Prof. Afsha Akkalot, Parth Vijaykumar Lashkare, Hemant Patel, Dharmendrasingh Rajpurohit
Abstract: The emergence of blockchain technology has paved the way for the development of secured e-voting systems that are transparent, immutable, and tamper-proof. In this survey report, we examine the current trends and future prospects of using blockchain technology for e-voting. We begin by exploring the key features of blockchain technology, including distributed ledger, cryptographic security, and decentralized consensus mechanisms. Next, we discuss the benefits of using blockchain technology for e-voting, including voter anonymity, transparent voting process, and immutable voting records. To gain a better understanding of the current state of the field, we conducted a survey of recent literature on blockchain-based evoting systems. The survey covers research articles, white papers, and conference proceedings published in the last five years. We analysed the data using statistical software and present our findings on the most commonly used consensus algorithms, cryptographic techniques, and blockchain architectures in e-voting systems. Our survey also highlights the challenges facing the adoption of blockchain-based e-voting systems, including scalability, usability, and regulatory issues. We conclude by discussing the future prospects of blockchain-based e-voting systems and identifying the areas that require further research and development. Overall, this survey report provides valuable insights into the current trends and future prospects of using blockchain technology for e-voting, and will be useful for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working in this field.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Permissionless blockchains promise to be resilient against censorship by a single entity. This suggests that deterministic rules, and not third-party actors, are responsible for deciding if a transaction is appended to the blockchain or not. In 2022, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned a Bitcoin mixer and an Ethereum application, putting the neutrality of permissionless blockchains to the test. In this paper, we formalize quantify and analyze the security impact of blockchain censorship. We start by defining censorship, followed by a quantitative assessment of current censorship practices. We find that 46% of Ethereum blocks were made by censoring actors that intend to comply with OFAC sanctions, indicating the significant impact of OFAC sanctions on the neutrality of public blockchains. We further uncover that censorship not only impacts neutrality, but also security. We show how after Ethereum's move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and adoption of Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) the inclusion of censored transactions was delayed by an average of 85%. Inclusion delays compromise a transaction's security by, e.g., strengthening a sandwich adversary. Finally we prove a fundamental limitation of PoS and Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols against censorship resilience.
Blockchain technology can construct a distributed and trusted ledger, which can be used for electronic voting (E-voting) systems to ensure the security of voting data and improve government credibility. However, existing blockchain-based solutions cannot fully fulfill five core requirements in E-voting, i.e., auditability, privacy, authentication, correctness, and unreusability, which make them unpractical in the reality. In this paper, we propose a Double Blockchain-based E-voting (DBE-voting) system, which consists of a private blockchain and a public blockchain. In the proposed system, the voter information is only recorded in the private blockchain for further auditing and the voting results are recorded in both blockchains. The voter's privacy can be protected in the private blockchain while the voting results can be queried in the public blockchain for verifying the correctness of the election process. Moreover, the ballot recorded in both blockchains is signed with a valid linkable ring signature to ensure authentication and unreusability. We propose an on-chain and off-chain hybrid storage mechanism to ensure the consistency and correctness of voting data in two blockchains. Experimental results demonstrate that the throughput of our system can reach 29 transactions per second when the block size is 512 KB. The security analysis shows that the DBE-voting is the first blockchain-based system that can meet all five requirements simultaneously.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has gained significant attention as a solution for ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and availability in a trustless environment.Its main objective is to safeguard data from both internal and external cyberattacks by leveraging the collective power of the network to counter malicious attempts.In this project, we aim to develop a decentralized messaging application using XMTP (replace with the correct protocol if applicable).Our application will enable secure and anonymous transmission of encrypted messages.The Ethereum platform will be utilized for deploying our blockchain network.By utilizing a distributed architecture and a flexible communication protocol, our application will be resilient against various forms of suppression.XMTP's extensible design allows for a wide range of use cases in exchanging message data between web3 identities.Additionally, the XMTP network ensures message persistence and associates them with web3 identities rather than specific client apps.As a result, each web3 identity possesses a portable inbox accessible through any XMTP-enabled client application.
Johnnatan Messias, Vabuk Pahari, B. Chandrasekaran, Krishna P. Gummadi · 5 authors
Smart contracts are contractual agreements between participants of a blockchain, who cannot implicitly trust one another. They are software programs that run on top of a blockchain, and we may need to change them from time to time (e.g., to fix bugs or address new use cases). Governance protocols define the means for amending or changing these smart contracts without any centralized authority. They distribute the decision-making power to every user of the smart contract: Users vote on accepting or rejecting every change. In this work, we review and characterize decentralized governance in practice, using Compound and Uniswap -- two widely used governance protocols -- as a case study. We reveal a high concentration of voting power in both Compound and Uniswap: 10 voters hold together 57.86% and 44.72% of the voting power, respectively. Although proposals to change or amend the protocol receive, on average, a substantial number of votes (i.e., 89.39%) in favor within the Compound protocol, they require fewer than three voters to obtain 50% or more votes. We show that voting on Compound proposals can be unfairly expensive for small token holders, and we discover voting coalitions that can further marginalize these users.
