Blockchain Papers

Wenying Wen, Yunpeng Jian, Yuming Fang, Yushu Zhang · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Pankaj Gugnani, W. Wilfred Godfrey, Debanjan Sadhya

Ethereum is a polpular blockchain platform with its native cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH). Further blockchain development and deployment creates new opportunities that enable its use in various applications and allow it to be further integrated into everyday life. A smart contract is a small set of instructions and a self-executing program stored in blockchain. Thus blockchain is impervious and eliminates the requirement of a central authority. This paper focuses on blockchain based event management smart contract, which is created in solidity and deployed on Rinkeby test network, and also described the differences between smart-contract and traditional-contract.

Can Zhang, Liehuang Zhu, Chang Xu, Zijian Zhang · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Anamika Singh, Rajesh Kumar Dhanaraj, Md. Akkas Ali, Balamurugan Balusamy · 5 authors

The Biometric system can be understood as a system that deals with an automated recognition of individual based on their physiological aspects (face, fingerprints, iris, retina) and behavioral patterns (signature, posture etc.). Biometric system works on feature extraction and feature matching. The feature is extracted in the form of fingerprints, iris and retina and then it is matched by the information stored by measuring the same patterns of particular individual, this process is feature matching. Between the two, works template database which is a central point from where every time the feature extracted is matched for confirming the identity of a person.. If the database is breached by the hacker, then the data could be used for falsifying the identity of the person. The paper focuses to implement blockchain technology in a biometric system in a manner that every record of individual is maintained using a blockchain so that it can’t be hampered by the hacker. Blockchain works as adecentralized repository of data which we assume to be the most suitable approach to hold the credentials of individuals and thus avoiding an unauthorized access to the systems. Making changes to blockchain is a complex and time-consuming task for any unwanted user. Many researchers contributed their work highlighting the security issues of the biometric system when applied practically. They noted that the fingerprint of an individual remains the same over life and once applied can’t be modified when compares with non-biometric systems which makes use of passwords and if forgotten or breached could be changed. Some of them conveyed that the biometric system is safe when only considering its physical implementation but the database created is still under threat.

Noor Adil Abdel Moneim, Methaq Talib Gaata

With the significant advancement in digital photo and video editing software, it is becoming very easy to modify digital video content. However, because of the increased misuse of such editing software, detecting the modification of digital content and verifying the authenticity of such content has become a significant challenge. The paper aims to address the main problem of tampering with digital video content by verifying that digital video received via digital media is tamper-free and identical to what was sent. To solve and control such a problem, blockchain features are used by creating a decentralized application on the Ethereum platform. A watermark is also used to access the data stored on the blockchain. Blockchain-based digital video content authentication technology is safe and reliable, with lower recording time and lower cost. Since the process of watermark embedding occurs only for the first and last frame, the content of the digital video does not change and, as a result, the PSNR value of the video is unaffected. This system allows a user receiving digital video to verify the authenticity of the content received without referring to the sender.

Dalia Elwi, Osama Abu-Elnasr, A. S. Tolba, Samir Elmougy

Abstract Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency which had become the focus of scientific research in the modern era. Blockchain is the underlying technology of Bitcoin because of its decentralization, transparency, trust-less, and immutability features. However, blockchain can be considered the cause of Bitcoin scalability issues especially storage. Nodes in Bitcoin network need to store the full blockchain to validate transactions. By time, the blockchain size will be extremely huge. So, the full nodes will prefer to leave the network, and this leads to the blockchain being centralized and trusted. Therefore, security will be adversely affected. In this paper, we propose a Stateful Layered Chain Model which is based on storing accounts’ balances to reduce the size of the Bitcoin blockchain. This model changes the structure of the traditional blockchain from blocks to layers. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model reduces the size of blockchain by about 50.6%. Imlicitly, the transaction throughput can also be nearly doubled.

Archana Bathula, Samya Muhuri, Suneet Gupta, Suresh Merugu

No abstract is available for this record.

