Blockchain Papers

Tanweer Alam

No abstract is available for this record.

Yizhuo Miao

Electronic voting systems have the potential to improve the efficiency and accessibility of elections, but they also introduce unique challenges in terms of security, privacy, and voter anonymity. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving voting system based on zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. Our system ensures the integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity of votes while preserving the anonymity of voters. We present the system architecture, design, and implementation, along with a detailed analysis of the cryptographic techniques employed. The evaluation of our proposed system demonstrates its effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability, making it suitable for use in large-scale elections. This work contributes to the ongoing efforts to develop more secure, transparent, and accessible electronic voting systems for the future.

Eva Chovancová, Martin Chovanec, Norbert Ádám, Ján Hurtuk

Online voting is a topic that companies have been dealing with for many years. Several countries tried and are still trying to implement such voting system instead of a classical paper election system we know the most nowadays, as it brings many advantages. Blockchain technology became known to people mainly thanks to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency which was created in 2008. Blockchain presented a new solution that was almost ideal for voting purposes. With the use of blockchain, the security and reliability of online voting systems has also increased over time. Voting became transparent. The work focuses on the development of an online voting management system built on such blockchain technology. The introductory part is focused on the blockchain technology and online voting. The work focuses on the design and implementation of a system based on the blockchain technology which allows the administrator to create new votes, start them and stop them.

Eva Chovancová, Martin Chovanec, Ján Hurtuk, Peter Pekarčík

The work is devoted to the analysis of technologies and the design of a responsive social network application with elements of decentralization. Despite all the positives that social networks bring, we can’t forget the potential problems associated with their use. Some of the problems can be minimized by using decentralization, which has the effect of limiting third-party control.The centralized part is created using the Vue.js and Laravel frameworks, which provide basic functions. In the context of decentralization, is very important the creation of a smart contract that is stored in the Ethereum blockchain. By using the Web3.js library, it is possible with a smart contract and a MetaMask wallet to carry out the transactions necessary for storing data on the blockchain.To increase efficiency, the IPFS distributed file system is used, which offers storage of larger files or texts and generates their content, while it is possible to access this data. By decentralizing these functions, data immutability is achieved, censorship is excluded, and data security is also provided.

L. T. Love

At the heart of the Crypto Code lies the blockchain technology. Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger system that records transactions across a network of computers. It ensures transparency, security, and immutability, making it a suitable infrastructure for handling digital currencies. Each block in the chain contains a list of transactions, and these blocks are linked together in chronological order, creating a continuous and unalterable chain of information.

Achilleas Spanos, Ioanna Kantzavelou

The development of an electronic voting system that would replace traditional election procedures is a research topic of great interest for many years. Blockchain technology could provide some guarantees and fulfill strong requirements for electronic voting platforms, such as transparency, immutability, and confidentiality. From time to time research is conducted to address problems in voting systems. Many research works attempt to implement secure and reliable voting systems, which address known security, anonymity, and fraud issues that might threaten such systems. This paper presents a proposal of a secure electronic voting system, the EtherVote, using the Ethereum Blockchain network that focuses deeply on the field of identification of eligible citizens. The proposed system will be entirely based on Blockchain without any central authority servers or databases, thus improving security, privacy, and election cost. Limitations, problems, and solutions are discussed, in order to make the proposed electronic voting system ideal and ready to use for national elections.

Felix Kleinwort, Wolf Posdorfer, Janick Edinger

Bitcoin was released in 2008 as an electronic peer-to-peer payment system. The aim was to enable financial transactions in an anonymous manner between participating parties. However, Bitcoin is considered a pseudonymous network rather than anonymous, as the identity of the address owner is unknown, but every transaction is permanently stored on the Bitcoin blockchain and can be tracked by anyone. The structure of the blockchain, its transactions, and the Bitcoin network make it possible to deanonymize pseudonyms through various methods such as flow analysis, heuristics, and network traffic observations. Once a connection is established between pseudonyms used in the Bitcoin network and the real world, all previous transactions can be attributed to that identity. In 2021, Taproot was introduced to further increase privacy within the Bitcoin Network by introducing a new address format which will allow transactions to be more indistinguishable from one another. In this paper, we analyze current methods for deanonymizing Bitcoin transactions to understand which parts of the Bitcoin protocol they exploit. In addition, we look at the changes introduced by Taproot and determine the extent to which these changes affect the methods and what assumptions must be made for these methods to remain applicable.