Ethereum is a decentralized open-source, public blockchain platform with smart contract functionality. As of December 2021, Ether is the second highest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, after Bitcoin. Also, Ether is one of the most used blockchain platforms. As a second-generation blockchain platform, Ethernet supports a new computing paradigm - decentralized applications (DApps) running on top of the blockchain. While DApps bring rich and flexible application semantics and functions, they also inevitably bring more security risks and vulnerabilities. And Ethereum, as a blockchain that carries a large amount of value in virtual currency, has attracted a large number of unsuspecting attackers to target Ethereum security vulnerability attacks for profit. Among them, there have been numerous attacks against the application layer of Ether in the past few years. This article will review several serious attacks on Ethereum at the application level in the past few years and analyse the vulnerabilities exploited by these attacks, the methods of attack, and the improvements made by Ethereum after the attacks in order to provide some insight into the future security of virtual currencies and blockchains.
The privacy of Cryptocurrencies are of great concern in various fields. Researches has shown that pseudonyms, which are used in Bitcoin, only provide weak privacy. The privacy of users may be put at risk under deanonymization attacks. The exisiting schemes typically require a trusted-third party to achieve anonymity, however this usually faces a single-point fault. In addition, existing schemes suffer from high communication complexity and impracticality. This paper proposes a practical privacy-preserving mixing protocol for Bitcoin to achieve unlink-ability of input and output address of transactions. Compared to existing schemes, our protocol improves practicality. The communication complexity of our protocol is linearly related to the number of peers. Moreover, our protocol is scalable as it works not only for Bitcoin, but also for other cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum phishing scams have proven to be highly profitable in recent years, and pose a serious risk to the security of the blockchain ecosystem. Existing techniques for detecting phishing scams mostly model the transaction network at a very coarse-grained level. These methods rarely take into account the heterogeneity of the network, and do not consider multiple transactions over time between pairs of accounts. To this end, we model the Ethereum transaction network as a heterogeneous muiltidigraph and propose a novel graph embedding technique. Specifically, we use a temporal-weighted biased walking method based on the Jump-Stay strategy, which not only captures the properties of the dynamic transaction network more comprehensively, but also elegantly balances the distribution of different types of nodes. The superior performance of our model is shown through classification experiments on a real-world dataset of Ethereum transactions.
Phishing is a widespread scam activity on Ethereum, causing huge financial losses to victims. Most existing phishing scam detection methods abstract accounts on Ethereum as nodes and transactions as edges, then use manual statistics of static node features to obtain node embedding and finally identify phishing scams through classification models. However, these methods can not dynamically learn new Ethereum transactions. Since the phishing scams finished in a short time, a method that can detect phishing scams in real-time is needed. In this paper, we propose a streaming phishing scam detection method. To achieve streaming detection and capture the dynamic changes of Ethereum transactions, we first abstract transactions into edge features instead of node features, and then design a broadcast mechanism and a storage module, which integrate historical transaction information and neighbor transaction information to strengthen the node embedding. Finally, the node embedding can be learned from the storage module and the previous node embedding. Experimental results show that our method achieves decent performance on the Ethereum phishing scam detection task.
Modern technology has created the need for information flow to be fast and effective. we have been able to reach this through the internet; the medium, that is, the internet has expedited every folks, by creating the communication cheap and quick. One such innovative technology is blockchain. Having the properties such as immutability, integrity and decentralized architecture, one of the prospective application of blockchain is e-voting. The objective of e-voting system using blockchain is to facilitate transparent, fair and verifiable approach. But the existing e-voting systems using blockchain take more time to reflect the vote casted by the voters as the number of voters increases and make the system slow. In this paper we propose a system which uses a consensus algorithm called PoA to minimize the time for authentication, mining and verification of casted votes. The Proposed system which replaces the PoW consensus algorithm, in existing system, with PoA consensus algorithm, proved to be faster than existing system by more than 9 seconds. Thus this paper highlights how the existing e-voting system using blockchain is slow and how the proposed system optimizes the time required and makes the system faster.
