Blockchain Papers

Kranthi Kiran Reddy, Gutha Vijay Kumar, Sai Siddu Sirimulla, Chanan Singh · 6 authors

This article explores the use and impact of voting using blockchain technology. As a result of mounting worries about the honesty and security of conventional voting methods, especially in the digital era, the study tackles the requirement for an open, impenetrable, and robust method of conducting elections. A decentralized application on a blockchain platform is designed and implemented using the technique, which makes use of smart contracts for voter registration, ballot generation, and vote counting. The viability of blockchain technology in guaranteeing voter anonymity, data integrity, and cryptographic security are important discoveries. Online voting can be done securely and digitally using blockchain technology. It has great potential to reduce costs and increase voter turnout. Using Blockchain we can secure any application and work securely for that application. Therefore, cryptocurrency, healthcare, real estate, etc. Many applications use blockchain technology. *Blockchain technology encrypts votes, preventing any votes from being tampered with. It allows voters to vote for a candidate only once. The system reduces labor costs and counting errors by providing quick access to election results. This article explains solutions to solve the above problems. Our solution is to use an online voting system based on the Ethereum blockchain. That's why we connect surveys to blockchain technology

T. S. Raja Rajeswari, S. K. Khajashareef, N. Sandhya, P. Chinnasamy

No abstract is available for this record.

Hisham S. Galal, Amr Youssef

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique non-interchangeable digital assets verified and stored using blockchain technology. Quite recently, there has been a surging interest and adoption of NFTs, with sales exceeding${\$}$10 billion in the third quarter of 2021. Given the public state of Blockchain, NFTs owners face a privacy problem. More precisely, an observer can trivially learn the whole NFT collections owned by an address. For some categories of NFTs like arts and game collectibles, owners can sell them for a profit. However, popular marketplaces trade NFTs using public auctions and direct offers. Hence, an observer can learn about the new owner and the NFT purchase price. To tackle those problems, we proposeAegis,(Aegis is a shield carried by Zeus and Athena. It is a symbol of protection.) a protocol that allows users to add privacy to their NFTs ownership. InAegisusers can swap NFTs for payment amounts in fungible tokens while hiding the details (i.e., involved parties, the NFTs, and the payment amounts). One of the main properties ofAegisis its complete compatibility with existing NFT standards. We designAegisby leveraging zkSNARK proof system and smart contracts. We build an open-source prototype and perform experiments to evaluateAegis's performance.

Garima Verma

Electronic voting or E-voting is a relatively new form of voting which has an electronic process for voting without using a paper system. This form of voting has several benefits over a traditional paper ballot system in that it can provide faster results with better efficiency and reduction in errors. But while implementing in a large scenario, three major concerns that need to be addressed are security, confidentiality, and reliability of voting data. Blockchain is a technology that allows and opens up a possibility for designing and developing such type of secure and reliable system. The system developed using Blockchain technology can be decentralized eliminating the need of a third party to manage the access control in the process of election. This paper presents an e-voting framework that ensures security, confidentiality, and reliability when people go for e-voting. The comparative results indicate that the proposed scheme is effective and secure.

Rahmeh Ibrahim, Qasem Abu Al‐Haija, Ashraf Ahmad

The Internet of Things (IoT) has widely expanded due to its advantages in enhancing the business, industrial, and social ecosystems. Nevertheless, IoT infrastructure is susceptible to several cyber-attacks due to the endpoint devices' restrictions in computation, storage, and communication capacity. As such, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the security of the IoT. Attackers can easily utilize IoT devices as part of botnets to launch DDoS attacks by taking advantage of their flaws. This paper proposes an Ethereum blockchain model to detect and prevent DDoS attacks against IoT systems. Additionally, the proposed system can be used to resolve the single points of failure (dependencies on third parties) and privacy and security in IoT systems. First, we propose implementing a decentralized platform in place of current centralized system solutions to prevent DDoS attacks on IoT devices at the application layer by authenticating and verifying these devices. Second, we suggest tracing and recording the IP address of malicious devices inside the blockchain to prevent them from connecting and communicating with the IoT networks. The system performance has been evaluated by performing 100 experiments to evaluate the time taken by the authentication process. The proposed system highlights two messages with a time of 0.012 ms: the first is the request transmitted from the IoT follower device to join the blockchain, and the second is the blockchain response. The experimental evaluation demonstrated the superiority of our system because there are fewer I/O operations in the proposed system than in other related works, and thus it runs substantially faster.

