Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are severely limited in transaction throughput and latency. A promising solution to this issue is a payment channel, which allows trust-free payments between two peers without exhausting the resources of the blockchain. A linked payment channel network (PCN) enables payments between two peers through a series of intermediate nodes that forward and charge for the payments. However, most of existing proposals only use the shortest path as the path of the transaction, which causes the frequently reused channels to be exhausted quickly. In addition, most of existing PCNs are almost only designed for payments between two parties, which leads to limited application scenarios. When multiple payments use the same intermediate channel, the two-party PCNs cannot achieve simultaneous payments. In this paper, we propose a multi-party payment channel (MPC) network, a payment channel proposal that supports multiple payments using the same intermediate channel simultaneously, thereby greatly expanding the application scenarios of payment channels. In addition, our channel selection and transaction conversion strategies can also increase the success rate of transactions. We implement MPC network in the simulated blockchain network and lightning network based on Truffle, and a large number of experiments verify the effectiveness of our solution.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Voting is one of the critical processes of modern democracy. It gives freedom to the people to choose a representative leader to implement their ideas and promote policies that benefit them. Elections can also be audited to ensure each vote is counted correctly. However, corruption: ballot forgery, coercion, etc can cause the public to lose trust in this system. Thus, BCT-Voting [8] - a fully secure and decentralized blockchain technology-based e-voting system (DApp) - was proposed as a voting system that can increase transparency and public trust. This system will provide a secure form of electronic voting which will allow for remote voting. The proposed BCT-Voting system has been deployed on the Ethereum framework. It includes five modules – nomination process, voter identity, vote tampering, donation module, and final counting of votes. However, the data retrieval and sorting from the Ethereum blockchain is a complex process because the personal identity of voters is not known. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an Ethereum Query Language (EQL) to query data from the smart contract of the BCT-Voting system. The query method allows voters or The Federal Election Commission (FEC) to retrieve the required information from the Ethereum chain such as which account voted, when, and for who while still maintaining the privacy of the voter. This method of querying provides fast and minimally labor-intensive audits of elections. It includes recounting ballots and efficiently tracking the history of casted votes to ensure that votes were counted and handled correctly. In this system finding duplicate and fraudulent voters will be easy and it will increase the efficiency and transparency of the electoral process.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
V Niranjani, P S Sanjaay Kamachi, S Siddhaarth, B Venkatachalam · 5 authors
The implementation of Cryptocurrency came into play after the resolution of double spending problem. After a decade of its conceptual inspection there are lots of cryptocurrencies being developed and used in today's market. Even though the cryptocurrencies win the confidence of stakeholders using their decentralized and cryptographic algorithms they always had a possible downfall which is quoted as practically impossible and stated theoretically. One of the major problems is 51 % attack on the blockchain of the cryptocurrency. The solution from centralized banks printing fiat currencies and causing inflation was decentralized miners mining and getting rewarded for their work However democratic the networks reward system seem they will always be dependent on any one factor which may allow a majority resource holder in PoW based system and majority stake holder in a PoS system to manipulate the blockchains consensus once they own 51 % of the mentioned. This problem will remain practically impossible for most of the cryptocurrencies that exists because of their vast network and resources. This is practically possible problem for cryptocurrencies that are new to the market and they face a vulnerable position since their network and resource is not yet distributed enough. To avoid such an attack the currencies should start with a rewarding system that is validated based on PoW and PoS but the miner from the list is declared on a random basis. Even if a malicious attacker holds 51 % of the resource and 51% of asset and cleared PoW and PoS which practically impossible still the rewarding systems random miner mechanism should restrict the same user from manipulating the whole chain and take control over it.