Blockchain Papers

Cynthia Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Hongyu Guo, Mao Chen, Wei Ou

No abstract is available for this record.

Sanjay Bhattacherjee, Palash Sarkar

No abstract is available for this record.

Polepaka Sanjeeva, M. Sai Sathwik, G. Sai Prasad, G. Praneeth Reddy · 6 authors

A decentralized and automated online voting system refers to an electronic voting method that leverages Blockchain technology to guarantee both transparency and security. It removes the need for intermediaries, making it more efficient and cost-effective than traditional voting methods. Aim of the paper is to develop an online voting system using Blockchain technology for secure and transparent voting. The proposed approach involves developing a decentralized voting system using Ethereum Blockchain technology. Smart contracts are used to manage the voting process and ensure its integrity. The datasets used in this paper will consist of mock voting data to simulate a real-world scenario. The results and discussions include an analysis of the system’s performance in terms of security, scalability, and usability. Future enhancements include integrating biometric authentication for enhanced security and accessibility.

Mohammad Hajian Berenjestanaki, Hamid R. Barzegar, Nabil El Ioini, Claus Pahl

No abstract is available for this record.

Heba Elgabri, Mohamed Sameh Hassanein

The purpose of this article is to propose a framework named IoT-AC/Bc to secure smart cities. This article describes a new method that integrates Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) models based on IoT and blockchain technologies. This method enables fast access authentication on smart city gates using ZKP, which provides an extra layer of security to address access control challenges. The framework consists of an Internet of Things Access Control-based Blockchain Smart Contract that manages user authentication, access session identities, and asset real-time interactions; and a Blockchain Ledger Management Smart Contract that implements distributed access control and tracks the ledger history of different activities. The framework achieves availability, scalability, multi-factor authentication, and decentralization, which strengthens distribution, role authority, access rights, and concurrent identity access requests. The results are demonstrated through a comparative analysis focused on the number of multithreaded requests, the cost of smart contract deployment, the multi-factor authentication performance for users’ interactions with the smart city gates, and the security strength levels. The framework’s performance effectiveness is evaluated through a case study that consists of various scenarios. The framework allows improving the security level by 94% under low and medium attack strength and 89% under high attack strength for 18 security attacks. This paper is novel because the framework uses ZKP over a blockchain network as an extra cryptographic technique with RBAC as a logical access control model to achieve fast accessibility authorization for users’ transactions while preserving their private identity on smart city gates. Keywords: Access Control, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Role-Based Access Control, Smart Cities, Multi-Factor Authentication DOI： https://doi.org/10.35741/issn.0258-2724.58.4.56

Tariq Alsboui, Muhammad Hussain, Hussain Al-Aqrabi, Richard Hill · 5 authors

With the vast development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem, various types of information, such as healthcare records and physical resources, are integrated for different types of applications. Due to the sheer number of connected IoT devices, which generate a large amount of data, Distributed Ledger Technology, such as Blockchain and IOTA have been recently applied in developing access control models, yet they involve significant energy due to mining, low throughput, non-scalable, and computational overhead that is not acceptable for IoT resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose a Scalable Decentralized and Lightweight Access Control framework (SDAC) by using the IOTA platform. IOTA is an emerging distributed ledger technology that has significant features for IoT, such as zero fees transactions, scalability, security and energy efficiency. The proposed SDAC aims to improve security, authorize, and authenticate users when accessing data by using the IOTA Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) protocol. MAM ensures access control by encrypting and granting permission to only authorized users. The experimental results indicate that IOTA MAM is a feasible solution that can be used for managing authorization in the IoT domain.

Valerie Fetzer, Michael Klooß, Jörn Müller‐Quade, Markus Raiber · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Liqun Chen, Changyu Dong, Nada El Kassem, Christopher J. P. Newton · 5 authors

Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) was designed for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and versions using RSA and elliptic curve cryptography have been included in the TPM specifications and in ISO/IEC standards. These standardised DAA schemes have their security based on the factoring or discrete logarithm problems and are therefore insecure against quantum attackers. Research into quantum-resistant DAA has resulted in several lattice-based schemes. Now in this paper, we propose the first post-quantum DAA scheme from symmetric primitives. We make use of a hash-based signature scheme, which is a slight modification of SPHINCS+, as a DAA credential. A DAA signature, proving the possession of such a credential, is a multiparty computation-based non-interactive zero-knowledge proof. The security of our scheme is proved under the Universal Composability (UC) model. While maintaining all the security properties required for a DAA scheme, we try to make the TPM’s workload as low as possible. Our DAA scheme can handle a large group size (up to 2 60 group members), which meets the requirements of rapidly developing TPM applications.