Mohamed Allouche, Mihai Mitrea

The last decades have seen video production and consumption rise significantly: TV/cinematography, social networking, digital marketing, and video surveillance incrementally and cumulatively turned video content into the predilection type of data to be exchanged, stored, and processed. Belonging to video processing realm, video fingerprinting (also referred to as content-based copy detection or near duplicate detection ) regroups research efforts devoted to identifying duplicated and/or replicated versions of a given video sequence (query) in a reference video dataset. The present paper reports on a state-of-the-art study on the past and present of video fingerprinting, while attempting to identify trends for its development. First, the conceptual basis and evaluation frameworks are set. This way, the methodological approaches (situated at the cross-roads of image processing, machine learning, and neural networks) can be structured and discussed. Finally, fingerprinting is confronted to the challenges raised by the emerging video applications ( e.g. , unmanned vehicles or fake news) and to the constraints they set in terms of content traceability and computational complexity. The relationship with other technologies for content tracking ( e.g., DLT - Distributed Ledger Technologies) are also presented and discussed.

Zigui Jiang, Kai Chen, Hailin Wen, Zibin Zheng

Smart contract has been the core of blockchain systems and other blockchain-based systems since Blockchain 2.0. Various operations on blockchain are performed through the invocation and execution of smart contracts. This leads to extensive combinations between blockchain, smart contract, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical System (CPS) applications, and then many blockchain-based IoT or CPS applications emerge to provide multiple benefits to the economy and society. In this case, obtaining a better understanding of smart contracts will contribute to the easier operation, higher efficiency and stronger security of those blockchain-based systems and applications. Many existing studies on smart contract analysis are based on similarity calculation and smart contract classification. However, smart contract is a piece of code with special characteristics and most of smart contracts are stored without any category labels, which leads to difficulties of smart contract classification. As the back end of a blockchain-based Decentralized Application (DApp) is one or several smart contracts, DApps with labeled categories and open source codes are applied to achieve a supervised smart contract classification. A three-phase approach is proposed to categorize DApps based on various data features. In this approach, 5,659 DApps with smart contract source codes and pre-tagged categories are first obtained based on massive collected DApps and smart contracts from Ethereum, State of the DApps and DappRadar. Then feature extraction and construction methods are designed to form multi-feature vectors that could present the major characteristics of DApps. Finally, a fused classification model consisting of KNN, XGBoost and random forests is applied to the multi-feature vectors of all DApps for performing DApp classification. The experimental results show that the method is effective. In addition, some positive correlations between feature variables and categories, as well as several user behavior patterns of DApp calls, are found in this paper.

Suhag Pandya

The modern challenges of supply chain control arising from globalisation, decentralisation, and modernisation are rapidly exposed to data leakage, network attacks, and software flaws. Business stakeholders are turning to blockchain technology as a possible solution to improve modern supply chains’ reliability, integration, and visibility. Blockchain is an elaborate structure that remains relevant when managing product traceability, integration, and increasing general transparency. This article explores the possibility of blockchain technology enhancing the transparency, integrity, and security of decentralised voting systems. Blockchain, which is decentralised, irreversible and fully transparent, is an alternative solution to the world’s problems described by manipulation, fraud and lack of transparency inherent in the globalisation of voting systems. The paper considers several models of voting on the basis of blockchain technology, comparing their advantages, which consist of providing the inviolability of the election results as well as minimising the usage of the intermediaries’ services. Evaluating blockchain technology using election procedures as a perspective, this article explores its foundational features, such as cryptographic protections, consensus processes, and ever-executable contracts. Other issues that are named by the study as the challenges for implementing blockchain technology in voting include scalability, energy consumption, and legal issues. This research aims to respond to these questions for enhancing election systems in the digital world by reviewing the literature comprehensively on blockchain technology for decentralised voting and providing a brief overview of the current trend. The results highlight the need for more study into blockchain-based voting systems to resolve the technological and ethical issues that have been raised.