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This paper presents a crypto Non Fungible Token (NFT) for real estate information. Current issues with real estate are the lack of asset information availability, and once data is retrieved, its veracity. Moreover, data can be out of data or artificially manipulated for an economic benefit. An example could be the fire alarm inspection logs. On the other hand, the main benefits of tokenisation are 1) decentralisation from a single source of authority, 2) encryption of data that avoids tampering, and 3) digital proof of ownership. The NFT registers real estate static and dynamic information to be traded in the data marketplace between the different users and stakeholders such as investors, occupiers, insurers and property managers. The information registered in the NFT contains real estate deeds, transactions and relevant parameters that change over time. The infrastructure of the proposed real estate NFT consists of a private token in a private blockchain entirely developed for this application rather than ERC-1155 or ERC-721; therefore, a new crypto token is created. Furthermore, the consensus protocol is a mixture between the proof of work and proof of stake mechanisms by choosing random validators with staked Cryptocurrency already, such as Ethereum. Experimental results show that the increment of the NFT at every transaction does not produce an equal increment of mining time or mining nonce, making the NFT predictable for higher complex models.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector represents a significant portion of any developing or developed economies of the world involving all banking, insurance, and non-banking financial institutions. This sector is the biggest buyer of identity management technology solutions and services. This accentuates the pivotal role of a robust identity authentication mechanism in the BFSI sector. The rapid proliferation of digitization in the different financial sectors, disruptive technological innovations around different services, and everchanging user behaviors are revolutionizing the way in which the institution of this sector interacts with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders. The definition of great consumer experience has widened in scope and includes facets like consumer trust, security, real-time, etc. The traditional identity verification system like passwords, pins, biometrics, facial recognition, etc. are prone to vulnerabilities. Blockchain addresses the lacunas in the present system by using a decentralized approach to transform digital identity. The purpose of this research paper is to study the use of blockchain in digital identity verification, the benefits it brings to identity management, and different techno-commercial use cases. This paper will also examine the zero-knowledge proof and the role of cryptography. For this study, a case study technique was used, in which different use cases of blockchain for digital identity management in the BFSI sector have been analyzed. Academics, practitioners, and government officials will benefit from the research article in investigating, implementing, and developing solutions for digital identity verification using blockchain.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain-based systems have gained immense popularity as enablers of independent asset transfers and smart contract functionality. They have also, since as early as the first Bitcoin blocks, been used for storing arbitrary contents such as texts and images. On-chain data storage functionality is useful for a variety of legitimate use cases. It does, however, also pose a systematic risk. If abused, for example by posting illegal contents on a public blockchain, data storage functionality can lead to legal consequences for operators and users that need to store and distribute the blockchain, thereby threatening the operational availability of entire blockchain ecosystems. In this paper, we develop and apply a cloud-based approach for quickly discovering and classifying content on public blockchains. Our method can be adapted to different blockchain systems and offers insights into content-related usage patterns and potential cases of abuse. We apply our method on the two most prominent public blockchain systems - Bitcoin and Ethereum - and discuss our results. To the best of our knowledge, the presented study is the first to systematically analyze non-financial content stored on the Ethereum blockchain and the first to present a side-by-side comparison between different blockchains in terms of the quality and quantity of stored data.
Metaverse depicts a vista of constructing a virtual environment parallel to the real world so people can communicate with others and objects through digital entities. In the real world, communication relies on identities and addresses that are recognized by authorities, no matter the link is established via post, email, mobile phone, or landline. Metaverse, however, is different from the real world, which requires a single identity belongs to the individual. This identity can be an encrypted virtual address in the metaverse but no one can trace or verify it. In order to achieve such addresses to hide individuals in the metaverse, re-mapping the virtual address to the individual's identity and a specific spectrum to support the address-based communication for the metaverse are needed. Therefore, metaverse native or meta-native communications based on blockchain could be a promising solution to directly connect entities with their native encrypted addresses that gets rid of the existing network services based on IP, cellular, HTTP, etc. This paper proposes a vision of blockchain, encrypted address and address-based access model for all users, devices, services, etc. to contribute to the metaverse. Furthermore, the allocation architecture of a designated spectrum for the metaverse is proposed to remove the barrier to access to the metaverse/blockchain in response to the initiatives of metaverse and decentralized Internet.