Arnab Mukherjee, Souvik Majumdar, Anup Kumar Kolya, S. Nandi

Within a modern democratic nation, elections play a significant role in the nation's functioning. However, with the existing infrastructure for conducting elections using Electronic Voting Systems (EVMs), many loopholes exist, which illegitimate entities might leverage to cast false votes or even tamper with the EVMs after the voting session is complete. The need of the hour is to introduce a robust, auditable, transparent, and tamper-proof e-voting system, enabling a more reliable and fair election process. To address such concerns, we propose a novel solution for blockchain-based e-voting, focusing on the security and privacy aspects of the e-voting process. We consider the security risks and loopholes and aim to preserve the anonymity of the voters while ensuring that illegitimate votes are properly handled. Additionally, we develop a prototype as a proof of concept using the Ethereum blockchain platform. Finally, we perform experiments to demonstrate the performance of the system.

Shihcheng Peng, Shunsuke Araki, Ken’ichi Kakizaki

Domain Name System(DNS) is a crucial component for us to access the Internet. However, it is vulnerable to several attacks such as DNS Cache Poisoning Attack and DNS DDoS Attack. Because of the high security promised by the Blockchain technology, we investigate the domain name systems based on blockchain, and focus on Ethereum Name Service(ENS). In this paper, we propose an ENS-oriented light node in order to solve the Full-node problem which means each participant has to hold a large amount data.

Dany Kamuhanda, Mengtian Cui, Claudio J. Tessone

Community detection is widely used in social networks to uncover groups of related vertices (nodes). In cryptocurrency transaction networks, community detection can help identify users that are most related to known illegal users. However, there are challenges in applying community detection in cryptocurrency transaction networks: (1) the use of pseudonymous addresses that are not directly linked to personal information make it difficult to interpret the detected communities; (2) on Bitcoin, a user usually owns multiple Bitcoin addresses, and nodes in transaction networks do not always represent users. Existing works on cluster analysis on Bitcoin transaction networks focus on addressing the later using different heuristics to cluster addresses that are controlled by the same user. This research focuses on illegal community detection containing one or more illegal Bitcoin addresses. We first investigate the structure of Bitcoin transaction networks and suitable community detection methods, then collect a set of illegal addresses and use them to label the detected communities. The results show that 0.06% of communities from daily transaction networks contain one or more illegal addresses when 2,313,344 illegal addresses are used to label the communities. The results also show that distance-based clustering methods and other methods depending on them, such as network representation learning, are not suitable for Bitcoin transaction networks while community quality optimization and label-propagation-based methods are the most suitable.

Hongkai Wang, Dong Mao, Zuge Chen, Hanyu Rao · 5 authors

As a decentralized technology, blockchain has the characteristics of traceability and immutability. Using blockchain technology, each model update of federation information can be associated with each participant, and the traceability of transactions in the blockchain can be used to detect fraudulent transactions that attempt to tamper with data. At the same time, the blockchain is used to realize the decentralization of the system, which strengthens the fault tolerance and attack resistance of the system. Based on this, this chapter designs and implements a blockchain architecture to solve the problem of safe and trusted data sharing among participants in the decentralized federated learning model. A blockchain architecture is designed and implemented for decentralized federated learning, using the blockchain to store the model parameter information of participants in each round of training; in view of the shortcomings of existing consensus algorithms, combined with decentralized federated learning detection model, A new consensus algorithm - “High Performance Byzantine Fault Tolerance Based on Model Accuracy” consensus algorithm is proposed.