Amrita Dahiya, Brij B. Gupta, Wadee Alhalabi, Klaus Ulrichd

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) driven blockchain is currently one of the most promising technology revolutions with enormous potential across a wide range of applications. Distributed ledger is essentially a distributed and encrypted database that can address several concerns pertaining to Internet security and trust with transparency. In fact, the scope of blockchain applications is broadening with each passing day. The exclusive features of safe and transparent data exchange provided by blockchain technology provide compelling arguments for its implementation in a variety of application scenarios. In this paper, we present the comprehensive view of blockchain and its related concepts. Though, there exists intensive research on these domains; however, these fields are still dealing with several security issues, data reliability and storage and scalability. Blockchain has emerged as a critical technology that can address these issues through its features like decentralization, transparency, immutability and auditability. Building trust in distributed systems without the need for authority is a technological advancement that can be well leveraged by domain, like, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and social media. Technologies like IoT and Cloud computing can be perceived as the trivial ones to get benefitted from the blockchain. However, the integration of social media and blockchain can revolutionize the domains, like, content creating and sharing, fake news scourge, trademarking and rights management. In this paper, we illustrate the integration of blockchain with IoT, cloud and social media and the related issues and challenges. Moreover, we also show some of the major research works done in each domain.

Minxian Wang, Zijian Zhang, Jialing He, Feng Gao · 7 authors

Abstract With the development of 5G, the wireless Internet of Things (IoT) has become possible; how to provide privacy protections for the communication of IoT devices in a more vulnerable wireless transmission environment is a huge challenge. Thus, steganography is introduced as a safe and effective technology. Blockchain systems have been widely used in the area of steganography. Several works attempted to embed covert data into transactions in public blockchain systems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero. However, most of them merely focus on putting covert data into certain fields in transactions based on cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, a Covert Transaction Recognition (CTR) model is proposed by the Text Convolutional Neural Networks and Back Propagation Neural Networks. When utilizing the covert data-embedded field for recognizing, our CTR model can attain 0.79 precision and 0.83 recall on average for seven covert transaction construction schemes. The precision and recall can increase by at most 43 and 47%, respectively, if other unembedded fields were additionally exploited for recognition. We further propose a Practical Covert Transaction Construction (PCTC) model. This model fixes the contents in the embedded fields of the constructed transactions, and generates the contents in other fields using Generative Adversarial Networks. Experimental results demonstrated that the precision and recall are greatly decreased when identifying the covert transactions generated by our PCTC model. The data underlying this article are available in ‘covert-transaction-model’, at https://github.com/1997mint/covert-transaction-model.

Ilyas Benkhaddra, Abhishek Kumar, Zine El Abidine Bensalem, Hang Lei

No abstract is available for this record.

Dexin Zhu, Jun Zheng, Hu Zhou, Jianan Wu · 6 authors

Traditional video conference systems depend largely on computational complexity to ensure system security, but with the development of high-performance computers, the existing encryption system will be seriously threatened. To solve this problem, a hybrid encryption scheme for quantum secure video conferencing combined with blockchain is proposed in this study. In the system solution architecture, first, the quantum key distribution network is embedded in the classic network; then, the “classical + quantum” hybrid encryption scheme is designed according to the secret level required for the video conference content. Besides, the real-time monitoring module of the quantum key distribution network is designed to ensure that users can check the running state of the network at any time. Meeting minutes can be shared by combining with blockchain. In order to quickly query meeting minutes, a cache-efficient query method based on B+ tree is proposed. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional video conference system, the quantum secure video conference system sufficiently integrates the technical advantages of the quantum key distribution to resist the security threats such as channel eavesdropping and high-performance computational attacks while ensuring the stable operation of the classic system, thus providing a video conference system with a higher security level. Meanwhile, the query time cost of blockchain with different lengths is tested, and the query efficiency of the proposed method is 3.15-times higher than the original query efficiency of blockchain.