Generally, image protection is often accomplished by digital watermark, which is also widely used in the field of data protection and data ownership authentication. However, the existing digital watermark has inherent disadvantages, it needs completely trusted third parties to act as the arbitration parties, which may be difficult to achieve. Second, an image watermark algorithm will inevitably lead to the loss of image data when operating on the image data, while it is usually irreversible. The zero-watermark algorithm can solve the problem of data loss but relies more on the trusted third party than a traditional digital watermark, which makes its prospects limited. With the development of blockchain technology in recent years, its features of de-trusted third parties combine the fairness and process automation of smart contracts to make up for the shortcomings of the zero-watermarking algorithm. This paper studies image storage and authentication frameworks. This framework utilizes the advantages of zero-watermarking algorithm and blockchain, using the Inter-Planetary File System to solve the data expansion problem of blockchain, which well avoids the shortcomings of zero-watermarking algorithm and blockchain. Experiment and inference illustrate that the proposed framework is feasible.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Copyright protection in multimedia protection distribution is a challenging problem. To protect multimedia data, many watermarking methods have been proposed in the literature. However, most of them cannot be used effectively in a multimedia distribution network (MDN) as they are not designed to support multi-layer watermark embedding. Multi-layer watermarking mechanisms were developed to protect multimedia data across different layers in an MDN. However, in those mechanisms, we need to trust the entities in the MDN, such as regional and country distributors. To overcome this potential drawback, in this article, we propose a novel privacy protection mechanism for MDNs by combining the advantages of both blockchain and watermarking technologies. A specifically designed watermarking algorithm is used to link the copyright information with the audio file, while a novel blockchain-based smart contract mechanism is developed to enforce the proper functioning of each entity in the distribution network. Moreover, the new audio mechanism is computationally efficient. Although audio signals are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, the proposed approach can easily be extended to other multimedia objects, such as an image. The validity of the proposed mechanism is demonstrated by our simulation results. The proposed mechanism can benefit multimedia production companies and other entities in the MDN.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Voting is essential for any modern society. E-voting has been grabbed remarkable attention in recent years as it reduces the cost of the process and increases transparency. Blockchain technology opened the door to a new approach to evoting. Some studies were conducted to design e-voting schemes utilizing blockchain as a public bulletin board, providing the ability for verifiability and self-tallying. In this paper, we propose a novel trustless e-voting scheme based on blockchain technology that minimizes the intervention of authorities in the process, and voters can vote remotely using their own mobile devices. This scheme prevents voters from selling their votes, and anyone can cast his/her vote for free. In addition, everyone in the network can tally the final result and verify the correctness of the votes.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Video conferencing applications help people communicate via the Internet and provide a significant and consistent basis for virtual meetings. However, integrity, security, identification, and authentication problems are still universal. Current video conference technologies typically rely on cloud systems to provide a stable and secure basis for executing tasks and processes. At the same time, video conferencing applications are being migrated from centralized to decentralized solutions for better performance without the need for third-party interactions. This article demonstrates a decentralized smart identification scheme for video conferencing applications based on biometric technology, machine learning, and a decentralized hash table combined with blockchain technology. We store users' information on a distributed hash table and transactional events on the distributed ledger after identifying users by implementing machine learning functions. Furthermore, we leverage distributed ledger technology's immutability and traceability properties and distributed hash table unlimited storage feature to improve the system's storage capacity and immutability by evaluating three possible architectures. The experimental results show that an architecture based on blockchain and distributed hash table has better efficiency but needs a longer time to execute than the two other architectures using a centralized database.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has been widely used in digital currency, Internet of Things, and other important fields because of its decentralization, nontampering, and anonymity. The vigorous development of blockchain cannot be separated from the security guarantee. However, there are various security threats within the blockchain that have shown in the past to cause huge financial losses. This paper aims at studying the multi-level security threats existing in the Ethereum blockchain, and exploring the security protection schemes under multiple attack scenarios. There are ten attack scenarios studied in this paper, which are replay attack, short url attack, false top-up attack, transaction order dependence attack, integer overflow attack, re-entrancy attack, honeypot attack, airdrop hunting attack, writing of arbitrary storage address attack, and gas exhaustion denial of service attack. This paper also proposes protection schemes. Finally, these schemes are evaluated by experiments. Experimental results show that our approach is efficient and does not bring too much extra cost and that the time cost has doubled at most.