Blockchain Papers

Pimal Khanpara, Shivam Patel, Sharada Valiveti

In a country like India, resolution of any major issue or conflict primarily lies in the hands of the government. Given that India is one of the world's largest democracies, the voting system is one of the most essential phases, considering its limitations. The voting system is mostly based on a centralized system. As a result, there are many chances of risks like vote tampering, security, transparencies, DoS attacks and many more. Due to these problems, the population of the world, is not fully trusting the voting system. The motive is to overcome the abovementioned loopholes and provide the nation a better environment for a better government. The one solution came out to overcome this problem is a Blockchain Technology. Blockchain is a method of storing information in such a way that it is difficult or impossible to edit, hack, or trick the system. The Blockchain is a distributed ledger that can efficiently and verifiably record transactions between two parties. The Blockchain Technology is used to protect the data from theft and to prevent vote tampering. This paper presents the study and analysis of various blockchain-based voting mechanisms.

Buhari Ugbede Umar, Olayemi Mikail Olaniyi, Daniel Oluwaseun Olajide, Eustace M. Dogo

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger of transactions that are linked together cryptographically leading to immutability and tamper-resistance, thereby ensuring the integrity of data. Due to the ability of blockchain to guarantee the integrity of data, it has found wide-range adoption in electronic voting (e-voting) systems in recent years, this is in a bid to prevent manipulation of votes. However, due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, opportunities arise for privacy intrusion of the data being secured. The translation of this privacy flaw in blockchain to e-voting systems is the possibility of violation of the privacy of the electorates. Consequently, in a bid to achieve integrity and privacy of votes in e-voting, this study presents the use of an open-source blockchain system, coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem, towards addressing the privacy concerns of the blockchain. The performance of the system was evaluated and a transaction throughput of 1424 tps was obtained for ten thousand simulated ballot transactions. Further evaluation was carried out on the system, by increasing the number of system transactions. This showed that the mining time of the blockchain increased by an average factor of 0.18 s for every thousand increases in the number of transactions. Also, the response time of the system to a range of user actions was evaluated over an increasing number of voters. Results obtained showed that the response time of the system for vote casting operations increased by an average of 0.33 min per thousand voters while for vote tallying there was an increase in response time by an average of 0.848 min per thousand voters. The scientific value of this study is the development of an integrity and privacy-preserving e-voting system consisting of an open-source nodechain coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem following the security requirements of e-voting systems. The proposed system addresses the issue of integrity in e-voting while still maintaining the privacy of the electorates.

K. L. Neela, V. Kavitha

No abstract is available for this record.

Lorenzo Bracciale, Pierpaolo Loreti, Emanuele Raso, Giuseppe Bianchi · 6 authors

Demand response consists in the modification of energy consumption by end users to attain specific effects on the electrical grid, namely reduce congestion and optimize the usage of renewable energy. When implemented with blockchain, demand response poses important privacy concerns since it generally needs the publication of sensitive information about users regarding their energy consumption. In this work, we devise a system to preserve privacy in such a scenario by using Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) algorithms and a blockchain-based architecture with the goal of achieving both accountability and privacy.

Peiru Li, Shanshan Li, Mengjie Ding, Jiapeng Yu · 7 authors

Hyperledger Fabric is another development of blockchain technology after Ethereum, which is more suitable as an operating platform for smart contracts. However, the testing technology of Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (also known as chaincode) is not yet mature currently. Based on this, this paper studies the vulnerability detection of Golang chaincodes. Firstly, we summarize 17 kinds of Golang chaincode vulnerabilities by investigating existing research. Secondly, taking the high accuracy of dynamic detection and the high efficiency of static detection into consideration, we propose a chaincode vulnerability detection framework that combines the dynamic symbolic execution and the static abstract syntax tree analysis technology. We also implement a supporting-tool that can detect the above 15 types of vulnerabilities. Finally, we test the tool by 15 chaincodes collected from GitHub and unknown vulnerabilities were detected in 13 projects. The precision turned out to be 91% after manual inspection. In order to verify the recall rate, we manually inject 30 vulnerabilities into the collected chaincodes and all of them are detected. The evaluation results show the accuracy of the proposed vulnerability detection method for Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts.