Hedi Choura, Faten Chaabane, Mouna Baklouti, Tarek Frikha

Patient medical data is the key data of an e-health application. Medical data frequently play an important role in disease analysis and are implicated in motivating values for educating diagnostic methods and modifying diagnostic results. Confidentiality of patient health documents is more important, and therefore researchers have considered many security measures, including access control, confidentiality, and integrity of these documents. To solve the security problem, this paper presents an advanced solution based on converting medical data into compact size, in the form of QR code before being deployed on our Blockchain. In this way, performing complex operations will be safely performed off-chain, such as collecting and preprocessing patient data, while submission of this data is done on an hourly basis. Chain. We recommend a data flow architecture that combines the Internet of Things (IoT) with blockchain (especially the Ethereum architecture), using smart contracts to access and store data while keeping Strong against many attacks. Our proposed system is effective in sharing and managing patient electronic health data. The tests involved implementing Ethereum chain configurations on PCs and two embedded IoT platforms, namely Raspberry Pi and PYNQ cards. Performance is evaluated in terms of security, execution time, memory, power and CPU consumption of various patient data scenarios.

Lotfi Ezzeddini, Jalel Ktari, Iheb Zouaoui, Amira Talha · 6 authors

Votingis a basic element of running a country. Voting will continue to take place by physically entering the voting booth. No security is guaranteed for this operation, and several cases of tampering have been noted. In order to eliminate this type of problem, the paper proposes an online voting process with blockchain technology. With encryption and hashing, the security of each vote is ensured. The votes will be stored as transactions. A peer-to-peer network is leveraged to share this distributed ledger with voting transactions. The application is designed to hide the complexities of the architecture from the user. With the QR code, each student is uniquely identified. This ensures that each voter has only one chance to vote. With the public and private key, each node will have the ability to securely encrypt, hash, and add transactions to the blockchain. Votes cannot be traced back to the voters. This paper creates a peer-to-peer network with at least three peers. This paper plans to increase voter turnout through online voting. The scalability of blockchain applications depends on the secondary storage limits of peers.

Joceli Mayer

The recent creation of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has enabled a multibillionaire market for digital artistic works including images or sequence of images, videos, and animated gifs. With this new trend issues regarding fraud, stolen works, authenticity, and copyright came along. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the watermarking techniques that can be employed to mitigate those issues. We will discuss transparency, robustness, and payload of watermarking techniques aiming to educate the artists, researchers, and developers about the many approaches that watermarking techniques provide and the resulting trade-offs. We focus on fragile watermarking techniques due to their high transparency for embedding into artistic works. We discuss the spread spectrum and Least Significant Bit techniques. We describe the usual process of NFT minting into a blockchain and propose a more secure certification protocol with watermarking which employs the same usual NFT minting offered by current marketplaces. The proposed certification protocol mints a checksum string into a blockchain, ensuring the validity of the watermark and the information embedded into this watermark. This proposed protocol validates the date of creation and author identification which are transparently embedded in the artistic work, thus, increasing the security and confidence of markets for artistic works transactions.

Xiang Zhang, Xiaona Zhang, Xiaorui Zhang, Wei Sun · 6 authors

The data in the blockchain cannot be tampered with and the users are anonymous, which enables the blockchain to be a natural carrier for covert communication. However, the existing methods of covert communication in blockchain suffer from the predefined channel structure, the capacity of a single transaction is not high, and the fixed transaction behaviors will lower the concealment of the communication channel. Therefore, this paper proposes a derivation matrix-based covert communication method in blockchain. It uses dual-key to derive two types of blockchain addresses and then constructs an address matrix by dividing addresses into multiple layers to make full use of the redundancy of addresses. Subsequently, to solve the problem of the lack of concealment caused by the fixed transaction behaviors, divide the rectangular matrix into square blocks with overlapping regions and then encrypt different blocks sequentially to make the transaction behaviors of the channel addresses match better with those of the real addresses. Further, the linear congruence algorithm is used to generate random sequence, which provides a random order for blocks encryption, and thus enhances the security of the encryption algorithm. Experimental results show that this method can effectively reduce the abnormal transaction behaviors of addresses while ensuring the channel transmission efficiency.

