Blockchain is an incipient technology that offers several advantages over traditional systems, such as decentralization, transparency and traceability. The architecture and characteristics specific to this technology shall, however, have consequences on how personal data is stored and processed. We present a detailed analysis of the European data protection regulation and discuss the weaknesses and strengths of solutions built using blockchain technology regarding the security and privacy requirements established by that regulation. We study the integration of off-chain capabilities in blockchain-based solutions and put forward a methodological framework that can be used to design secure and privacy aware information systems that combine operational off-chain constructs with traditional blockchain functionalities.
Various e-voting systems have been provided with the goal of increasing security and reducing costs for a long time. Ethereum Blockchain is a major breakthrough in the tech industry that provides a highly secure platform. As Ethereum, a decentralized platform which runs decentralized applications (DApps), was introduced in the market, the idea of secured voting system finally seemed possible. Organizations have shifted their focus on applications that run on blockchain platforms. It is highly likely that a simple voting method will not lead to a clear majority. There can be a number of ways to deal with this issue, including other potentially voting process, thus costing time and resources which is exactly opposite of the main concern of e-voting systems. Thus, in our paper, we introduce the vote-trading concept where in the absence of a clear majority, votes can be redistributed to other candidates and also this 'majority' factor can be determined by the organization as per their requirement as different organizations can have different winning percentage. We discuss the design and implementation for the Ethereum blockchain based decentralized preferential e-voting system using Solidity programming language where we present the idea of giving preference to candidates, rather than one vote per candidate.
N. Suganthi, Gokul Sridharan, E Shravanth, K. Veena
Abstract: Democratic rule is based on safe and open electoral systems that can preserve their authenticity. The conventional voting processes are hampered significantly by electoral fraud and security breaches as well as centralized management and inefficiencies in auditability and accessibility. The issues of electoral systems reduce public trust along with lowering the credibility of election results. This paper introduces a new three-tier blockchain-based e-voting system designed to enhance voter privacy alongside system scalability and end-to-end verifiability to restore trust in electoral processes. Voter verification at Layer 1 (Identity Verification) combines Decentralized Identity (DID) with Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and multimodal biometric techniques involving fingerprint scanning, facial recognition technology, and voice analysis. The system enables only the participation of valid voters while also protecting their private data and fulfilling different user needs. The system's Layer 2 (Vote Casting & Secure Storage) employs a hybrid consensus algorithm combining Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) and Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) to store votes securely while reducing energy consumption. The system leverages Triple-Blind Signatures to provide complete voter anonymity by decoupling voter identities from their votes as well as any accompanying metadata. Lattice-based post-quantum cryptography is employed to encrypt votes which are distributed across sharded blockchain subnets for enhanced performance without sacrificing fault tolerance. The system accumulates votes via Merkle roots and verifies them via zk-SNARKs in Layer 3 (Result Processing & Transparency) that allows public observation without compromising voter privacy. A Live Audit Dashboard provides voters with the capability to check their vote in real time which facilitates transparent and accountable voting processes. The suggested system attains a secure and open electronic voting process using sophisticated cryptographic protocols in a decentralized setup compliant with international requirements while enabling digital democratic participation.
The proliferation of IoT devices in society demands a renewed focus on securing the use and maintenance of such systems. IoT-based systems have a significant impact on society and therefore such systems must have guaranteed resilience. We introduce a solution as a protocol that utilizes smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain to enforce a security model that helps maintain distributed IoT networks in a healthy condition throughout their lifecycle. Our protocol enforces secured deployment, communication, management, and maintenance for hardened IoT devices. We additionally propose a smart contract solution for creating and handling generic IoT tasks. This solution enables users to manage devices by utilizing the Ethereum infrastructure for authentication, authorization, and communication. This design allows the devices to function autonomously by interpreting tasks received through smart contract transactions, without any direct human to device interaction. The result is a protocol that provides mechanisms for authentication and authorization, task provisioning, and audit trails.
As pass the three revised bills, the Personal Information Protection Act was revised to have a larger application for personal information. For an industrial development through an efficient and secure usage of personal information, there is a need to revise the existing anonymity processing method. This paper modifies the Zero Knowledge Proofs algorithm among the anonymity processing methods to modify the anonymity process calculations by taking into account the reliability of the used service company. More detail, the formula of ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof) used by ZK-SNAKE is used to modify the personal information for pseudonymization processing. The core function of the proposed algorithm is the addition of user variables and adjustment of the difficulty level according to the reliability of the data user organization and the scope of use. Through Setup_p, the additional variable γ can be selectively applied according to the reliability of the user institution, and the degree of agreement of Witness is adjusted according to the reliability of the institution entered through Prove_p. The difficulty of the verification process is adjusted by considering the reliability of the institution entered through Verify_p. SimProve, a simulator, also refers to the scope of use and the reliability of the input authority. With this suggestion, it is possible to increase reliability and security of anonymity processing and distribution of personal information.