Shekh Minhaz Uddin Deep, Md Mosharof Hosen, Mohimatun Nisa, Md Gulzar Hussain · 5 authors

For a very long time, it has been a difficult task to construct a voting machine system that is both secure and fair, maintaining the confidentiality of the various voting methods that are currently in use while also maintaining the accountability and adaptability of the electrical components. This piece of work presented a procedure for an election in a faraway place that must be secure, deniable, irrevocable, user-friendly, and convenient. As a consequence of this, members of the voting public can vote for their preferred candidate without being required to carry out the procedure in person. Campaigns for the upcoming election will make use of this framework. This system will make use of two different blockchains, both of which will communicate with one another: the Ethereum platform, which is accessible to the general public, and the Quorum blockchain, which is not. The technology of private blockchains will be operated by an autonomous organization. All of these different blockchain technologies send the necessary data to the public blockchain technology, which seems to be able to process a variety of voting data. This framework makes it possible to use encrypted information effectively with the SHA-256 method, thereby protecting both the confidentiality of the information and the knowledge it contains.

Wei Zhang

Block production in Bitcoin, often referred to as mining, is becoming increasingly industrialized. Many nodes in the network are represented by registered business entities. The concept of Bitcoin as a Service is also pushing the industry to become more customer oriented. Services such as transaction validation, transaction status query or notification, and blockchain data indexing are in high demand among blockchain application providers and users. As service providers, nodes need to distinguish themselves from others and be identifiable. In this article, we introduce an efficient self-established identity system, called Miner ID, to enable nodes to be publicly identifiable. It is based on economic investment and active participation in the blockchain network. Moreover, Miner ID is optional for nodes, and it does not affect the consensus mechanism of the network. We explore use cases including instant transaction confirmation, blockchain attestation, public key infrastructure, and token recovery. Miner ID can also be used for secure communication with applications, services, users and peers.

Chao Li, Runhua Xu, Li Duan

Voting mechanisms play a crucial role in decentralized governance of blockchain systems. Liquid democracy, also known as delegative voting, allows voters to vote directly or delegate their voting power to others, thereby contributing to the resolution of problems such as low voter turnout. In recent years, liquid democracy has been widely adopted by Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) blockchains and implemented successfully on platforms with millions of users. However, little is known regarding the characteristics and actual effectiveness of liquid democracy in decentralized governance. This paper explored for the first time the practical implementation of liquid democracy in DPoS blockchain systems. Using actual data collected from two major DPoS blockchains, EOS and Steem, our study compared and evaluated the participation of different types of users of DPoS blockchain systems in liquid democracy, as well as extracting and analyzing the delegation chains and networks formed during the process of liquid democracy within the systems. We believe that the findings of this paper will contribute to further studies on the design and implementation of liquid democracy and other voting mechanisms in decentralized governance.

Hui Zuo, Yadong Shi, Zhongyuan Qin, Xuxian Jiang

Code similarity detection is crucial for conducting security audits on smart contracts. It enables important audit tasks such as vulnerability mining and malicious contract detection based on code similarity. However, as the majority of smart contracts on Ethereum do not share their source code, detecting code similarity based on bytecode is of great significance. This paper proposes a method for self-supervised learning-based bytecode similarity detection, which obtains the control flow graph (CFG) from the bytecode in a symbolic way by simulating the execution of all instructions on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Similarity detection is then performed at the function level. The proposed method utilizes a self-supervised model to obtain features from the bytecode and combines them with the features obtained from the stack when generating CFG to detect bytecode similarity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline in terms of performance.

Divyam Arora, Ruchi Ruchi, Vikas Wasson

Elections are an important way of conveying one's choice in a democratic system. Many new technologies have been introduced to carry out the process of elections over the years. Even after so many developments in the voting system, there are still many issues faced regarding the results of voting. The voting approaches available are vulnerable to malfunctions and the results of voting are not reliable. This paper compares the different methods of voting while discussing their advantages and drawbacks. Blockchain based polling is a decentralized voting system which offers transparency and protection from any malpractice. The voting results obtained from this process are reliable. An Ethereum platform based decentralized application (DApp) along with a smart contract in solidity is proposed in this work to execute the process of voting through blockchain based technology.