Amit Kumar Goel, Aditi Rai, Anushree Narain, Ashish Richard · 5 authors

Voting is the essential element for each nation to express one’s choice. Nowadays, Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are used to poll which may be tampered resulting in incorrect election results. Therefore, an online voting system has been introduced in this research. An Electronic Voting (E-Voting) machine is a balloting machine wherein the election opinions are notated, saved, stored, and processed digitally, which makes the balloting control project complicated than the conventional paper based method. The Election Commission forms elections and enlist party candidates along with the parties for contesting the election. This paper works with the following ideas by having the two different sets of modules: election commission and the voters. An election’s REST API is arranged on Ethereum’s Blockchain, which is the front end. The votes are then stored on the blockchain architecture, to which the Election Commission grants the number of votes. However, there are some limitations due to the fact that the blockchain architecture cannot run on the main net as it must be hosted, and a separate web3 provider must be used for interacting with it due to the lack of public API availability.

Chábeli Castaño Arango, Roberto Luna-Garcia, Steve Cutchin, Gaby G. Dagher

Bitcoin transactions are pseudonymous, which means that even when addresses or addresses can be connected one to another, it is really hard to connect them with outside entities. On top of that there have been a proliferation of bitcoins mixing sites in recent years. These sites operate mostly on the dark web and their main mission is launder bitcoins by making vast amounts of complex transactions with them and to make their association with a single owner even harder. Our mission is to make that distinction easier. In this paper we plan to introduce two novel heuristics. Our OI heuristic is designed to parse blockchain data in a way where we only receive information we deem is of interest. We introduce HOLO which aims to taint bitcoin addresses in reference to a fixed output. We also visualize the blockchain and our heuristic in an easily digestible manner.

Wafaa N. Al-Sharu, Majdi K. Qabalin, Muawya Naser, Omar A. Saraerh

One of the most extensively used technologies for improving the security of IoT devices is blockchain technology. It is a new technology that can be utilized to boost the security. It is a decentralized peer-to-peer network with no central authority. Multiple nodes on the network mine or verify the data recorded on the Blockchain. It is a distributed ledger that may be used to keep track of transactions between several parties. No one can tamper with the data on the blockchain since it is unchangeable. Because the blocks are connected by hashes, the transaction data is safe. It is managed by a system that is based on the consensus of network users rather than a central authority. The immutability and tamper-proof nature of blockchain security is based on asymmetric cryptography and hashing. Furthermore, Blockchain has an immutable and tamper-proof smart contract, which is a logic that enforces the Blockchain’s laws. There is a conflict between the privacy protection needs of cyber-security threat intelligent (CTI) sharing and the necessity to establish a comprehensive attack chain during blockchain transactions. This paper presents a blockchain-based data sharing paradigm that protects the privacy of CTI sharing parties while also preventing unlawful sharing and ensuring the benefit of legitimate sharing parties. It builds a full attack chain using encrypted threat intelligence and exploits the blockchain’s backtracking capacity to finish the decryption of the threat source in the attack chain. Smart contracts are also used to send automatic early warning replies to possible attack targets. Simulation tests are used to verify the feasibility and efficacy of the suggested model.

Musan Eltuhami, Munaisyah Abdullah, Bazilah A. Talip

Currently, identity and document verification use either physical documentation or centralized digital databases. A central figure is responsible for verifying these documents and this is thought to prevent document tampering. However, this does not eliminate threats of external hacking or internal bad actors and individuals to commit acts of forgery. in addition, bureaucracy and delays often occur with central entities validating documents that causes wasted time for users. Blockchain technology has brought a positive impact to document traceability and transparency across institutions and industries. This research will analyse and use non-transferable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with smart contract functions which is a new concept for projecting digital and physical goods on a blockchain, it’s expected to represent complicated operations in an effective manner for document traceability systems, enabling a decentralized approach while preventing fraud, corruption, tampering, and counterfeiting.