Maryam Sheikhi, Rosario Giustolisi, Carsten Schuermann

In 2016, Locher and Haenni (Locher andHaenni, 2016) proposed an e-voting scheme that offers verifiability, everlasting vote privacy, and computational receipt-freeness, as well as an informal discussion of how the scheme achieves such properties.We advance this line of work by proposing a new cryptographic scheme that provably satisfies those properties as well as everlasting participation privacy and efficient tallying.Receiptfreeness relies on deniable vote updating and verifiable null ballot posting, generated from public knowledge stored on the bulletin board.The everlasting vote and participation privacy properties directly result from the hash-based commitment scheme and efficient zero-knowledge proofs (SNARKs).Finally, we provide mathematical proofs for all the properties, including a new game-based definition of participation privacy.

Ziqi Zhu, Kai Zhang, Junqing Gong, Haifeng Qian

No abstract is available for this record.

Shaorui Song, Lei Xu, Liehuang Zhu

Local differential privacy (LDP) is a promising technique to realize privacy-preserving data aggregation without a trusted aggregator. Normally, an LDP protocol requires each user to locally perturb his raw data and submit the perturbed data to the aggregator. Consequently, LDP is vulnerable to output poisoning attacks. Malicious users can skip the perturbation and submit carefully crafted data to the aggregator, altering the data aggregation results. Existing verifiable LDP protocols, which can verify the perturbation process and prevent output poisoning attacks, usually incur significant computation and communication costs, due to the use of zero-knowledge proofs. In this paper, we analyze the attacks on two classic LDP protocols for frequency estimation, namely GRR and OUE, and propose two verifiable LDP protocols. The proposed protocols are based on an interactive framework, where the user and the aggregator complete the perturbation together. By providing some additional information, which reveals nothing about the raw data but helps the verification, the user can convince the aggregator that he is incapable of launching an output poisoning attack. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocols have good defensive performance and outperform existing approaches in terms of efficiency.

Johannes Blömer, Jan Bobolz, Laurens Porzenheim

No abstract is available for this record.

Vaseem Ahmed Qureshi, G. Divya, T. Satayanarayana

No abstract is available for this record.

Noe Elisa, Longzhi Yang, Fei Chao, Nitin Naik · 5 authors

Electronic Government (e-Government) systems constantly provide greater services to people, businesses, organisations, and societies by offering more information, opportunities, and platforms with the support of advances in information and communications technologies. This usually results in increased system complexity and sensitivity, necessitating stricter security and privacy-protection measures. The majority of the existing e-Government systems are centralised, making them vulnerable to privacy and security threats, in addition to suffering from a single point of failure. This study proposes a decentralised e-Government framework with integrated threat detection features to address the aforementioned challenges. In particular, the privacy and security of the proposed e-Government system are realised by the encryption, validation, and immutable mechanisms provided by Blockchain. The insider and external threats associated with blockchain transactions are minimised by the employment of an artificial immune system, which effectively protects the integrity of the Blockchain. The proposed e-Government system was validated and evaluated by using the framework of Ethereum Visualisations of Interactive, Blockchain, Extended Simulations (i.e. eVIBES simulator) with two publicly available datasets. The experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed framework in that it can mitigate insider and external threats in e-Government systems whilst simultaneously preserving the privacy of information.

Hao Sui, Jiale Zhang, Xiaobing Sun, Bing Chen · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Axin Wu, Weiqi Luo, Jian Weng, Anjia Yang · 5 authors