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Currency Recognition and Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The blockchain specifications distributed ledger, traceability, immutability provide a secure high-speed voting system. Data stored on the blockchain cannot be traced back, edit or deleted due to which transparent and high-performance capabilities are inherent to the network. But as the information of the e-voting system increases storage space and processing cost also increases due to an increase in delay. This delay increases as the comparison of hash value with the existing hash value for uniqueness. Apart from the uniqueness of hash designer also required initial 8 bytes of hash to be zeros. In this paper, we propose the multiobjective genetic algorithm-based creation of a side-chain to enhance the scalability and performance of the blockchain-based e-voting system. We compare the storage cost and the processing cost of the state of the art models with the proposed model. our experiments yielded observations on the scalability and the performance of the blockchain-based e-voting system.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The implementation of blockchain technology by various businesses has gained impetus at the same time as within the finance area it is achieving new heights progressively. To generate a distributed ledger a blockchain (data structure) is utilized. Basically, a blockchain is a collection of (a page of a ledger or record book) i.e. blocks in a sequential fashion. A record book holds all dealings, timestamps, the hash value of the preceding block, record book compensation, record book number, and others. Each single record book holds a hash value of the preceding record book or block, therefore making a series of record books accompanying one another. In this research work, while discovering these DApps, we will discover them at a stage that is sufficient to comprehend in what way they work and manage various concerns. In this research work, we will deliberate and recognize Blockchain arrangement, how Ethereum works, writing smart contracts, the introduction of web3.js, and wallet services. Finally, we put forward promising clarifications in detail for improving the safety of the distributed ledger for industrialized applications
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abir El Azzaoui, Haotian Chen, So Hyeon Kim, Yi Pan · 5 authors
Medical supply chain communication networks engender critical information and data. Notably in the COVID era, inner personal and private information is being shared between healthcare providers regarding the medical supply chain. In recent years, multiple cyber-attacks have targeted medical supply chain communication networks due to their lack of security measures. In the era where cyber-attacks are cheaper and easier due to the computational power and various algorithms available for malicious uses, security, and data privacy requires intensive and higher measures. On the other hand, Information Hiding Techniques (IHT) compromise various advanced methods to hide sensitive information from being disclosed to malicious nodes. Moreover, with the support of Blockchain, IHT can bring higher security and the required privacy levels. In this paper, we propose the implementation of Blockchain and smart contract with the information hiding technique to enhance the security and privacy of data communication in critical systems, such as smart healthcare supply chain communication networks. Results show the feasibility of the framework using Hyperledger smart contract along with the desired security level.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohamed Al Ali, Ahmed Adel Ismail, Hany M. Elgohary, Saad M. Darwish · 5 authors
Digital evidence is critical in cybercrime investigations because it is used to connect individuals to illegal activity. Digital evidence is complicated, diffuse, volatile, and easily altered, and as such, it must be protected. The Chain of Custody (CoC) is a critical component of the digital evidence procedure. The aim of the CoC is to demonstrate that the evidence has not been tampered with at any point throughout the investigation. Because the uncertainty associated with digital evidence is not being assessed at the moment, it is impossible to determine the trustworthiness of CoC. As scientists, forensic examiners have a responsibility to reverse this tendency and officially confront the uncertainty inherent in any evidence upon which they base their judgments. To address these issues, this article proposes a new paradigm for ensuring the integrity of digital evidence (CoC documents). The new paradigm employs fuzzy hash within blockchain data structure to handle uncertainty introduced by error-prone tools when dealing with CoC documents. Traditional hashing techniques are designed to be sensitive to small input modifications and can only determine if the inputs are exactly the same or not. By comparing the similarity of two images, fuzzy hash functions can determine how different they are. With the symmetry idea at its core, the suggested framework effectively deals with random parameter probabilities, as shown in the development of the fuzzy hash segmentation function. We provide a case study for image forensics to illustrate the usefulness of this framework in introducing forensic preparedness to computer systems and enabling a more effective digital investigation procedure.