D. Prabakaran, Shyamala Ramachandran

No abstract is available for this record.

Wei Liu, Wenlong Feng, Mengxing Huang, Yun Xu · 5 authors

A service can be an intangible commodity in which no physical goods are transferred from the seller to the buyer. However, traditional trading platforms have many limitations in trading services due to dishonest buyers and brokers. In this paper, we propose a service trading ecosystem based on blockchain, named STEB, which combines blockchain, smart contract, encryption, and digital authentication techniques for service trading. In addition, a dual-chain architecture, which contains two types of blockchains, namely TraChain and SerChain, and a hierarchical encryption scheme of the data on the chain, are proposed to ensure the integrity of transaction data and fine-grained privacy protection of users. Furthermore, we describe a new set of smart contracts to ensure safe transactions for the entire service trading. Security analysis and simulation results confirm that the proposed STEB can achieve more efficient contract execution and enhance service transaction privacy.

Ming Fong Sie, Jingze Wu, Seth Austin Harding, Chien-Lung Lin · 6 authors

Technologies designed for digital provenance, especially the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, may allow for security, transparency, and traceability in the global supply chain. However, upstream nodes in the supply chain that work for large-scale production suppliers are not considered. In addition, most IoT blockchain systems adopt an ID-based signature scheme that may affect the efficiency of IoT devices. We propose using aggregate verification to improve the security and efficiency of ID-based verification, reduce network traffic on the blockchain, and transfer computing overhead to aggregator nodes. This paper implements a multi-layer blockchain for Agriculture 4.0 supply chain management that has higher efficiency, effectiveness, and security in comparison to conventional blockchains. We design a Multi-Layer Aggregate Verification (MLAV) solution to improve supply chain management with IoT Blockchain for Agriculture 4.0 through the following methods. First, we use a multi-layer IoT blockchain system to reduce Ethereum gas fee. Second, we design an ID-based Aggregate Verification scheme, thereby eliminating the certificate management cost in the traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and reducing bandwidth and computation time requirements. Third, we implement a three-layer blockchain infrastructure. In Layer 1, IoT devices sense and upload data to the system's database; in Layer 2, smart contracts execute aggregate ID-based signature verification from IoT devices and upload the transactions to the private blockchain; in Layer 3, a batch converts the layer 2 data and uploads its Merkle root to Ethereum, thereby reducing the required gas fee.

Engin Zeydan, Yekta Türk, S. Bugrahan Ozturk, Hakan Mutlu · 5 authors

Quantum technologies have made significant advances and are likely to lead to important security challenges and threats to networks in the near future. On the other hand, sharing the huge amount of data from the Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of data as a service could provide new revenue streams for infrastructure providers and service providers. However, post-quantum computing exposes the entire data sharing ecosystem to a new set of security risks. In this article, we propose a novel blockchain-based system for data sharing in the post-quantum era. The proposed system facilitates data sharing among multiple organizations while meeting compliance and regulatory requirements via private blockchain. We implemented the proposed architecture and information flow using three blockchain networks (namely Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum, and Quorum) and selected NTRU as our quantum resistant security algorithm (QRSA) to compare the parallelization performance of Toom-Cook's and Karatsuba's computation methods. Experimental results show that parallel computation has a positive impact when the security level of QRSAs is lowered, and the transaction time savings is almost 50 percent in favor of Quorum. Finally, we outline the main challenges and potential solutions.