Yi Chen, Chung-Chiang Chen, Li‐Chuan Tang, Wei-Hua Chieng

Abstract NuText is a novel music-encoding technology based on numbered musical notation. This paper outlines the notation principles of numbered musical notation and delineates the conversion relationship and encoding protocol between NuText and numbered musical notation. Furthermore, this study demonstrates NuText's playback software and its practical applications, including digital artwork creation, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and social use, and identifies opportunities to develop it as a music technology. The encoding method proposed herein was implemented on PCs and mobile devices, and the method has been successfully applied to sports-oriented music. The image steganography method used in digital artwork creation, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and social use does not destroy images, and it has been implemented on mobile devices. NuText is a note-level encoding method, which has advantages for interpreting music connotations and a great potential in the development of music information retrieval and artificial intelligence composition. In future work, special musical skills may be added, including the modification of each note velocity, and this may be incorporated into the encoding specification to realize sound in virtual reality.

Carlos Gabriel de Araujo Gewehr, Carlis Raupp, Julio Leao

Bitcoin is the most well-adopted cryptocurrency today. As of 2022, it is estimated that around US$ 4 billion are transacted daily within the Bitcoin network. Optimizing the energy expenditure of Bitcoin mining is of interest to several parties, such as end-users, who make transactions on the Bitcoin network with lower fees, miners themselves, who increase mining profits due to lower operational costs, and government regulation bodies, who minimize the environmental and power-grid impacts of mining. In this work we present a Bitcoin mining core employing several optimizations and design techniques that aim to maximize energy efficiency. Results in a 6 nm technology node show a 33% improvement in energy efficiency when compared to the state-of-the-art implementation.

Wenxuan Yu, Minghui Xu, Dongxiao Yu, Xiuzhen Cheng · 6 authors

Payment channel network (PCN) is a layer-two scaling solution that enables fast off-chain transactions but does not involve on-chain transaction settlement. PCNs raise new privacy issues including balance secrecy, relationship anonymity and payment privacy. Moreover, protecting privacy causes low transaction success rates. To address this dilemma, we propose zk-PCN, a privacy-preserving payment channel network using zk-SNARKs. We prevent from exposing true balances by setting up \textit{public balances} instead. Using public balances, zk-PCN can guarantee high transaction success rates and protect PCN privacy with zero-knowledge proofs. Additionally, zk-PCN is compatible with the existing routing algorithms of PCNs. To support such compatibility, we propose zk-IPCN to improve zk-PCN with a novel proof generation (RPG) algorithm. zk-IPCN reduces the overheads of storing channel information and lowers the frequency of generating zero-knowledge proofs. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of zk-PCN in various settings.

Jazem Mutared Alanazi, Ahmad Ali AlZubi

Technological advancement has made a significant contribution to the change of the economy and the advancement of humanity. Because it is changing how economic transactions are carried out, the blockchain is one of the technical developments that has a lot of promise for this progress. The public record of the Bitcoin blockchain provides dispersed users with evidence of transaction ownership by publishing all transaction data from block reward transactions to unspent transaction outputs. Attacks on the public ledger, on the other hand, are a result of the fact that all transaction information are exposed. De-anonymization attacks allow users to link transaction entities and acquire user privacy through specified transaction amounts. As a result, in light of the Bitcoin blockchain system’s privacy issues, this scheme combines the concept of coin mixing with encrypted transaction technology to create a truly anonymous blockchain system that preserves the payer identity and transaction amount privacy. The one-way aggregated signature technique of Boneh, Gentry, and Lynn systematically embeds the notion of mixing into the whole block. The homomorphic encryption approach of Boneh, Goh, and Nissim allows miners to check the legality of encrypted transactions. Miners will validate transactions, conceal transactions, and package transactions as entities in the scheme. Finally, this technique was chosen after a comparison of several privacy-preserving blockchain schemes. It not only ensures complete anonymity, but also keeps transaction storage overhead to a minimum.