Natarajan Balakrishnan, S Aruna, D Akshaya, P. Karthikeyan · 5 authors
Voting is a fundamental right for every citizen in a country to express their views and select their representatives for shaping the society. However, the current voting process is vulnerable to security breaches and frauds. To address this issue, e-voting systems have emerged using the blockchain technology. By utilizing this technology, the voting process can become more secure, transparent, and fraud-proof. For every vote, separate blocks are created and decentralized to maintain transparency and accuracy in the voting process. The blockchain technology, working on a peer-to-peer network, guarantees secure and transparent record-keeping and verification of each vote. Additionally, the system’s immutability property ensures the voting process’s protection. The data is stored in encrypted blocks with hash values, and smart contract concepts detect fake votes and multiple voting attempts. This research work presents an in-depth explanation of how the blockchain algorithm records voting results and voter information at every election location, highlighting the technology’s fundamental structure and characteristics for electronic voting.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is the foundation of all cryptocurrencies, while machine learning (ML) is one of the most popular technologies with a wide range of possibilities. Blockchain may be improved and made more effective by using ML. Even though blockchain technology uses encryption to safeguard data, it is not completely reliable. Various elements, including the particular use case, the type of data, and legal constraints can determine whether it is suitable for keeping private and sensitive data. While there may be benefits, it is important to take into account possible hazards and abide by privacy and security laws. The blockchain itself is secure, but additional applications and layers are not. In terms of security, ML can aid in the development of blockchain applications. Therefore, a critical investigation is required to better understand the function of ML and blockchain in enhancing security. This study examines the current situation, evaluates the articles it contains, and presents an overview of the security issues. Despite their existing limitations, the papers included from 2012 to 2022 highlighted the importance of ML’s impact on blockchain security. ML and blockchain can enhance security, but challenges remain; advances such as federated learning and zero-knowledge proofs are important, and future research should focus on privacy and integration with other technologies.
Blockchain has already been used in developing many applications, including cryptocurrencies and NFTs. With the help of blockchain and smart contracts, a Decentralized E-Voting System can be developed. A Decentralized E-Voting System is used for activities like voting, verifying the user’s details, adding candidates, starting and ending the election, self-tallying the total number of votes, and giving the results of the elections. A system using blockchain is more secure, faster, transparent, and immutable. The existing systems for voting are less secure as they use EVMs and VVPATs, which can be tampered with. The existing systems are also slower than the proposed model in terms of the time taken to announce the results. There are other problems like Vote Rigging, Polling Booth Capture, and Voting Manipulation. With the increasing risk of cyberattacks, it is of utmost importance to have an online voting system capable of withstanding these attacks. A blockchain-based e-voting system will enable user confidentiality using encryption. The platform is created on the Ethereum network that makes use of smart contracts written in the Solidity programming language. Truffle, Ganache and Metamask are the tools used to create a Decentralized E-Voting System.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Omid Mir, Daniel Slamanig, Balthazar Bauer, René Mayrhofer
Anonymous credentials (ACs) systems are a powerful cryptographic tool for privacy-preserving applications and provide strong user privacy guarantees for authentication and access control. ACs allow users to prove possession of attributes encoded in a credential without revealing any information beyond them. A delegatable AC (DAC) system is an enhanced AC system that allows the owners of credentials to delegate the obtained credential to other users. This allows to model hierarchies as usually encountered within public-key infrastructures (PKIs). DACs also provide stronger privacy guarantees than traditional AC systems since the identities of issuers and delegators can also be hidden. In this paper we present a novel DAC scheme that supports attributes, provides anonymity for delegations, allows the delegators to restrict further delegations, and also comes with an efficient construction. Our approach builds on a new primitive that we call structure-preserving signatures on equivalence classes on updatable commitments (SPSEQ-UC). The high-level idea is to use a special signature scheme that can sign vectors of set commitments, where signatures can be extended by additional set commitments. Signatures additionally include a user's public key, which can be switched. This allows us to efficiently realize delegation in the DAC. Similar to conventional SPSEQ, the signatures and messages can be publicly randomized and thus allow unlinkable delegation and showings in the DAC system. We present further optimizations such as cross-set commitment aggregation that, in combination, enable efficient selective showing of attributes in the DAC without using costly zero-knowledge proofs. We present an efficient instantiation that is proven to be secure in the generic group model and finally demonstrate the practical efficiency of our DAC by presenting performance benchmarks based on an implementation.
Bruno Pereira, José Manuel Torres, Pedro Sobral, Rui S. Moreira · 6 authors
Since its appearance in 2008, blockchain technology has found multiple uses in fields such as banking, supply chain management, and healthcare. One of the most intriguing uses of blockchain is in voting systems, where the technology can overcome the security and transparency concerns that plague traditional voting systems. This paper provides a thorough examination of the implementation of a blockchain-based voting system. The proposed system employs cryptographic methods to protect voters’ privacy and anonymity while ensuring the verifiability and integrity of election results. Digital signatures, homomorphic encryption (He), zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and the Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus method underpin the system. A review of the literature on the use of blockchain technology for voting systems supports the analysis and the technical and logistical constraints connected with implementing the suggested system. The study suggests solutions to problems such as managing voter identification and authentication, ensuring accessibility for all voters, and dealing with network latency and scalability. The suggested blockchain-based voting system can provide a safe and transparent platform for casting and counting votes, ensuring election results’ privacy, anonymity, and verifiability. The implementation of blockchain technology can overcome traditional voting systems’ security and transparency shortcomings while also delivering a high level of integrity and traceability.