Rohan Madhwal, Johan Pouwelse

Web3Recommend is a decentralized Social Recommender System implementation that enables Web3 Platforms on Android to generate recommendations that balance trust and relevance. Generating recommendations in decentralized networks is a non-trivial problem because these networks lack a global perspective due to the absence of a central authority. Further, decentralized networks are prone to Sybil Attacks in which a single malicious user can generate multiple fake or Sybil identities. Web3Recommend relies on a novel graph-based content recommendation design inspired by GraphJet, a recommendation system used in Twitter enhanced with MeritRank, a decentralized reputation scheme that provides Sybil-resistance to the system. By adding MeritRank's decay parameters to the vanilla Social Recommender Systems' personalized SALSA graph algorithm, we can provide theoretical guarantees against Sybil Attacks in the generated recommendations. Similar to GraphJet, we focus on generating real-time recommendations by only acting on recent interactions in the social network, allowing us to cater temporally contextual recommendations while keeping a tight bound on the memory usage in resource-constrained devices, allowing for a seamless user experience. As a proof-of-concept, we integrate our system with MusicDAO, an open-source Web3 music-sharing platform, to generate personalized, real-time recommendations. Thus, we provide the first Sybil-resistant Social Recommender System, allowing real-time recommendations beyond classic user-based collaborative filtering. The system is also rigorously tested with extensive unit and integration tests. Further, our experiments demonstrate the trust-relevance balance of recommendations against multiple adversarial strategies in a test network generated using data from real music platforms.

Qiming Yu, Qiming Yu, Shilei Liao, Lianhai Wang · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Libin Xia, Jiashuo Zhang, Xihan Zhang, Yue Li · 7 authors

The popularity of decentralized applications brings increasing on-chain audit concerns. Since on-chain accounts do not link to real-world identities, decentralized applications have been wildly used for illegal activities like money laundering. Decentralized identity (DID) is one of the most promising solutions to guarantee on-chain auditability in a privacy-preserving way. However, the existing DID systems suffer from two limitations, making them rarely adopted in on-chain decentralized applications. First, most previous systems only provide partial auditability, meaning that their regulators cannot trace users' real-world identities after users' malicious behaviors occur. Second, current solutions are usually isolated systems, causing a lack of interoperability with on-chain decentralized applications. To address the problems, we propose Didapper, a practical and auditable on-chain identity service with both privacy and auditability for decentralized applications. We introduce group signatures to provide anonymous and traceable credentials for on-chain users and decentralized applications. In order to meet the efficiency and flexibility requirements, we design credential structure and workflow mostly compatible with W3C standards (a DID recommendation that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity), and realize credential verification service with updatable policies. We implement Didapper and evaluate it on Ethereum, and the results show that the performance of Didapper is acceptable in practice.

Eko Yanuarso Budi, Cahyo Prihantoro, Nicolaus Euclides Wahyu Nugroho

Electronic voting (e-voting) merupakan salah satu jenis sistem voting yang prosesnya berjalan dengan sistem elektronik. E-voting dikembangkan untuk menjadi alternatif lain voting tradisional negara demokrasi. Di Indonesia sistem pemilihan menggunakan e-voting mulai diterapkan pada skala desa. Dengan adanya perancangan website e-voting menggunakan smart contract blockchain Polygon bertujuan agar melengkapi sistem yang sudah ada terutama keamanan, transparansi dan meningkatkan kepercayaan masyarakat dalam proses pemilihan. Penerapan blockchain pada masa sekarang masih dibilang awal tentunya membutuhkan pengembangan dan improvisasi. Mekanisme yang ditawarkan pada penelitian ini adalah penggunaan smart contract voting yang artinya proses voting berjalan diatas jaringan blockchain. Pemilih akan mendapatkan Non-Fungible Token setelah voting sukses sebagai bukti telah memilih.