Saba Abdulbaqi Salman, Sufyan Al-Janabi, Ali Makki Sagheer

Improving the voting system has become a widely discussed issue. Paper-based elections are not safe because of the possibility of changing and adding ballots. Consequently, many countries use e-voting systems to ensure security, authenticity and time efficiency. Blockchain e-voting systems can be adopted to reduce fraud and increase voting access from home, especially in pandemics. This paper suggests a blockchain e-voting system that tackles two security and authentication issues. The security has been ensured using hybrid public-key cryptography; the voter information is encrypted using the regional election office elliptic public key, while the homomorphic public supreme election authority encrypts the vote. Using homomorphic encryption for voice enables the calculations of results as the authority encrypts it without revealing the vote itself. Authentication has been improved for home voting by a robust login system. This login system consists of two steps. In the first step, the voter enters the site using his unique QR code number scanned by webcam; in the second step, the system checks the voter's face using a face recognition system by web camera to be routed to the voting page. Voting public keys are also authenticated using a digital certificate schema. The system has been tested to show its efficiency and suitability in block establishment time and the encryption and key generator randomness using NIST tests.

Baddepaka Prasad, S. Ramachandram

The second revolution in blockchain technology is smart contracts. Smart contracts are used in most of the blockchain applications like cryptocurrency, Health care, banking sectors, supply chain and IOT with different platforms like Fabric, Ethereum, Corda etc. In Ethereum blockchain, due to lack of inefficiency of the knowledge of technical developers and insecure programming languages for smart contracts, the attackers have exploited the smart contracts and the end users have lost millions of dollars like re-entrancy, king of ether throne attack, DoS, forcefully send ethers, multisig wallet, unexpected ether and poly network attack etc. In the year 2016, the attackers have exploited approximately $289 million US dollars with the help of re-entrancy vulnerability. The attackers have also attacked the smart contracts and broke the execution of that particular contracts through king of ether throne attack. In this paper, we propose a novel prevention and detection mechanisms for re-entrancy and king of ether throne attacks using time mechanisms and also implementing the same with proof of concepts for these vulnerabilities.

Qingliang Liu, Shuguo Yang, Jing Liu, Li Zhao · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Anubis Graciela de Moraes Rossetto, Christofer L. Sega, Valderi Reis Quietinho Leithardt

With the fast development of blockchain technology in the latest years, its application in scenarios that require privacy, such as health area, have become encouraged and widely discussed. This paper presents an architecture to ensure the privacy of health-related data, which are stored and shared within a blockchain network in a decentralized manner, through the use of encryption with the RSA, ECC, and AES algorithms. Evaluation tests were performed to verify the impact of cryptography on the proposed architecture in terms of computational effort, memory usage, and execution time. The results demonstrate an impact mainly on the execution time and on the increase in the computational effort for sending data to the blockchain, which is justifiable considering the privacy and security provided with the architecture and encryption.

Guangxia Xu, Jiajun Zhang, Uchani Gutierrez Omar Cliff, Chuang Ma

As a distributed ledger technology, blockchain has excellent openness and transparency, which can provide data security management services for distributed intelligent systems and establish effective security guarantee mechanisms. However, precisely due to the open nature of blockchain, malicious users can trace the real transaction transfer path with high probability and even obtain the real identity of users by collecting transaction information on the blockchain and performing data analysis. Besides, existing intelligent systems lack effective encryption or desensitization measures, and attackers are able to access data in intelligent systems through identity forgery and other means, posing a huge potential risk to user privacy. To alleviate the above security issues, this paper proposes an efficient blockchain-based privacy-preserving scheme with attribute and homomorphic encryption, which can not only achieve user-level fine-grained secure access control but also supports the transmission and verification of blockchain data in the form of ciphertext. The access control method based on attribute-based encryption and the data transmission method based on homomorphic encryption are proposed, and the blockchain-based access whitelist mechanism is designed to reduce the resource loss due to repeated authentication. Simulation calculations and blockchain performance experiments show that this scheme can develop flexible access policies according to the attributes of users, has good performance in computational efficiency, and the blockchain performance test results are stable with errors in milliseconds for all operations. It has certain application potential in the field of distributed intelligent systems and blockchain.