Open access
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Archaeological Research and Protection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Secure and real-time communication is an essential condition in mobile vehicular networks, and this requires secure authentication and seamless access enabled by roaming services. As a security inspector, roaming authentication ensures that legitimate users can access the network securely. However, today’s roaming authentication protocols authenticate users with the help of centralized authentication servers, leading to the risk of the single point of failure and roaming fraud. The massive device access in 5G networks further exacerbates the losses when problems occur. In light of it, we propose a decentralized fraud-proof roaming authentication framework based on blockchain. We leverage smart contracts to implement a roaming authentication protocol, including user/AP registration, authentication, and revocation. For higher efficiency, we utilize the Bloom filter for the revocation process. In addition, we design an unforgeable and undeniable billing scheme based on hash chain technology. Security and performance analysis show that the proposed roaming authentication scheme can provide the required security features while incurring an acceptable authentication delay.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Smart contracts are becoming more and more popular in financial scenarios like medical insurance. Rather than traditional schemes, using smart contracts as a medium is a better choice for both participants, as it is fairer, more reliable, more efficient, and enables real-time payment. However, medical insurance contracts need to input the patient's condition information as the judgment logic to trigger subsequent execution. Since the blockchain is a closed network, it lacks a secure network environment for data interaction with the outside world. The Data feed aims to provide the service of the on-chain and off-chain data interaction. Existing researches on the data feed has solved the security problems on it effectively, such as Town Crier, TLS-N and they have also taken into account the privacy-preserving problems. However, these schemes cannot actually protect privacy because when the ciphertext data is executed by the contract, privacy information can still be inferred by analyzing the transaction results, since states of the contract are publicly visible. In this paper, based on zero-knowledge proof and Hawk technology, a on-and-off-chain complete smart contract data feed privacy-preserving scheme is proposed. In order to present our scheme more intuitively, we combined the medical insurance compensation case to implement it, which is called MIPDF. In our MIPDF, the patient and the insurance company are parties involved in the contract, and the hospital is the data provider of data feed. The patient's medical data is sent to the smart contract under the umbrella of the zero-knowledge proof signature scheme. The smart contract verifies the proof and calculates the insurance premium based on the judgment logic. Meanwhile, we use Hawk technology to ensure the privacy of on-chain contract execution, so that no information will be disclosed due to the result of contract execution. We give a general description of our scheme within the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We experiment and evaluate MIPDF on Ethereum for in-depth analysis. The results show that our scheme can securely and efficiently support the functions of medical insurance and achieve complete privacy-preserving.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the prevalence of digital cameras, multimedia data have been used to record facts and provide evidence of events. However, the integrity of multimedia data is vulnerable to attacks with the proliferation of data tampering tools. In fact, an effective multimedia content authentication system should support compliant editing (cropping, rotation, compression, and so forth) and have the ability to detect malicious data tampering. Data traceability is a feasible strategy to verify the integrity and provenance of multimedia data. Besides, the privacy of multimedia data needs to be protected to prevent unauthorized access. In this paper, we trace transformations of multimedia data privately by integrating a transparent and immutable blockchain with trusted hardware that provides the capability of private computation. Our system exploits a hybrid storage pattern that separately stores multimedia data off the blockchain and their hashes on the blockchain. With this, our system ensures data integrity and addresses the issue of blockchain's storage capability. Experimental results and analysis show that our solution is efficient and verifiable. A lightweight verifier merely needs to store block headers and is able to validate query results returned by full nodes.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques