Blockchain Papers

Arun Kumar Rana, Sharad Sharma, Kashif Nisar, Ag Asri Ag Ibrahim · 8 authors

Most Internet of Things (IoT) resources are exposed to security risks due to their essential functionality. IoT devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have a limited network, computation, and storage capacity, making them more vulnerable to attacks. In addition, the huge volume of data generated by IoT devices remains an open challenge for existing platforms to process, analyze, and discover underlying trends to create a convenient environment. As a result, to deliver acceptable services, a new solution is necessary to secure data accountability, increase data privacy and accessibility, and extract hidden patterns and usable knowledge. Moving the Internet of Things to a distributed ledger system might be the most effective way to solve these issues. One of the most well-known and extensively utilized distributed ledger systems is the blockchain. Due to its unique properties, such as privacy, accountability, immutability, and anonymity, blockchain technology has recently attracted a lot of interest. Using IoT in conjunction with blockchain technology can bring several benefits. This paper reviews the current state of the art different BIoT architectures, with a focus on current technologies, applications, challenges, and opportunities. The test findings prove that the decentralized authentication platform-based blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) device-to-device architecture has a significantly higher throughput than the gateway-based architecture. To encrypt the elliptical curve cryptographic (ECC) and to generate keys, the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT)-based scheme is proposed and compared with the secure hash algorithm (SHA-256). Finally, ECC-CRT is used to access system performance in terms of latency, throughput, and resource consumption, simulated through the Contiki Cooja (CC) simulator, and alter orderer and peer nodes for performance study in BIoT. A comprehensive analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is secure against a variety of known attacks, including the man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack, and outperforms the SHA-256 cryptographic algorithm. Moreover, the significance of blockchain and IoT, as well as their analysis of proposed architecture, is discussed. This paper will help readers and researchers understand the IoT and its applicability to the real world.

Mahantesh N. Birje, R. H. Goudar, C. M. Rakshitha, Manisha T. Tapale

Blockchain technology is one of the revolutionary technology in this digital era due to its vital features like immutability, anonymity and enhanced security. It’s scope is just not limited to cryptocurrency(money) domain, now it pledges to improve the present models of almost all kind of industries including government, media, medicine, law and Supply Chain Management (SCM). Blockchain is also referred as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), which makes the data immutable and transparent through the use of cryptographic hashing. This paper surveyed on the layered architecture of blockchain technology and various application domains. Literature survey of around 20 papers has been done to understand the basic concepts of blockchain technology. This paper helps to explore the fundamentals of blockchain technology and its application domains.

Aisha Zahid Junejo, Manzoor Ahmed Hashmani, Abdullah Alabdulatif, Mehak Maqbool Memon · 6 authors

Preserving anonymity and confidentiality of transactions has become crucial with widespread of the blockchain technology. Despite of the increased efforts for retaining privacy in blockchain networks, invasion attacks are still surfacing. Most of these attacks do not come from outsiders, but from the resident adversarial nodes. Existence of these insider adversaries lead to damaging of an organization’s internal network system and information leakage. Consequently, transaction anonymity and confidentiality are compromised. Hence, adversary detection and filtration play a vital role in protecting networks against unforeseen privacy and security threats. Therefore, in this paper, we propose RZee, a cryptographic and statistical privacy preserving model for adversary detection and filtering in blockchain networks. Firstly, RZee exploits zero-knowledge proofs to cryptographically secure the data. Secondly, based on certain identified conditions, RZee captures node behavior and blacklists malicious nodes to restrict those from injecting harmful data into the chain or viewing transactions as they propagate across the network. This adds an additional layer of protecting transactions from unauthorized and malicious intervention. The proposed framework is evaluated based on various privacy attributes as identified by literature. For this evaluation, 4 different types of experiments have been conducted. Further, the comparison of privacy perseverance of RZee with existing benchmark privacy-preserving frameworks is also done. The results depict that performance and privacy preservation in RZee exceeds the rest with an attribute score of 6.774 and a gain margin of 46.5%.

Qiuyu Zhang, Zhenyu Zhao

No abstract is available for this record.

Mohammed Shuaib, Sumit Badotra, Muhammad Irfan Khalid, Abeer D. Algarni · 9 authors

Cryptography and associated technologies have existed for a long time. This field is advancing at a remarkable speed. Since the inception of its initial application, blockchain has come a long way. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency based on blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). The most well-known cryptocurrency for everyday use is Bitcoin, which debuted in 2008. Its success ushered in a digital revolution, and it currently provides security, decentralization, and a reliable data transport and storage mechanism to various industries and companies. Governments and developing enterprises seeking a competitive edge have expressed interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies due to the rapid growth of this recent technology. For computer experts and individuals looking for a method to supplement their income, cryptocurrency mining has become a big source of anxiety. Mining is a way of resolving mathematical problems based on the processing capacity and speed of the computers employed to solve them in return for the digital currency incentives. Herein, we have illustrated benefits of utilizing GPUs (graphical processing units) for cryptocurrency mining and compare two methods, namely overclocking and undervolting, which are the superior techniques when it comes to GPU optimization. The techniques we have used in this paper will not only help the miners to gain profits while mining cryptocurrency but also solve a major flaw; in order to mitigate the energy and resources that are consumed by the mining hardware, we have designed the mining hardware to simultaneously run longer and consume much less electricity. We have also compared our techniques with other popular techniques that are already in existence with respect to GPU mining.

Moez Krichen, Meryem Ammi, Alaeddine Mihoub, Mutiq Almutiq

Blockchain is a modern technology that has revolutionized the way society interacts and trades. It could be defined as a chain of blocks that stores information with digital signatures in a distributed and decentralized network. This technique was first adopted for the creation of digital cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, research and industrial studies have recently focused on the opportunities that blockchain provides in various other application domains to take advantage of the main features of this technology, such as: decentralization, persistency, anonymity, and auditability. This paper reviews the use of blockchain in several interesting fields, namely: finance, healthcare, information systems, wireless networks, Internet of Things, smart grids, governmental services, and military/defense. In addition, our paper identifies the challenges to overcome, to guarantee better use of this technology.

Mrunal Mhatre, Harshvivek Kashid, Tanisha Jain, Pallavi Vijay Chavan

A key aspect of sustainable business development involves protecting a company’s products from counterfeiting. Since this can impact brand’s image and often, product counterfeits are of a minor quality which can be dangerous and even pose health hazards. Counterfeiters gain profits by manufacturing products using lesser quality materials and production methods. Many counterfeit products in the market are difficult to identify for a normal customer and require to be examined by a trained professional which is time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying counterfeit by a simple scan of the quick response code on the product. Since these codes are unique and are implemented by unique algorithms, it is almost impossible to forge them. Also, implementing an encrypted peer-to-peer system for the database makes it impossible for attackers to tamper with the database. The proposed method collectively not only helps laypersons to identify the authenticity of products but also an ownership tracking system where products are linked to the owners’ account which will allow them to produce proof of purchase and authenticity when reselling products and when claiming the warranty of the product. This will help in reducing manufacturing and materials costs used from traditional methods against counterfeiting such as Radio-Frequency Identification and the Hologram technique.

Nisha Balani, Pallavi Vijay Chavan, Mangesh Ghonghe

No abstract is available for this record.

Kentaro Sako, Shin’ichiro Matsuo, Tatsuya Mori

We propose N-choice game (NCG), a decentralized pseudo-random number generation method that can be executed on smart contracts. Of the M participants, one is a dealer, and the rest are players, each with a different role. Each participant randomly chooses one value between 0 and N − 1 and receives a score determined by the NCG rule. The amount of reward each participant receives is determined by the score. The values chosen by the participants are combined and hashed into a pseudo-random number. The NCG framework is designed to achieve the following three goals: (1) Incentivize participants to provide random choices, (2) Evaluate the level of randomness in the decentralized environment, and (3) Establish high performance. We implement the NCG framework in Solidity and evaluate its performance. Our extensive experiments revealed that unless more than 90% of NCG players collide, the generated random numbers have high randomness that can pass the NIST randomness test. The experiments also demonstrated that the throughput of random number generation in NCG was 129 times faster than in the existing framework, Random Bit Generator [2].

Xiaojun Wen, Yongzhi Chen, Wei Zhang, Zoe L. Jiang · 5 authors

The consensus mechanism is the core secret of the blockchain network. However, the consensus mechanism of the classical blockchain is based on the classical cryptosystem, which is based on the problem of computational complexity. With the improvement of computing power, the security of this cryptosystem is being threatened. In addition, the consensus mechanism of classic blockchain also has the following disadvantages: serious waste of computing resources and energy; the inability to withstand a 51% attack; low system throughput and large delay. Based on quantum teleportation technology and the randomness of quantum measurement, a consensus mechanism for a quantum blockchain system is proposed. Based on the physical properties of quantum mechanics, this scheme has the unconditional security of quantum cryptography. This new consensus mechanism does not involve a great deal of computing resources and hence has a lower energy consumption, shorter time delay and higher throughput. Furthermore, the new consensus mechanism could withstand a 51% attack.

Muntadher Sallal, Ruairí de Fréin, Ali Malik, Benjamin Aziz

There is an increasing demand for digital crypto-currencies to be more secure and robust to meet the following business requirements: (1) low transaction fees and (2) the privacy of users. Nowadays, Bitcoin is gaining traction and wide adoption. Many well-known businesses have begun accepting bitcoins as a means of making financial payments. However, the susceptibility of Bitcoin networks to information propagation delay, increases the vulnerability to attack of the Bitcoin network, and decreases its throughput performance. This paper introduces and critically analyses new network clustering methods, named Locality Based Clustering (LBC), Ping Time Based Approach (PTBC), Super Node Based Clustering (SNBA), and Master Node Based Clustering (MNBC). The proposed methods aim to decrease the chances of performing a successful double spending attack by reducing the information propagation delay of Bitcoin. These methods embody proximity-aware extensions to the standard Bitcoin protocol, where proximity is measured geographically and in terms of latency. We validate our proposed methods through a set of simulation experiments and the findings show how the proposed methods run and their impact in optimising the transaction propagation delay. Furthermore, these new methods are evaluated from the perspective of the Bitcoin network’s resistance to partitioning attacks. Numerical results, which are established via extensive simulation experiments, demonstrate how the extensions run and also their impact in optimising the transaction propagation delay. We draw on these findings to suggest promising future research directions for the optimisation of transaction propagation delays.

Jamal Elhachimi, Abdellatif Kobbane

With their vast range of uses, Internet of things (IoT) and its applications are becoming more popular. However, the security and privacy of the IoT-based applications remains a worry. The majority of the privacy and security issues of the interconnected, diverse resource-constrained IoT devices are unable to be solved efficiently by traditional security protocols. Blockchain technology has emerged as a distributed ledger technology or data structure that can manage many intelligent IoT transactions and ensure greater security to data management. In this paper, we propose a light-weight authentication system based Blockchain approach that provides network and communication security. Due to Blockchain decentralized nature and transparency, the proposed approach ensures high-level data security, improves system operation efficiency and system performances.

Suppakit Yamwaja, Chinnapong Angsuchotmetee

Managing royalty fees in the music business is the task that is done by record labels, music retailers, and performance-right organization firms. Royalty fees are mostly distributed in a centralized manner. A centralized-based approach may be straightforward for managing a music business. However, a centralized-based approach prevents artists to be able to set their revenue model for their music and getting paid promptly. To allow an artist to have freedom in setting their revenue model, a decentralized-based approach may need to be proposed. In this work, we propose to apply Blockchain and Smart Contract in the music business to propose a decentralized-based music streaming service that allows artists can independently design their royalty fee model and get paid promptly. Our proposal is based on an extension of ERC20 and ERC721 standards on writing a smart contract. Our proposal is deployed and tested in a private Ethereum-based blockchain in a laboratory-controlled environment to determine the feasibility and gas fee required. The result suggests that the business logic required in our contract does not consume a high amount of gas fee. Hence, it can be deemed that our contract design is suitable for deploying in an actual decentralized-based music streaming service.

Uday Khokhariya, Kaushal Shah, Nidhay Pancholi, Shambhavi Kumar

No abstract is available for this record.

Khandaker Sajidul Islam, Md Babul Islam, Christian Avornu, Jungang Lou · 5 authors

Voting is a vital aspect of human democracy, and efforts have been made throughout civilization to enhance the mechanisms, processes, and methodologies used to vote in a way that is transparent, verifiable, and accessible. Blockchain technology has been significantly widely used to solve multidimensional difficulties in various application sectors including healthcare, banking, electronic voting, etc., in recent decades. In this article, we propose a new e-voting protocol system which is based on blockchain technology without trusted tallying authorities. One of the most challenging challenges in arranging elections is gaining the faith of all voters in the counting process. The current election system frequently results in the recounting of votes cast, raising issues about the authenticity of many of the votes cast. There have even been instances where the opposition has expressed questions due to a lack of transparency in the vote verification and tallying process, there are concerns regarding the election’s overall validity. The current study offers a new voting mechanism which is based on blockchain technology to address this issue. The new protocol allows each voter to rate each candidate by giving different scores to them, instead of voting for a single candidate. Before being submitted, every vote is encoded using a different encryption method. The new protocol assures the validity of the votes cast during the counting procedure and maintains anonymity at the same moment. For the relatively large election, our proposed protocol will be flexible and feasible because the overhead of counting ballots is linear.

Dingjie Xu, Changqing Zhu, Na Ren

In order to solve the problem that the existing zero-watermark technology relies on the third-party IPR management organization, this paper proposes a new zero- watermark algorithm based on blockchain. The algorithm considers the multi-band characteristics of remote sensing image. It uses K-L transform, NSCT transform, SVD and other technical means to obtain the robust zero-watermark image of remote sensing image. The zero-watermark is stored on the blockchain by a zero-watermark registration system based on IPFS and Hyperledger Fabric. The experimental results show that the algorithm based on blockchain proposed in this paper realizes the lossless protection of data copyright. Moreover, this paper proves that blockchain can replace third-party IPR management organization.

Chunying Peng, Haixia Xu, Peili Li

Blockchain as a tamper-proof, non-modifiable and traceable distributed ledger technology has received extensive attention. Although blockchain's immutability provides security guarantee, it prevents the development of new blockchain technology. As we think, there are several arguments to prefer a controlled modifiable blockchain, from the possibility to cancel the transaction and necessity to remove the illicit or harmful documents, to the ability to support the scalability of blockchain. Meanwhile, the rapid development of quantum technology has made the establishment of post-quantum cryptosystems an urgent need. In this paper, we put forward the first lattice-based redactable consortium blockchain scheme that makes it possible to rewrite or repeal the content of any blocks. Our approach uses a consensus-based election and lattice-based chameleon hash function (Cash and Hofheinz etc. EUROCRYPT 2010). With knowledge of secret trapdoor, the participant could find the hash collisions efficiently. And each member of the consortium blockchain has the right to edit the history.

Amer A. Sallam, Taha H. Rassem, Hanadi Abdu, Haneen Abdulkareem · 6 authors

On the Ethereum network, users communicate with one another through a variety of different accounts. Pseudo-anonymity was enforced over the network to provide the highest level of privacy. By using accounts that engage in fraudulent activity across the network, such privacy may be exploited. Like other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum blockchain may exploited with several fraudulent activities such as Ponzi schemes, phishing, or Initial Coin Offering (ICO) exits, etc. However, the identification of parameters with abnormal account characteristics is not an easy task and requires an intelligent approach to distinguish between normal and fraudulent activities. Therefore, this paper has attempted to solve this a problem by using machine learning techniques to introduce a robust approach that can detect fraudulent accounts on Ethereum. We have used a K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest and XGBoost over a collected dataset of 4,681 instances along with 2,179 fraudulent accounts associated and 2,502 regular accounts. The XGBoost, RF, and KNN techniques achieved average accuracies of 96.80 %, 94.8 8%, and 87.85% and an average AUC of 0.995, 0.99 and 0.93, respectively.