In a world full of e-services that provide speed of implementation and comfort to customers and users and provide high-luxury features, whether in the world of stock's trading or e-government systems or others. However, any system can suffer from serious challenges such as security and privacy issues, so the existing infrastructure of e-Governance paves the way for a powerful underlying technology. Using Blockchain technology is a strong option to secure platforms and services. Therefore, a new framework that integrates Blockchain into any platform is proposed, especially in Saudi Arabia. This paper surveys research related to Blockchain technology and developments of its witch cut across both public and private sectors. The adoption and integration of e-governance is linked as a key point towards smart applications in the smart environment is discussed. For the improvement and development of any country, there is a need to connect technology-based services and products. These are the main points of an intelligent environment with e-governance in any area. This work refers to these views of e-governance and online services.
Abstract Due to the rapid growth of Internet, E-commerce and Internet of Things, people use Web based services for most of their needs including buying items, reading books, watching online shows etc. Several companies are using recommender systems to influence people’s choices based on their likings, behaviours etc. Hence, people fear that their privacy is violated. Also, some of the online applications are not safe and secure. One way to overcome the privacy related issues is using secured solutions such as incorporating blockchain technologies for privacy-based applications. The decentralized nature of blockchain technologies have resolved several security, and authentication problems of Internet of Things systems. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the privacy solutions for recommender systems emphasising current status, classification and open issues. We also discuss blockchain technology, including its structure as well as applications of blockchain technology for privacy solutions of recommender systems. Furthermore, we discuss the limitations and delve into future trends that blockchain technology can be adapted for privacy-base applications in the years to come.
Security and trust are seen as the most important issues in electronic voting systems. Therefore, it is necessary to use cryptographic procedures to ensure anonymity, security, privacy, and reliability in these systems. In recent years, blockchain has become one of the most commonly used methods for securing data storage and transmission through decentralized applications. E-voting is one of these application areas. However, data manipulation is still seen as a major potential problem in e-voting systems. In theproposed model, administrators or miners are prevented from previewing election results which are normally accessible data due to the blockchain structure. A double-layer encryption model is proposed and tested to prevent manipulations that may occur with the election results. It is ensured that the election results can be counted after the participation of all stakeholders at the end. In this way, potential manipulations may be prevented during the election period. As a result of the model, the privacy of voters is ensured, no central authority is needed, and the recorded votes are kept in a distributed structure.
Digital evidence, such as evidence from CCTV and event data recorders, is highly valuable in criminal investigations, and is used as definitive evidence in trials. However, there are risks when digital evidence obtained during the investigation of a case is managed through a physical hard disk drive until it is submitted to the court. Previous studies have focused on the integrated management of digital evidence in a centralized system, but if a centralized system server is attacked, major operations and investigation information may be leaked. Therefore, there is a need to reliably manage digital evidence and investigation information using blockchain technology in a distributed system environment. However, when large amounts of data-such as evidence videos-are stored in a blockchain, the data that must be processed only within one block before being created increase, causing performance degradation. Therefore, we propose a two-level blockchain system that separates digital evidence into hot and cold blockchains. In the criminal investigation process, information that frequently changes is stored in the hot blockchain, and unchanging data such as videos are stored in the cold blockchain. To evaluate the system, we measured the storage and inquiry processing performance of digital crime evidence videos according to the different capacities in the two-level blockchain system.
Digital identity is an identity which involves from records and cultural capital, personal profiles created by interactions between individuals, commented “ I connect therefore I am” with expression, celebrity tag of Descartes “ I think therefore I am” by updating with social media platforms, in YouTube videos. A digital identity is comprised in time by users of technologies such as e-mail, text messaging, social media and so on electronic communication tools. Digital identity is defined in nine dimensions as digital access, digital law, digital communication, digital commerce, digital health, digital security, digital rights and digital responsibilities, digital literacy and digital ethic. The aim of this article is to reveal importance of digital identity concept and elements of digital identities and to explore roles of blockchain and artificial intelligence in development process of digital identities. This article is written as the theoretically. Therefore, in study has been used descriptive analysis method. Consequently, blockchain contributes increasing security measures of digital identity. In case artificial intelligence contributes development of digital identity with face recognition systems and algorithms. Moreover, digital identity got more secure thanks to blockchain systems while digital identities is defined more quickly and easily by means of developed technologies with artificial intelligence
Rofaida Khemaissia, Makhlouf Derdour, Ala Djeddai, Mohamed Amine Ferrag
Nowadays, the number of services is increasing which allows users to perform their tasks easily. A huge amount of data is published regularly where the personal data takes the lion's share. In fact, personal data protection remains a big issue as far as how the service provider collected the data and for what purpose. Therefore, the privacy of the data owner has to be preserved by putting a strategy to control the data usage by the services. The concept of inter services privacy has been marginalized in the previous privacy preserving works. This paper proposes SDGchain, a secure and privacy-preserving decentralized model that uses secure service dependency graph (SDG) combined with permissioned blockchain Hyperledger fabric, which cooperates with an off-chain storage. In our design the SDG is used to control inter services interactions by building dependencies, measuring the level of trust, calculating the quality of service to ensure the privacy preservation of the service using blockchain to support authentication, access control and the logging operations for immutable and auditable history.
