq, Dongsoo Han

The adaption of the NFT to the mainstream web3 marketplace has led to the rise of challenges like authenticity and verification. On the other hand, privacy-preserving is one of the important research topics in the data-driven metaverse due to its anonymity while maintaining transparency and security. As the traditional method does not preserve privacy, there is a dire need for a novel privacy-preserving method for NFT authentication while preserving anonymity, transparency, and security. This paper proposes a smart card-based approach for privacy preservation authentication of Non-Fungible Tokens using Non-Interactive Zero Knowledge Proof (NIZKP). The paper presents a Novel NIZKP response with the integration of challenge and proof with the encapsulation of a time-based one-time password (TOTP) solution to address the most critical problem of the proof of the source of the NFT and its rightful owner. The proposed solution is a lightweight mechanism for preventing unauthorized and hostile agents from the accessibility of the system while maintaining privacy and anonymity along with the verification and authenticity of the NFT. We have implemented our approach and compared the communication overhead and functional security features with related work and its precedence over them. The results show that the proposed approach has less communication overhead than the existing work and fulfills all the functional security and privacy-preserving features. It indicates that the proposed method can be an ideal solution for NFT authentication and transaction among users.

Subhi Alrubei, Edward A. Ball, Jonathan Rigelsford

Blockchain is a technology that could help secure Internet of Things (IoT) systems and allow for easy interactions and communications among IoT devices without compromising their security. However, many nodes in IoT blockchain platforms lack adequate security at the hardware level; this is an important security aspect that can enhance both node security and overall trust in the platform. In this paper, we evaluate the viability of integrating a hardware secure module (HSM) and a hardware wallet (HW) into IoT blockchain applications. We provide a performance evaluation regarding the energy consumption of nodes that are equipped with HSM and HW and conduct security analyses. Finally, we discuss an example application, namely, secure community energy trading based on the deployment of an honesty-based distributed proof of authority (HDPoA) consensus algorithm where all nodes are equipped with an HSM and HW.

Qingsen Zhang

Blockchain is considered one of the most innovative techniques in the recent decade, this is because it takes advantage of the trustless, distributed, and tamper-proof. Researchers have established the existence of blockchain in regions from finance to health care records. They are also devoted to extending the application in other areas. This paper proposes an attendance system integrating blockchain and face recognition techniques. The attendance system consists of two parts, the face recognition component enables the system to automatically take attendance of a participant, which reduces complicated paperwork and saves time. Then, it stores attendance information in a blockchain-based database component at a specific time, providing a reliable and tamper-proof solution where no one is entitled to edit or delete data. We introduced an attendance system that utilizes a convolutional neural network for face recognition and stores the attendance data on the blockchain. The system shows decent resilience on tamper, and saves time for automatic attendance marks.

Bismark Tei Asare

High profile cybersecurity attacks on networks and the occurrences of critical security breaches on existing wireless sensor networks grow by the day. The distributed ledger technology provided for by blockchainwith all its benefits has shown great industrial prospects in the face of the rampant occurrences of cyber thefts of critical data from compromised networks. The centralized identity model relies on centralized authentication mechanisms that create a single point of failure for such database systems. Again, thecentralized data is a honeypot for cyber-attacks.Blockchain as a database structure adopts an authentication mechanism that depends on the distributed ledger technology to eliminate the incidences of single point of failure.Although Blockchain holds security benefits for ensuring enhanced privacy and confidentiality for stored data, the computational overhead in classical blockchain technology makes it a challenge for full use in a network where its devices are resource constrained. In this thesis, solutions have been proposed to solve the aforementioned problems. The main contributions of the PhD thesis are the following: the proposal of a blockchain-based architecture for IoT security, the proposal of cryptographic approaches for securityreinforcement in blockchain-based architectures, and the elaboration of a model based on a formal approach, namely Petri nets, for simulation, analysis and verification of blockchain-based architectures for IoT.

Chinnam Shanmukha Sai, Narayanan Subramanian

Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a widely used distributed file system on a peer to peer network to store, share data and handle content management. There is often lack of availability, security and concealment on IPFS, resulting in compromise of confidential information during covert communication. The data in IPFS could be dropped and nodes compressed which results in unavailability of data. IPFS does not encrypt files and users who uploaded the sensitive data can be traced. To overcome these issues a Filecoin-Slate Blockchain (FSB) is adopted in this work. FSB is built on top of content addresser IPFS, a persistent storage ensuring data availability and transaction cost free for users who are uploading data into the FSB. This work proposes a robust and efficient implementation of FSB integrating plain text cryptography and Least Significant Bit (LSB) image steganography. Cryptography along with steganography ensures a strong two-tiered data protection, and adapting FSB guarantees file availability and integrity using inverse embedding technique. The proposed work is tested with nine high quality images and the results validate to maintain confidentiality, availability and integrity of data, for covert communication over FSB.