Zichi Wang, Xin Feng, Xinpeng ZHANG

The images with non-fungible token (NFT) are employed as the digital artistic works in metaverse for creation, transaction, sharing, and collection.Being different from natural images, the content of NFT images is defined by user and distributed in the digital space widely.It is convenient for the hidden of secret data.In this case, covert communication with NFT images is a new branch of image steganography.Then, a steganographic method for NFT images was proposed accordingly.Given a NFT image, the regions of its profile and the components with high frequency were enhanced firstly to enrich the details which were beneficial to hide the modification trace of steganography.In this way, the enhanced image was used as cover since it is more suitable for steganography.Then, the tendency modification direction of each pixel was determined by the differences between the enhanced image and the given image.The differences were also used to determine the cost value of modification amplitude.Thus, the undetectability of steganography can be increased further.Secret data was embedded into the cover image using the popular steganographic coding schemes.Experimental results showed that the proposed method had imporoved undetectability on NFT images compared with existing digital steganographic schemes.Compared with HILL, MiPOD, and DEFI, the proposed method can increase the detection error P_E of steganalysis by 8.7%, 9.2% and 6.2%, respectively (the average value for the cases of different payload and steganalytic features).Therefore, the proposed method is suitable for NFT images and it provides targeted steganographic method for the third kind of images, i.e., NFT images, except of natural images and generated images.For further study, the deep learning-based steganographic method can be designed for NFT images using the strong fitting and learning ability of neural networks.

Yingjun Zhou, Yin Gao, Jiajun Chen, Dapeng Li · 7 authors

Fifth generation (5G) wireless network can provide wide network coverage, high transmission rate, low communication latency, and support massive connections. However, it is not able to support user privacy information security and virtual intellectual property protection. Furthermore, the 5G system is centralized which is easy to be attacked and cause data monopoly. Thus, 5G advanced is expected to solve the above issues. Applying blockchain in 5G advanced will provide decentralized service and ensure the trustworthiness. In this paper, applications for blockchain enabled 5G advanced are presented. In addition, this paper also investigates the solutions to support bolckchain based on 5G RAN (radio access network) architecture.

Vehbi Neziri, Isak Shabani, Ramadan Dervishi, Blerim Rexha

Anonymity and privacy in the electoral process are mandatory features found in any democratic society, and many authors consider these fundamental civil liberties and rights. During the election process, every voter must be identified as eligible, but after casting a vote, the voter must stay anonymous, assuring voter and vote unlinkability. Voter anonymity and privacy are the most critical issues and challenges of almost all electronic voting systems. However, vote immutability must be assured as well, which is a problem in many new democracies, and Blockchain as a distributed technology meets this data immutability requirement. Our paper analyzes current solutions in Blockchain and proposes a new approach through the combination of two different Blockchains to achieve privacy and anonymity. The first Blockchain will be used for key management, while the second will store anonymous votes. The encrypted vote is salted with a nonce, hashed, and finally digitally signed with the voter’s private key, and by mixing the timestamp of votes and shuffling the order of cast votes, the chances of linking the vote to the voter will be reduced. Adopting this approach with Blockchain technology will significantly transform the current voting process by guaranteeing anonymity and privacy.

Nelofa Akter, Fahmida Haque, Saha Reno, Mamun Ahmed

In the case of single sign-on (SSO) within the companies, chip-embedded cards can offer highly secured data encryption. For instance, smart cards, a conceptual card with an encoded interconnected chip that serves as a private key, provide personally identifiable information, verification, storing data, and other types of security management. To secure an organization, blockchain technology is adopted since it represents a transparent database. Ethereum is an unauthorized, distributed blockchain system where everyone can manipulate the transaction records. Hyperledger Fabric, on the other hand, is an authorized and secret framework that incorporates the latest calculation of the asset’s properties and the background history of transactions. In classical Smart Card Management System, frequently identified concerns with existing techniques are - physical documents and properties displacement, dispersed blocks containing papers, intermediary and distributors etc. In this paper, we are focused on creating a blockchain-based smart card management system using Hyperledger. Hyperledger has a preprogrammed community of users and application usability for these particular users alone is available so that data is appropriately covered. By accessing the Historical Archive, this system will detect illegal entry and alteration, ensuring information neutrality, security, and authenticity.