Sung-Shine Lee, Alexandr Murashkin, Martin Derka, Jan Gorzny

The blockchain ecosystem has evolved into a multi-chain world with various blockchains vying for use. Although each blockchain may have its own native cryptocurrency or digital assets, there are use cases to transfer these assets between blockchains. Systems that bring these digital assets across blockchains are called bridges, and have become important parts of the ecosystem. The designs of bridges vary and range from quite primitive to extremely complex. However, they typically consist of smart contracts holding and releasing digital assets, as well as nodes that help facilitate user interactions between chains. In this paper we first provide a high level break-down of components in a bridge and the different processes for some bridge designs. Then, we analyse past exploits in the blockchain ecosystem that specifically targeted bridges. In doing this, we identify risks associated with bridge components.

Muhammad Iqbal Syamil Ayasy, Ari Moesriami Barmawi

Digital assets are one of the assets that have become an option in the internet era. With the internet’s adoption, many creators create digital assets and sell them via the internet. A proper sales mechanism is needed to tackle this phenomenon. Lack of transparency on sales became a consideration for a creator who wanted to sell an asset in this medium. Most publishers do not honestly publish the number of sales to a creator because all the data is stored privately in the publisher server and can only be accessed by the publisher. This condition can lead to unfair distribution of royalties for the creator. To overcome the centralized system’s weakness, researchers proposed using smart contracts in the public blockchain. In this case, the data link of the digital assets file is kept as plain text in the smart contract, such that the user can directly obtain or copy the digital assets from the smart contract. To overcome this problem, this study uses the Ethereum smart contract for became an intermediate, IPFS for distributing the file, ERC-721 as Token standard ownership on the Ethereum blockchain, and ECC to secure the data link of the digital assets file on the smart contract. Based on the discussion, it is proven that the proposed method can keep the link of the digital assets file secured such that the author can maintain his intellectual property.

Cheng Yiyang, Kazunori Takashio

It has become an industry consensus to integrate blockchain with other technologies to create a complete solution. Among the combinations, the Internet of Things can collect data on a large scale at a low cost, and the blockchain can trust data on a large scale at a low cost. With the development of Internet of Things(IoT) technology, the trend of networking of furniture is more apparent. The following security issues have also received more and more attention. Blockchain technology and smart contracts are widely regarded as a solution that can solve the networking of large scale terminals. But at the same time, due to the features of the blockchain, the floating calculation of smart contracts is unavoidable. This paper proposes a calculation revamp for the Ethereum-based smart contracts. Firstly, we verified the behaviour of our smart contract on Remix. Secondly, we implemented the smart contract on a blockchain-based IoT system. We confirmed the availability and reliability of our revamped smart contract.

Minghui Xu, Yihao Guo, Qin Hu, Zehui Xiong · 6 authors

Metaverse has rekindled human beings' desire to further break space-time barriers by fusing the virtual and real worlds. However, security and privacy threats hinder us from building a utopia. A metaverse embraces various techniques, while at the same time inheriting their pitfalls and thus exposing large attack surfaces. Blockchain, proposed in 2008, was regarded as a key building block of metaverses. it enables transparent and trusted computing environments using tamper-resistant decentralized ledgers. Currently, blockchain supports Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) for metaverses. However, the power of a blockchain has not been sufficiently exploited. In this article, we propose a novel trustless architecture of blockchain-enabled metaverse, aiming to provide efficient resource integration and allocation by consolidating hardware and software components. To realize our design objectives, we provide an On-Demand Trusted Computing Environment (OTCE) technique based on local trust evaluation. Specifically, the architecture adopts a hypergraph to represent a metaverse, in which each hyperedge links a group of users with certain relationship. Then the trust level of each user group can be evaluated based on graph analytics techniques. Based on the trust value, each group can determine its security plan on demand, free from interference by irrelevant nodes. Besides, OTCEs enable large-scale and flexible application environments (sandboxes) while preserving a strong security guarantee.