Apoorv Saxena, Hung–Min Sun

This study proposes a hybrid architecture in which duplicates in the dataset are identified using a deep-learning neural network to authenticate the source. The blockchain provides distinct metadata to the information source to allow the sender and the recipient to verify that the information is accurate and cannot be modified or altered. The system also uses RNN-based LSTM and GRU model neural networks to determine whether the method performs better for these applications and uses an Ethereum blockchain to perform transactions between the two parties. The system also used an advanced encryption standard (AES) to protect the transactions. The AES uses encryption and decryption keys. This system structure is implemented on raspberry pi devices to determine its feasibility in a small system flowchart. The dataset for this study is the “Image encryption and decryption dataset” from the Kaggle website, and the results are better than GRU, with a 0.9635 accuracy rate for this dataset. The smart contract module is verifiable, available, tamper-resistant, and usable, and AES provides a more robust encryption method for the system.

Stanisław Barański, Julian Szymański, Higinio Mora

Abstract Lawyers, laboratories, auditors, and banks often need access to sensitive personal data to provide services such as genetic testing, paternity testing, STD testing, credit scoring, or legal advice. Processing such data exposes both service providers (SPs) and users to privacy risks: SPs risk violating laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Consumer Protection Act (CPA), while users risk losing their privacy. We observe that personal data is often only needed for logistical purposes like payment or communication and could be provided anonymously if suitable methods existed. To address this, we present a solution that enables services to be delivered without collecting personal data. Our protocol combines anonymous payment methods (e.g., cash, privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies), blockchain for fairness, and distributed content-addressable storage networks to deliver results. Compared to existing approaches, our protocol achieves anonymity under weaker assumptions, supports the transfer of physical materials and conflict resolution, and eliminates the need for customer interaction with a trusted arbiter in conflict-free cases-making it more practical. We analyze the protocol’s fairness and implement a prototype using Ethereum as a message board, Monero for anonymous payments, and Powergate (IPFS/Filecoin) as a decentralized storage solution.

Abdulrezzak Zekiye, Öznur Özkasap

The Internet of Energy (IoE) is a distributed paradigm that leverages smart networks and distributed system technologies to enable decentralized energy systems. In contrast to the traditional centralized energy systems, distributed Energy Internet systems comprise multiple components and communication requirements that demand innovative technologies for decentralization, reliability, efficiency, and security. Recent advances in blockchain architectures, smart contracts, and distributed federated learning technologies have opened up new opportunities for realizing decentralized Energy Internet services. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis and classification of state-of-the-art solutions that employ blockchain, smart contracts, and federated learning for the IoE domains. Specifically, we identify four representative system models and discuss their key aspects. These models demonstrate the diverse ways in which blockchain, smart contracts, and federated learning can be integrated to support the main domains of IoE, namely distributed energy trading and sharing, smart microgrid energy networks, and electric and connected vehicle management. Furthermore, we provide a detailed comparison of the different levels of decentralization, the advantages of federated learning, and the benefits of using blockchain for the IoE systems. Additionally, we identify open issues and areas for future research for integrating federated learning and blockchain in the Internet of Energy domains.

Isaac David, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Dawn Song · 6 authors

We investigate the feasibility of employing large language models (LLMs) for conducting the security audit of smart contracts, a traditionally time-consuming and costly process. Our research focuses on the optimization of prompt engineering for enhanced security analysis, and we evaluate the performance and accuracy of LLMs using a benchmark dataset comprising 52 Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts that have previously been compromised. Our findings reveal that, when applied to vulnerable contracts, both GPT-4 and Claude models correctly identify the vulnerability type in 40% of the cases. However, these models also demonstrate a high false positive rate, necessitating continued involvement from manual auditors. The LLMs tested outperform a random model by 20% in terms of F1-score. To ensure the integrity of our study, we conduct mutation testing on five newly developed and ostensibly secure smart contracts, into which we manually insert two and 15 vulnerabilities each. This testing yielded a remarkable best-case 78.7% true positive rate for the GPT-4-32k model. We tested both, asking the models to perform a binary classification on whether a contract is vulnerable, and a non-binary prompt. We also examined the influence of model temperature variations and context length on the LLM's performance. Despite the potential for many further enhancements, this work lays the groundwork for a more efficient and economical approach to smart contract security audits.