Simran Bhari, Suhail Javed Quraishi

Blockchain is a technical breakthrough being investigated by academics and business across a variety of applications, encompassing cryptocurrencies, financial businesses, Internet of things, 5G, risk evaluation, and financial and commercial services. Cloud technology, on the other hand, is ushering in the Digital Realm and quickly becoming the most fashionable topic in IT. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is plagued by a lack of attention, respect, and responsibility. Blockchain, with its innovative characteristics such as autonomy and immutability, adds dependability and authenticity to cloud technology.This research examines the literature on Blockchain-based enterprise solutions published between 2008 and 2021. The following manuscript focuses on the technological integration of Blockchain technology and cloud infrastructure, as well as the current achievements in the field of Cryptocurrency cloud technology. To Be precise, we split the information into three categories: Blockchain employing IaaS, Blockchain employing PaaS, and Blockchain employing SaaS. We’ll start with a look at a few Blockchain characteristics and how they relate to cloud services. Then we provide our study methods, as well as a detailed analysis of important background information. Following that, we describe cutting-edge studies in Ledger storage-as-a-service, strategy creation, computation-as-a-service, data aggregation-as-a-service, microservice-as-a-service, and Acquired by extraction.The report concludes with the current issues in Blockchain based cloud technology, their expected obstacles, and potential studies and opportunities. We believe that research shall give a complete knowledge of the legitimacy of Blockchain based cloud technology and will contribute in the creation of the future cloud computing environment.

P. Shamili, B. Muruganantham

Federation Payment Tree, a new Off-chain with zero-knowledge hash time lock commitment setup is proposed in this paper. The security of blockchain is based on consensus protocols that delay when number of concurrent transactions processed in given throughput framework. The scalability of blockchain is the ability to perform support increasing workload transaction. The FP-Tree provides zero knowledge hash lock commitment connect with off-chain protocols by using the payment channel, which enables execution of off-chain protocol that allows interaction between the parties without involving the consensus protocol. It allows to make payment across an authorization path of payment channel. Such a payment tree requires two commitment scheme is Timelock and Fundlock, each party lock fund for a time period. The main challenges we faced in this paper is that the computational power, storage and cryptography. Furthermore, we discussed many attacks on off-chain payment channel that allows a malicious adversary to make fund lose. The FP-Tree supports multi-parti computation (MPC) merging transactions into single hash value in payment tree. We enable the parties to generate single hash value by consumes both less than 0 (log2 N ) and space less than 0 (log2 N ) time combine element over length of single hash. The results were discussed in this paper and efficiency of FP-Tree is well suited for the blockchain technology. We achieved the accuracy of 60.2% in federated payment tree when compared with the proof of work and proof of authority.

Omaji Samuel, Akogwu Blessing Omojo, Syed Muhammad Mohsin, Prayag Tiwari · 6 authors

The Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible for health institutions to have remote diagnosis, reliable, preventive, and real-time decision-making. However, the anonymity and privacy of patients are not considered in IoT. Therefore, this article proposes a blockchain-based anonymous system, known as GarliMediChain, for providing anonymity and privacy during COVID-19 information sharing. In GarliMediChain, garlic routing and blockchain are integrated to provide low-latency communication, privacy, anonymity, trust, and security. Also, COVID-19 information is encrypted multiple times before transmitting to a series of nodes in the network. To ensure that COVID-19 information is successfully shared, a blockchain-based coalition system is proposed. The coalition system enables health institutions to share information while maximizing their payoffs. In addition, each institution uses the proposed fictitious play to study the strategies of others in order to update its belief by selecting the best responses from them. Furthermore, simulation results show that the proposed system is resistant to security-related attacks and is robust, efficient, and adaptive. From the results, the proposed proof-of-epidemiology-of-interest consensus protocol has 15.93% less computational cost than 26.30% of proof-of-work and 57.77% proof-of-authority consensus protocol, respectively. Nonetheless, the proposed GarliMediChain system promotes global collaborations by combining existing anonymity and trust solutions with the support of blockchain technology.