Ateniese et al. introduced the primitive of matchmaking encryption (ME) at CRYPTO 2019 and left open several important questions, which include extending ME to fuzzy cases or giving an efficient ME in the identity-based setting without relying on random oracles. The main challenge is to achieve fuzzy bilateral access control while providing identity privacy of the sender and receiver, message confidentiality and authenticity without random oracles. In this work, we resolve the question by formalizing the first fuzzy identity-based ME (IB-ME) and presenting a concrete construction. Specifically, we propose the formal syntax definition of fuzzy IB-ME. In fuzzy IB-ME, the identities of senders and receivers are characterized by attribute sets. A ciphertext can be correctly decrypted if the overlaps between the attribute set of the sender or receiver and the attribute set specified by the other party are simultaneously greater than a threshold, which can be applied to many attractive applications such as fuzzy bilateral access control in online social dating. Then, we present concrete details of fuzzy IB-ME based on fuzzy identity-based encryption, which does not rely on other cryptographic tools such as two-input functional encryption and non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems. In this process, fuzzy bilateral access control and identity privacy are achieved through the formalism of arranged ME and the splitting technique while message authenticity is provided through the authentication and binding of the encryption key. The identity privacy of the sender and receiver, confidentiality, and authenticity of messages are reduced to the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman, decision linear, and computational bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions in the selective model without random oracles. Finally, we implement the scheme and evaluate its performance through theoretical analyses and experiments to demonstrate its efficiency.

Asma Jodeiri Akbarfam, Sina Barazandeh, Deepti Gupta, Hoda Maleki

Access control is a critical component of computer security, governing access to system resources. However, designing policies and roles in traditional access control can be challenging and difficult to maintain in dynamic and complex systems, which is particularly problematic for organizations with numerous resources. Furthermore, traditional methods suffer from issues such as third-party involvement, inefficiency, and privacy gaps, making transparent and dynamic access control an ongoing research problem. Moreover detecting malicious activities and identifying users who are not behaving appropriately can present notable difficulties. To address these challenges, we propose DLACB, a Deep Learning Based Access Control Using Blockchain, as a solution to decentralized access control. DLACB uses blockchain to provide transparency, traceability, and reliability in various domains such as medicine, finance, and government while taking advantage of deep learning to not rely on predefined policies and eventually automate access control. With the integration of blockchain and deep learning for access control, DLACB can provide a general framework applicable to various domains, enabling transparent and reliable logging of all transactions. As all data is recorded on the blockchain, we have the capability to identify malicious activities. We store a list of malicious activities in the storage system and employ a verification algorithm to cross-reference it with the blockchain. We conduct measurements and comparisons of the smart contract processing time for the deployed access control system in contrast to traditional access control methods, determining the time overhead involved. The processing time of DLBAC demonstrates remarkable stability when exposed to increased request volumes.

Junke Duan, Licheng Wang, Wei Wang, Lize Gu

Anonymous cryptocurrencies are distributed applications based on blockchain technology that enhance the anonymity of user transactions. However, they also provide cover for many criminal activities. Existing traceable modifications of anonymous transaction protocols do not support public verification of the traceability of transactions, meaning dishonest users can still evade tracing by forging partial proofs. In this paper, we first propose EPoK, which is a partially extractable zero-knowledge proof scheme designed to address this issue. We provide the instantiation of EPoK, as well as its formal security proofs. Combined with EPoK and the classic anonymous transaction protocol RingCT, we propose a traceable anonymous transaction protocol TRCT for tracing participants’ addresses and transaction amounts in anonymous transactions. Compared to previous works, TRCT is the first to implement public verification of the transaction’s traceability while still maintaining anonymity. This ensures that users cannot forge relevant proofs to evade tracing. We present and prove the security properties of TRCT, and experimentally compare its efficiency with the original RingCT protocol. The result shows that the extra overhead generated by TRCT is small.

I Wayan Budi Sentana, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kâafar

No abstract is available for this record.

Jonathan Bootle, Vadim Lyubashevsky, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Alessandro Sorniotti

No abstract is available for this record.

Kailash Chandra Bandhu, Ratnesh Litoriya, Murtaza Bagwala, Alakmar Barwaniwala · 5 authors

Building an electronic voting system is a prime requirement of a government election system to avoid the manipulation in the voting machines and make them more secure and efficient. There is a need of cost-efficient, time-saving, and trusted voting system. Blockchain technology is a revolutionary method that provides decentralised, distributed, and immutable ledgers features. The proposed work utilised this recent technology along with smart contract and keccak256 encryption algorithm to implement vote casting. The performance of the system is measured based on the execution time of the smart contract, average voting time per user, and the hidden and visible gas cost for smart contract deployment for voting. The results obtained come to be promising with an average execution time of 6ms per vote and the percentage of visible cost out of voting and contract deployment is 15.42% and hidden costs out of voting and contract deployment is 84.58%.

Zhipeng Wang, Xihan Xiong, William J. Knottenbelt

No abstract is available for this record.

Suparat Srifa, Yury Yanovich, Ahmad Salehi Shahraki, Robert Vasilyev · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.