Recent increases in security breaches and digital surveillance highlight the need for improved privacy and security, particularly over users’ personal data. Advances in cybersecurity and new legislation promise to improve data protection. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies provide novel opportunities for protecting user data through decentralized identity and other privacy mechanisms. These systems can allow users greater sovereignty through tools that enable them to own and control their own data. Artificial intelligence provides further possibilities for enhancing system and user security, enriching data sets, and supporting improved analytical models.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Ming Ding, Quoc‐Viet Pham, Pubudu N. Pathirana · 9 authors
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising paradigm to handle the massive volume of data generated from ubiquitous mobile devices for enabling intelligent services with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, AI techniques often require centralized data collection and training in a single entity, e.g., an MEC server, which is now becoming a weak point due to data privacy concerns and high data communication overheads. In this context, federated learning (FL) has been proposed to provide collaborative data training solutions, by coordinating multiple mobile devices to train a shared AI model without exposing their data, which enjoys considerable privacy enhancement. To improve the security and scalability of FL implementation, blockchain as a ledger technology is attractive for realizing decentralized FL training without the need for any central server. Particularly, the integration of FL and blockchain leads to a new paradigm, called FLchain, which potentially transforms intelligent MEC networks into decentralized, secure, and privacy-enhancing systems. This article presents an overview of the fundamental concepts and explores the opportunities of FLchain in MEC networks. We identify several main topics in FLchain design, including communication cost, resource allocation, incentive mechanism, security and privacy protection. The key solutions for FLchain design are provided, and the lessons learned as well as the outlooks are also discussed. Then, we investigate the applications of FLchain in popular MEC domains, such as edge data sharing, edge content caching and edge crowdsensing. Finally, important research challenges and future directions are also highlighted.
Lodovico Giaretta, Ioannis Savvidis, Thomas Marchioro, Šarūnas Girdzijauskas · 7 authors
We envision PDS<sup>2</sup>, a decentralized data marketplace in which consumers submit their tasks to be run within the platform, on the data of willing providers. The goal of PDS2is to ensure that users maintain full control on their data and do not compromise their privacy, while being rewarded for the value that their data generates. In order to achieve this, our marketplace architecture employs blockchain technology, privacy-preserving computation and decentralized machine learning. We then compare different potential solutions and identify the Ethereum blockchain, trusted execution environments and gossip learning as the most suitable for the implementation of PDS<sup>2</sup>. We also discuss the main open challenges that are left to tackle and possible directions for future work.
IoT devices have the characteristics of limited performance and mobility, which makes it difficult for traditional centralized security authentication methods to support security authentication in the current IoT environment. In order to cope with these challenges, this paper proposes a security authentication system named iot-chain in the Internet of Things, which provides attribute-based security authentication based on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework. The system contains three kinds of chain codes, namely access code, device code, and policy code. The access code is the main program that implements the user safety authentication method. The device code provides a query method for the URL of the resource data generated by the storage device, and the policy code provides the access control strategy for the administrator user. Combining access control and blockchain technology, iot-chain provides dynamic security authentication management in the Internet of Things. Experimental results show that iot-chain can maintain high throughput and effectively reach consensus in a distributed system.
Riaz Ahmad Ziar, Syed Irfanullah, Wajid Ullah Khan, Abdus Salam
Blockchain technology provides several suitable characteristics such as immutability, decentralization and verifiable ledger. It records the transactions in a decentralized way and can be integrated into several fields like eHealth, e-Government and smart cities etc. However, blockchain has several privacy and security issues, one of them is the on-chain data privacy. To deal with this issue we provide a privacy-preserving solution for permission less blockchain to empower the user to take control of transaction data in the open ledger. This work focuses on designing and developing the peer-to-peer system using symmetric cryptography and ethereum smart contract. In this scheme, we create smart contracts for the interaction of the data provider, data consumer, and access control list. Data providers register authorized users in the access control list. Data consumers can check their validity in the access control list. After successful validation, data consumers can request the security key from data providers to access secret information. Based on successful validation, a smart contract that is created between the data provider and data consumer is executed to send a key to the data consumer for accessing the secret information. The smart contracts of this proposed model are modeled in solidity, and the performance of the contracts is assessed in the Ropsten test network.