James A. Cunningham, Nigel Davies, Sarah Devaney, Søren Holm · 7 authors

In recent years we have seen the adoption of distributed ledger technology (DLT), originally the mechanism underpinning the operation of the Bitcoin crypto currency, across a wider range of technology sectors including healthcare. DLT allows for the design of informatics systems with the properties of immutability, security, and decentralization. One recent innovation in the space has been the specification and development of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are decentralized DLT-based records that represent ownership of a unique digital asset. The predominant current use case for NFTs has been in the representation and sale of digital artwork, however the features offered by NFTs, unique-ness, immutability, transferability, and verifiability, are directly applicable to the design of health informatics systems. In this paper we explore these properties and describe a reference architecture for using NFTs as a means of representing and transferring records of patient's consent for medical data use.

Zhimei Sui, Joseph K. Liu, Jiangshan Yu, Man Ho Au · 5 authors

Payment channels have been a promising solution to blockchain scalability. While payment channels for script-empowered blockchains (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) have been well studied, developing payment channels for scriptless blockchains (such as Monero) is considered challenging. In particular, nabling bidirectional payment on scriptless blockchains remains an open challenge.

Mayank Raikwar

A distributed and reliable source of randomness is always a critical element in cryptography, both in the construction and application of cryptographic primitives. Modern cryptography such as blockchain, cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance is heavily dependent on a trusted randomness source. In particular, Decentralized Randomness Beacon (DRB) protocols can be a reliable source of randomness. A DRB protocol generates a continuous stream of publicly verifiable random values. Almost all the available DRB protocols are collaborative in nature where participants of a DRB protocol collaborate their local entropy to generate global randomness.

Jia Shi, Xuewen Zeng, Rui Han

How to achieve secure content distribution and accountability in information-centric networking (ICN) is a crucial problem. Subscribers need to verify whether the data came from a reliable source, rather than from a spoofing adversary. Public key cryptography was introduced to achieve a method of authentication that binds the data packet to its owner. In existing prototypes, PKIs, identity-based signatures (IBSs) and recommendation networks are the common schemes used to ensure the authenticity and availability of public keys. However, CA-based PKIs and KGC-based IBSs have been proven to be weak when it comes to resisting security attacks, with recommendation networks being too complex to deploy. In this respect, we designed a novel distributed authentication model as a secure scheme to support public key cryptography. Our model establishes a decentralized public key infrastructure by combining the smart contracts of blockchain and optimized zero-knowledge proof-verifiable presentations by utilizing the DID project, which realizes the management of public key certificates through blockchain and ensures the authenticity and availability of public keys in decentralized infrastructure. Our scheme fundamentally solves the issues of security and feasibility in existing schemes and provides a more scalable solution with respect to authenticating data sources. An experiment demonstrated that our proposal is 20% faster than the original zero knowledge proof scheme in registration.

Samvid B. Pandya, Harshal A. Sanghvi, Riki Patel, Abhijit S. Pandya

Blockchain Technology is considered as an attention-seeking technology and still in its early years according to many researchers. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and many more have emerged as new area of research for the fintech community as they are using blockchain technology. Bitcoin (BTC) emerged as the first real-world application of the blockchain technology. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies depend on the mining of the raw data which is going to be stored in the blocks. These cryptocurrencies depend on crypto mining, which is a complex computation of mathematical equations and problems. To solve these equations and problems, high-powered computing is required. The Graphics Processing Units work on the principle of high-power and high-performance computing. They are also extremely useful for solving complex computation of mathematical equation and problems. We have observed the usage of GPUs to deploy blockchain for mining of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. The research describes about the applications of GPU and FPGA for deployment of Blockchain for Cryptocurrency.