Physical terminals provide network services to upper-layer applications, but their limited memory and processing power make it challenging to perform security updates and patches, leaving them vulnerable to known security threats. Attackers can exploit these weaknesses to control the terminals and attack the network. To restrict unauthorized access to the network and its resources, appropriate access control mechanisms are necessary. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained access control method based on smart contracts (FACSC) for terminals in software-defined networking (SDN). FACSC utilizes the attribute-based access control (ABAC) model to achieve fine-grained control over terminal access networks. To ensure the security and reliability of access control policies and terminal-related attribute information, we utilize smart contract technology to implement the ABAC model. Furthermore, we leverage the programming protocol-independent packet processor (P4) to filter and forward packets in the data plane based on the packet option field, enabling rapid terminal access. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves fine-grained secure authentication of terminals in SDN networks with a low authentication processing overhead.
Covert channels serve the construction of cyberspace security. By realizing the secure transmission of data, it is widely used in political and financial fields. Blockchain covert channels have higher reliability and concealment compared to traditional network-based covert channels. However, existing blockchain covert storage channels need to create a large number of transactions to transmit covert information. Creating transactions requires a transation fee, which means that the implementation of blockchain covert storage channels requires a high cost. Besides, created transactions remain on-chain permanently, leading to the threat of covert information being detected. To overcome these limitations, we propose a blockchain covert timing channel framework. Specifically, we utilize inv and getdata messages in the Bitcoin transaction broadcast as carriers and propose three modulation modes to achieve covert channels without cost and leaving no trace. We evaluate the concealment of our modes by K-S, KLD tests, and machine learning approaches. Experimental results show the indistinguishability between traffic carrying covert information and normal traffic. Our channels promise a capacity of 2.4 bit/s.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In order to study the standard security access authentication mechanism of intelligent sensing terminals of massive power Internet of Things, In order to study the standard secure access authentication mechanism of intelligent sensing terminal of massive power Internet of Things, a new privacy protection method widely used in block chain is proposed to prove identity. The traditional power IoT cloud-side interaction security access MQTT protocol still has a lot of room for adaptation and optimization. First, the proposed non-interactive zero-knowledge proof identity authentication method reduces the time of traditional standard secure access authentication process; Second, it reduced the computing resources consumed in a large number of intelligent sensors access authentication. The comparison results show that, the access authentication time of this method is 30% <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="\sim" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mo>∼</mml:mo> </mml:math> 50% less than that of the traditional secure access authentication process. The computing resources consumed during authentication are reduced by 20% to 30% compared with traditional security and secrecy mechanisms.
With its dedicated money Ether, Ethereum offers regionalized Ethernet simulated computers to manage as an open-source public blockchain, peer-to-peer agreementsability to perform clever contracts. And since Ethereum is the second largest blockchain, transaction data volumes are growing rapidly. However, at this point, most analyses of Ethereum data are focused on the statistical characteristics of Ethereum nodes and do not examine how transactions between them behave. In this research, leverage transaction data from existing blocks to categorize users and smart contracts into groups and Applies machine learning to Ethereum analytics for the first time. The identification data of the accessible Ethereum users and smart contracts is used to examine the clustering findings.
Saba Abdulbaqi Salman, Sufyan Al-Janabi, Ali Makki Sagheer
Electronic voting has become popular in democratic countries, and thus the cyber security of this system is demanded. In this paper, some attacks were made on a proposed electronic election model based on blockchain technology, where the impact of each attack (Sybil, DDoS, Eclipse, Selfish mining, 51% attack) was calculated, and the time in which it achieved 51% of the attack was calculated. In this study, we investigate of Blockchain technology’s attack surface, focusing on general blockchains. The following factors show how these attacks have an impact on the proposed model: 1) The cryptographic architecture of the Blockchain. 2) The distributed architecture of systems using Blockchain. 3) The Blockchain application context. For each of these factors, we identify several attacks, including selfish mining, 51% attack, sybil attacks, eclipse attacks, distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks, consensus delay (due to selfish behavior or distributed denial-of-service attacks), blockchain forks, orphan blocks, block swallowing, wallet theft, smart contract attacks, and privacy attacks.