Suliman Aladhadh, Huda Alwabli, Tarek Moulahi, Muneerah Al Asqah

Recently, blockchain technology has appeared as a powerful decentralized tool for data integrity protection. The use of smart contracts in blockchain helped to provide a secure environment for developing peer-to-peer applications. Blockchain has been used by the research community as a tool for protection against attacks. The blockchain itself can be the objective of many cyberthreats. In the literature, there are few research works aimed to protect the blockchain against cyberthreats adopting, in most cases, statistical schemes based on smart contracts and causing deployment and runtime overheads. Although, the power of machine learning tools there is insufficient use of these techniques to protect blockchain against attacks. For that reason, we aim, in this paper, to propose a new framework called BChainGuard for cyberthreat detection in blockchain. Our framework’s main goal is to distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior of the traffic linked to the blockchain network. In BChainGuard, the execution of the classification technique will be local. Next, we embed only the decision function as a smart contract. The experimental result shows encouraging results with an accuracy of detection of around 95% using SVM and 98.02% using MLP with a low runtime and overhead in terms of consumed gas.

P. Shanmugaraja, Susmitha K. S, S Swadha, R Vijay · 5 authors

Creating fake documents and certificates by duplicating them from the real ones has become most popular in the recent days. Moreover, documents are stored in the respective offices in a centralized database, and to access them one should always be physically present in that office. Also, during the pandemic, most of the schools, colleges, and offices were subjected to online document storage. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain system as a solution for the taut storage of documents in the form of electronic files on a blockchain network. The immutable property will aid the document from being duplicated, and will result in the permanent entry of the document in the distributed databases. Also, the blockchain belongings of the decentralized ledger structure will help to keep the files safe and unaffected forever.

Rajkumar Gaur, Shiva Prakash, Sanjay Kumar, Kumar Abhishek · 6 authors

Nowadays, finding genetic components and determining the likelihood that treatment would be helpful for patients are the key issues in the medical field. Medical data storage in a centralized system is complex. Data storage, on the other hand, has recently been distributed electronically in a cloud-based system, allowing access to the data at any time through a cloud server or blockchain-based ledger system. The blockchain is essential to managing safe and decentralized transactions in cryptography systems such as bitcoin and Ethereum. The blockchain stores information in different blocks, each of which has a set capacity. Data processing and storage are more effective and better for data management when blockchain and machine learning are integrated. Therefore, we have proposed a machine-learning-blockchain-based smart-contract system that improves security, reduces consumption, and can be trusted for real-time medical applications. The accuracy and computation performance of the IoHT system are safely improved by our system.

Pragya Jain, Sunandani Gupta, Sunandani Gupta, Sneha Shelke

Normal cash has developed and appears numerous downsides such as inaccessibility. It is inclined to burglary and is intensely directed by government offices. Cryptocurrencies have risen as a egotistic money related framework. They depend upon secure disseminated ledger data structure. Mining plays a critical portion in this framework [1]. Basically, our cryptocurrency could be a conveyed database that keeps up tamper-proof information structure pieces containing his bunches of person exchanges. Blockchain innovation can be a widely emerging approach to data innovations. Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has made several considerations since it was one of its earliest implementations. They discuss the key elements driving the development of sophisticated cryptocurrencies alongside Ethereum, a blockchain implementation with a focus on informed contracts [1]. In its most basic form, our cryptocurrency may be thought of as a distributed database that keeps track of tamper-proof data structure blocks comprising batchesof individual transactions [1].

Ali Zouaghi Yousra, Mahamdioua Meriama, Atidel Lahoulou

Biometric authentication methods generally rely on centralized authority such as centralized database servers to store biometric templates and manage authentication. These methods suffer from different points of attack. If the central entity is compromised, the system becomes vulnerable and unable to ensure integrity of stored templates. This paper proposes a distributed scheme of biometric authentification, eliminating the need for a central entity. The proposal is based on the Ethereum blockchain, which offers decentralized and irreversible properties for the storage and management of biometric templates. For each user, the fingerprint template is encrypted using homomorphic encryption and stored on the smart card. The hashed encrypted vector is then stored on the blockchain to ensure its confidentiality. Our proposed scheme, allows authentication of users using a smart contract, while the distance calculation is performed on the encrypted domain that achieves the integrity of the calculation results. By using hashed vectors, the proposal is efficient and cost-effective. These improvements provide solutions to many problems in biometric systems such as template modification, channel interception, and override comparator.