Syada Tasmia Alvi, Mohammed Nasir Uddin, Linta Islam, Sajib Ahamed

Voting is a fundamental democratic activity. Many experts believe that paper balloting is the only appropriate method to ensure everyone’s right to vote. But this method is prone to errors and abuse. Many nations utilize digital voting methods to solve the difficulties of paper balloting. A single flaw in digital voting may lead to massive vote-rigging. Election voting methods must be legal, accurate, safe, and convenient. However, issues with digital voting methods may restrict acceptance. Due to its end-to-end verification capabilities, blockchain technology was developed to address these problems. To guarantee We have used blockchain technology anonymity, privacy, verifiability, mobility, integrity, security, and fairness in voting. By using blockchain our proposed system ensures security, privacy, and integrity. This system provides voter anonymity by keeping the voter information as a hash in the blockchain. It also provides fairness by keeping the casted vote encrypted till the ending time of the election. After ending time, the voter can verify their casted vote, ensuring verifiability. To test our protocol, we put it on Ethereum 2.0, a blockchain platform that uses Solidity as a programming language to create smart contracts. The adoption of smart contracts provides a safe means for performing voter verification, ensuring the correctness of voting results, making the counting system public, and protecting against fraudulent activities. We analyzed the system’s performance based on security and gas costs. It improves in terms of security characteristics and the related cost for the necessary infrastructure.

Jamal Kh-Madhloom

Blocks and chains are the building blocks of the blockchain, which is a community network. Blocks and chains are two terms used to describe collections of data information. The most fundamental need for a blockchain is that these postings be connected by cryptography, which is the case here. Cryptography. the entries in each block are added to as the list grows. Although the concept of blockchain cryptography is difficult, we have made it easier for you to understand. Asymmetric-key cryptography and hash functions are used in blockchains. Hash functions provide participants with a complete image of the internet. The SHA-256 hashing algorithm is often used in blockchains. In Bitcoin, where addresses are tracked by public-private key pairs, blockchains are often used. The public key in blockchain cryptography is a person's address. All participants have access to the participant's public key. The private key is used to get access to the address database and to authorise activities using the address. To ensure the integrity of the blockchain ledger, encryption plays a key role. Each event on the blockchain is recorded using encrypted data. As long as each user has access to their cryptographic keys, they may buy or trade cryptocurrencies. The root hashes of all transactions are stored in blockchains via cryptographic hashing. If somebody attempts to tamper with any data upon that blockchain, the main hash will have a completely new hash. Root hash comparisons may be performed on any other system to check whether the data is safe.

Jangho Na, Hye-Young Kim, Nohpill Park, Beomjoo Seo

This paper reports the use of the Schnorr Digital Signature as a new alternative instead of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) currently used in Ethereum. Elliptic curve cryptography, which is the cryptographic background of blockchain digital signature, is explained in the background and related works. This study then examined, the problems facing ECDSA and how the Schnorr Digital Signature could solve them. The test was performed by comparing Schnorr and ECDSA implemented in a private Ethereum network environment. The performance results showed that Schnorr Digital Signature has strengths in terms of efficiency over ECDSA. The efficiency deals with the gas price, signature size, block size, block elapsed time, and signature algorithm calculation time.

Vikas Chouhan, Anshul Arora

No abstract is available for this record.

Turgut Hanoymak, Ömer Küsmüş

Blockchain technology, which includes cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum,…etc [1,2] which has been evaluated as an investment tool by many people all over the world in recent years, needs to be examined in details, both mathematically and conceptually [8,9]. In fact, it can be said that blockchain technology, which is characterized as an accounting system and database based on distributed ledgers in its most basic form, is extremely secure in terms of copying data or attacking. For this reason, we can say that technology has a more effective security mechanism than any central state-of-the-art authoritative system used today. However, as it is almost impossible to bring all of the security, speed and cost parameters to their full extend in a system at the same time, as in any cryptosystem, the security parameter from the distributed ledger structure in blockchain technology adversely affects the speed and cost parameters. In this article, we discuss the cryptographic working principles of cryptocurrencies, which is an application field of blockchain technology, together with blockchain technology and the features and structures of the blocks contained.

Xianxian Li, Jiahui Peng, Shiqi Gao, Zhenkui Shi · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.