V. Kavitha, G S Sruthi, B Thoshinny, S R Riduvarshini

Communication plays a vital role in human life. But in the case of sharing confidential information, there are many issues of concern, such as the lack of confidentiality, authenticity and integrity. Steganography is one of the methods used for conventional covert communication, but it sends the information via an insecure channel. Even though the hackers entering into the channel cannot decrypt the original data, information such as recipient details and communication time are exposed and the communication can be disrupted or hijacked. To address this problem, "Stag-chain," a blockchain-based design that combines an effective steganographic technique with the Advance Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) Protocol (decentralized cloud storage), is introduced. Furthermore, the image file will be available on the cloud for retrieval only for a limited period after which it will be replaced by a normal image. Since the data is sent as a transaction in Ethereum, it is almost impossible to manipulate or retrieve that data, hence ensuring data integrity and data security. The aim of the said scheme is to develop an app that will ensure data confidentiality, establish a secure channel to transmit data, enhance data security and protect the data from unauthorized access or manipulation.

Neyire Deniz Sarier

No abstract is available for this record.

Simin Ghesmati, Walid Fdhila, Edgar Weippl

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that promises a multitude of benefits, such as transparency, traceability, and immutability. However, this unique bundle of key characteristics has proved to be a double-edged sword that can put users’ privacy at risk. Unlike in traditional systems, Bitcoin transactions are publicly and permanently recorded, and anyone can access the full history of the records. Despite using pseudonymous identities, an adversary can undermine users’ financial privacy and reveal their actual identities by using advanced heuristics and techniques to identify possible links between transactions, senders, receivers, and consumed services (e.g., online purchases). Hence, a multitude of approaches has been proposed to reduce financial transparency and enhance users’ anonymity. These techniques range from mixing services to off-chain transactions that address different privacy issues. In this paper, we particularly focus on comparing and evaluating privacy techniques in the Bitcoin blockchain (which can be applied in (Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) based blockchains), present their limitations, and highlight new challenges.

Basheir Khan, Inam Ul Haq, Sohaib Rana, Haroon Ul Rasheed

Smart Grids are an emerging technology and are significant for widespread industries and domains. In smart-grid-based applications, data is collected by various sensors that assist in effective decision-making. Currently, such systems are centralised and inherit multiple users’ privacy and security concerns. To overcome these security concerns, blockchain-based security schemes are in place. However, the rapid emergence of quantum computers is threatening the security of existing designs. This paper proposes a blockchain architecture for smart grids based on ring signatures that will be secure in the post-quantum era. Furthermore, comprehensive security and performance analysis make it evident that the proposed scheme is well suited for smart grids.

G. Uganya, Radhika Baskar

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that moves the world in the direction of smart things. But, IoT security is the complex problem due to its centralized architecture, and limited capacity. So, blockchain technology has great attention due to its features of decentralized architecture, transparency, immutable records and cryptography hash functions when combining with IoT. Cryptography hash algorithms are very important in blockchain technology for secure transmission. It converts the variable size inputs to a fixed size hash output which is unchangeable. Existing cryptography hash algorithms with digital signature have issues of single node accessibility and accessed up to 128 bytes of key size only. As well as, if the attacker tries to hack the key, it cancels the transaction. This paper presents the Modified Elliptic Curve Cryptography Multi Signature Scheme (MECC-MSS) for multiple node accessibility by finding nearest path for secure transaction. In this work, the input key size can be extended up to 512 bytes to enhance the security. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed with other cryptography hash algorithms like Secure Hashing Algorithms (SHAs) such as SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA3-224, SHA3-256, SHA3-384, SHA3-512 and Message Digest5 by one-way analysis of variance test in terms of accuracy and time complexity. Results show that the MECC-MSS achieves 90.85% of accuracy and time complexity of 1.4 nano seconds with significance less than 0.05. From the statistical analysis, it is observed that the proposed algorithm is significantly better than other cryptography hash algorithms and also having less time complexity.