Kuo‐Hui Yeh, Guan-Yan Yang, Chanapha Butpheng, Lin-Fa Lee · 5 authors

Blockchain technology has recently attracted tremendous interest due to its potential to revolutionize the industry by achieving decentralization while increasing the number of data sources, transparency, reliability, auditability, and trustworthiness. However, one of the major barriers to the widespread adoption of blockchain applications is the lack of mutual consensus and management across blockchains. Cross-blockchain consensus refers to one blockchain network reaching a consensus with another blockchain network to provide the ability to interact and share data. In this paper, we propose a secure management scheme with symmetric cross-blockchain communication and certificateless signature primitives, in which two heterogeneous blockchains are linked by a relay chain to simultaneously deliver cross-blockchain transaction security, achieve compatibility among various blockchains, and ensure the consistency of data exchanged, in practice. Additionally, our evaluation and security analysis shows the practicability and security of our proposed management scheme and demonstrates that a common test platform based on Ethereum can achieve acceptable computation costs.

Maha Rahrouh, Walid Alayash, Mamdouh Ghanem

In the past few years, the world has witnessed a massive development in the digital world, which has led to the emergence of a new advanced trading technology called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as digital crypto assets using blockchain technology. This technology has expanded and developed by leaps and bounds in various aspects of the digital world, including virtual reality and cryptocurrency. This rapid development has created a marketplace that allows users to create, buy and sell their own unique NFT digital assets quickly and easily compared to the real world while maintaining ownership rights. The huge trading market of NFTs and their remarkable technical advantages have attracted Attention and concerns of musicians, artists, collectors and gamers to such an extent that it has sparked interest in studying the applicability of NFT technology in various sectors of the real world. This research came to study the applicability of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their opportunities and challenges in the publishing industry, taking into consideration all its stakeholders, in order to open doors for this industry, and maybe to other potential non-digital (real) industries to benefit from it.

Cheng Ting Tsai, Ja‐Ling Wu

No abstract is available for this record.

Kyohei Shibano, Tohru Nakajima, Gento Mogi

The system proposed in this study uses zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to verify the traceability of wood recorded in a public blockchain. Wood is a byproduct of several states, ranging from standing trees to logs, lumber, and wood products (hereinafter ``wood objects''). The advantage of using the blockchain for record keeping is that participants can freely record the information at their discretion, without any restrictions. However, the openness of the blockchain may allow a malicious third party to introduce disinformation. In this study, we employ ZKP and near-field communication (NFC) chips to eliminate the possibility of disinformation introduction. ZKP is used to prove/validate changes in the state of wood objects, and the unique nonce associated with that state is encrypted and recorded on an NFC chip. The nonce is concealed and id of the wood object is defined as hash value of this nonce. We developed a prototype system based on an Android application and an Ethereum smart contract. We confirm that wood traceability and verification can be performed using the prototype system.

Gousia Habib, Sparsh Sharma, Sara Ibrahim, Imtiaz Ahmad · 6 authors

The real-world use cases of blockchain technology, such as faster cross-border payments, identity management, smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and supply chain–blockchain technology are here to stay and have become the next innovation, just like the Internet. There have been attempts to formulate digital money, but they have not been successful due to security and trust issues. However, blockchain needs no central authority, and its operations are controlled by the people who use it. Furthermore, it cannot be altered or forged, resulting in massive market hype and demand. Blockchain has moved past cryptocurrency and discovered implementations in other real-life applications; this is where we can expect blockchain technology to be simplified and not remain a complex concept. Blockchain technology’s desirable characteristics are decentralization, integrity, immutability, verification, fault tolerance, anonymity, audibility, and transparency. We first conduct a thorough analysis of blockchain technology in this paper, paying particular attention to its evolution, applications and benefits, the specifics of cryptography in terms of public key cryptography, and the challenges of blockchain in distributed transaction ledgers, as well as the extensive list of blockchain applications in the financial transaction system. This paper presents a detailed review of blockchain technology, the critical challenges faced, and its applications in different fields. Blockchain in the transaction system is explained in detail with a summary of different cryptocurrencies. Some of the suggested solutions are given in the overall study of the paper.