Robert Karaszewski, Paweł Modrzyński, Joanna Modrzyńska
Blockchain technology is currently one of the trends considered to have a tremendous future ahead. It ensures data security, data sharing protection and automation development—elements that are of colossal importance in the era of cloud solutions, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) reality. Additionally, blockchain technology allows one to create new programmable ecosystems on an unprecedented scale. The implementation of blockchain technology leads not only to improving the flow of documents and data storage, as is the case with the creation of shared service centers (SSCs), but—as this paper shows—allows one to reduce the carbon footprint when servicing SSCs at a considerably higher organizational level at the same time. The example of an SSC in Elbląg, Poland, proves that cloud solutions enabling electronic documents flow and data storage combined with blockchain technology are tools essential for further SSCs development. Furthermore, such tools allow us not only to obtain economic effects (i.e., cost reduction), but also to achieve positive ecological effects (i.e., carbon footprint reduction).
This paper outlines an approach for IEEE to take leadership for digital privacy to align many existing IEEE Societies and efforts in the areas of computer systems & applications security, organizational & global architectures, policy-supporting legislation, originating new standards, integrating compliance into technologies, and helping design decision-board infrastructures for governance bodies. Much of the current emphasis on evolving privacy technologies centers on big corporate enterprises and institutions, causing the industry to support corporate assets protection mainly. Fostering technology to empower individual privacy-enabling tools has lagged, and personal privacy has diminished because corporate big data applications have made sizable investments into exploiting private data. As one of the largest individual-member-based organizations, IEEE is urged to develop a collaborative approach for digital privacy with privacy-enabling technologies to benefit its members. The recommendations outlined define a prospective course that could result in future global individualized privacy capabilities which employ a combination of synergistic technologies such as distributed ledgers, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure distributed multi-party computation, zero-trust architectures, proof-of-origin of data, software, or other techniques. Such an effort would involve community engagement and outreach, academic peer-review events, the establishment of governance bodies, coordination & expansion of existing standards, and the development of publicly-accessible prototypes. Collaboration with other IEEE-sponsored efforts for transactive energy systems, confidentiality and security of healthcare records and devices, and other IEEE-funded projects will help magnify digital privacy investments already in progress in these applications of emerging technologies.
With the development of smart city, the cooperation between government sectors is becoming more and more frequent, breaking the information island and big data sharing has become an inevitable trend. The traditional way of government data sharing is mainly based on one unified data center, which has high construction cost and maintenance cost, and fails to fully consider the sectoral interests, authority, security and traceability, so there are still many barriers in government data sharing. Taking advantage of the features of blockchain technology, such as distributed ledger, smart contract, data trust and traceability, this paper proposes an application model of government data sharing based on blockchain, which uses a unified data sharing model and autonomous authority management to provide efficient and safe bus service for distributed government big data sharing.
Having a transparent and convenient insurance system is desired by users, but the insurance industry currently plays differently. For example, when users ask for a fast and simple self-service, the industry may need a long and cumbersome process, and sometimes users are not sure whether they have a fair deal according to their contract. With the aim of enhancing the current bicycle insurance system in Denmark, we investigate the local market and develop BlockCycle, which is a blockchain-based bicycle insurance system. The basic idea is that insurance companies transform their insurance products into a smart contract, including the criteria of applying the product and the eligibility of compensating into program logic. When a smart contract is deployed, the immutability can ensure the deal integrity and protect both users and insurance companies from the threat of unauthorized manipulation. In addition, blockchain can provide a secure and simple way to decentralize data and services, which enables high availability and reliability. Our experimental results indicate the viability of our system.
This paper addresses the scalability in the cost of smart contracts, which prevent illegal resource access (control access) in the Internet of Things. In previous studies, smart contracts have been used to avoid having a single point of failure, while maintaining tamper resistance. However, a high cost (called gas) is necessary when the number of subject-object pairs becomes large. In order to reduce cost, this paper proposes an access control method using smart contracts with a hierarchical name space. The proposed method scales well in terms of cost-decisive factors, namely, the complexity of functions and the number of smart contracts, leading to scalability in cost.
Voting is one of the most fundamental aspects of democracy. Over the past few decades, voting methods around the world have expanded from traditional paper ballot systems to electronic voting (e-voting), in which votes are written directly to computer memory. Like any computer system, voting machines are susceptible to technical vulnerabilities that open up opportunities for hackers to tamper with votes, causing the use of electronic voting technology to raise concerns about ballot security. We describe how electronic voting can be supported by blockchain technology to ensure voter secrecy, vote correctness, and equal voting rights. In this paper, we present a system using two separate blockchains, each with separate transactions and consensus algorithms. We describe a prototype implementation that validates our ideas by executing several proof-of-concept simulations of a range of voting scenarios.