Pei Zhang, Qingfeng Cheng, Mingliang Zhang, Xiangyang Luo

With the rapid development of the Internet, it has become a hot spot in protecting important information from illegal theft and destruction during network transmission. The characteristics of strong robustness, anonymity and distributed transmission in blockchain technology can precisely make up for the disadvantages faced by traditional covert communication in transmitting important data, such as poor robustness, easy exposure of participants and difficulty in achieving group covert transmission. Therefore, a group steganography method for digital currency based on blockchain technology is proposed in this paper. In this method, an index matrix of address interaction is designed for group covert communication, using the address interaction relationship and transaction amount to hide secret message alternately, the transaction hiding secret message is published on the blockchain. In different groups, the receivers use different keys to extract different secret message. The method proposed also introduces a fine-grained group division mechanism to control the spread of secret information and reduce the risk of secret information leakage. And the application scenarios of the method proposed are more universal, breaking the limitation of using a single digital currency for covert communication on the blockchain. In addition, the proposed method modulates the number of addresses reasonably by sensing the generation time of the block, enhancing the concealment of the method. Through practical tests on a variety of mainstream digital currencies, the experimental results show that digital currencies with smaller block generation times need to consume less embedding time.

Jing Huey Khor, Michail Sidorov, Nathan Tze Min Ho, Tze Hank Chia

Anonymous authentication is an important factor for Internet of Things (loT) applications such as Smart Grids and Vehicle Ad hoc Networks. The zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) is one of the popular methods that has been used for transacting anonymously in public blockchains. However, a heavy computational process is involved during the generation of zk-SNARK proofs (zk-SNARKs). This intensive computation is a significant barrier that prevents resource-constrained loT devices from implementing zk-SNARKs for anonymous transactions. Therefore, this paper proposes a public blockchain-based lightweight anonymous authentication platform for low-power loT devices using zk-SNARKs. A lightweight anonymous authentication protocol is designed using the SHA256 hash function. The heavy proving processes of the zk-SNARK protocol are offloaded to a powerful loT machine. A proof of concept has been designed to verify the proposed platform is capable to provide anonymous authentication with the help of zk-SNARKs and InterPlanetary File System. The security of the proposed platform is analysed and has been proved to be resistant to tracking, replay, key disclosure, and desynchronization attacks. The performance of the proposed platform is also evaluated and has been proven to be supported by low-power loT devices.

Yuechen Pan, Yiwen Zhao, Xiaoguang Liu, Gang Wang · 5 authors

Aiming at the existence of a trusted third party in the traditional lottery and the privacy leakage of the current blockchain lottery scheme, we propose a fair blockchain-based lottery scheme for privacy protection, called FPLotto. Benefiting from a Lagrange interpolating polynomial over a finite field and a verifiable random function, lottery ticket of all users fairly contributes to the generation of winning numbers which is transparent and verifiable to anyone. The discrete logarithm, the one-way property of hash function and VRF provide security and avoid deliberate control of the lottery draw. Moreover, the mixing protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs hides lottery amount and bonus amount, and cuts off the connection among the lottery buyers and the winners for protecting the privacy of users. The scheme guarantees fairness, verifiability, and privacy without a trusted third party. Additionally, we propose a method of aggregation verification based on PLONK reducing the operating cost of lottery agency and speeding up the draw phase.