Yuechen Hao

With the explosion of Nakamoto’s paper, blockchain technology has developed rapidly, but at the same time, security problems are emerging one after another. As a potential security hazard in the payment field, 51% attack brings huge risks to the normal operation of the blockchain system. Miners with great computing power have the ability to monopolize the generation of blocks and modify the generated blocks. Therefore, it is necessary to do research of this kind of attacks. This article cites both Nakamoto model and Rosenfeld model to illustrate relationship between computing power and attack success rate. Through a series of mining experiments, this paper preliminarily introduces the operation principles of blockchain based on Ethereum, including proof of stake, smart contracts etc. Models show that for rational attackers who pursue interests, they lack the motivation to launch 51% attacks. For attackers who only destroy the bitcoin system, they need to master huge financial resources to launch 51% of attacks, and even need financial support at the national level, which is very difficult. It can be said that 51% attacks against bitcoin are only theoretically possible, but users still need to pay enough attention. As an emerging technology, blockchain technology is currently in the research and exploration stage. While it is applied in the financial field, it is also expanding to other fields. In the future, blockchain technology will not only be used to solve the trust and security problems in the centralized service architecture, but also appear in more decentralized service scenarios. So, the research on blockchain security is particularly important.

Manal M. Khayyat, Mashael Khayyat, S. Abdel‐Khalek, Romany F. Mansour

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) denotes a network of interlinked sensors, instruments, and other devices for industrial applications in the domains of manufacturing, logistics, transportation, etc. IIoT security is a major crucial research area for several applications. Image encryption techniques gained popularity in the recent years, thanks to increasing requirements for secure image transmission in IIoT environments. At the same time, conventional security solutions built for sensitive data protection are getting outdated in IIoT environment due to the participation of third party. Blockchain (BC) is one of the recent solutions used for security purpose which eliminates the involvement of a third party. With this motivation, the current research article presents a new BC-Enabled Shark Smell Optimization with Hopfield Chaotic Neural Network (SSO-HCNN) for secure encryption in IoT environment. The proposed SSO-HCNN model exploits a composite Chaotic Map (CM) which is integrated into staged logistic and tent maps to initially process the images and develop the variables needed for Arnold mapping. In addition, the SSO algorithm is developed with maximum PSNR and coefficient fitness function to select the optimum secret and public keys of the system amongst the random numbers. Besides, the diffusion phase utilizes HCNN to create a self-diffusion chaotic matrix whereas the jumbled image performs XOR operation using the keys to obtain the cipher image. In SSO-HCNN model, the cryptographic pixel value in the image is saved on BC thus guaranteeing the security and privacy of the images. To examine the superior performance of SSO-HCNN model over state-of-the-art methods, a set of simulations was conducted on benchmark test images. The simulation results of the proposed SSO-HCNN model were promising under different evaluation parameters.

Hari Krishnan Andi

Cloud network has become very popular in recent days due to its accessibility merits. The data stored in the cloud environment are accessible by the clients from any location. A reliable shielding approach will protect the data stored in the cloud from the hackers and malwares. Blockchain is one of the recent technologies implemented to the cloud network for storing the location of the saved data in an encrypted ledger format. This saves the stored data location without exploring it to the hacker’s algorithm. Hence the hacking algorithm fails by not knowing the location to be targeted. Deep learning is an advanced technique developed to act like that of the human neurological analysis on several problems. Implementation of deep learning algorithm to the cloud security module identifies the movement of malware and spywares in the cloud storage. Similarly the cryptography is an old technique structured to hide the information with a cover data or cover image. It allows the hacking algorithm to extract only the useless data. This paper reviews the recent advancements in the cloud security with blockchain, deep learning and cryptographic models.