In the blockchain-based energy transaction scenario, the decentralization and transparency of the ledger will cause the users’ transaction details to be disclosed to all participants. Attackers can use data mining algorithms to obtain and analyze users’ private data, which will lead to the disclosure of transaction information. Simultaneously, it is also necessary for regulatory authorities to implement effective supervision of private data. Therefore, we propose a supervisable energy transaction data privacy protection scheme, which aims to trade off the supervision of energy transaction data by the supervisory authority and the privacy protection of transaction data. First, the concealment of the transaction amount is realized by Pedersen commitment and Bulletproof range proof. Next, the combination of ElGamal encryption and zero-knowledge proof technology ensures the authenticity of audit tickets, which allows regulators to achieve reliable supervision of the transaction privacy data without opening the commitment. Finally, the multibase decomposition method is used to improve the decryption efficiency of the supervisor. Experiments and security analysis show that the scheme can well satisfy transaction privacy and auditability.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the development of information technology and network technology, digital archive management systems have been widely used in archive management. Different from the inherent uniqueness and strong tamper-proof modification of traditional paper archives, electronic archives are stored in centralized databases which face more risks of network attacks, data loss, or stealing through malicious software and are more likely to be forged and tampered by internal managers or external attackers. The management of intangible cultural heritage archives is an important part of intangible cultural heritage protection. Because intangible heritage archives are different from traditional official archives, traditional archive management methods cannot be fully applied to intangible heritage archives’ management. This study combines the characteristics of blockchain technology with distributed ledgers, consensus mechanisms, encryption algorithms, etc., and proposes intangible cultural heritage file management based on blockchain technology for the complex, highly dispersed, large quantity, and low quality of intangible cultural heritage files. Optimizing methods, applying blockchain technology to the authenticity protection of electronic archives and designing and developing an archive management system based on blockchain technology, help to solve a series of problems in the process of intangible cultural heritage archives management.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has now spread like wildfire across the internet. Blockchain has emerged as a game-changing technology for complex industrial processes as a result of its openness, availability, and security. In this study, we used a hybrid adaptive crypto cloud framework that combines blockchain technology with multiple authorities and a botnet framework to improve cloud security while reducing computation time. The proposed adaptive crypto cloud system divides the cloud security framework into stages to organize secure data communication and reduce communication latency while detecting internal and external threats. In order to compute authentication using hash mapping and deploy an authentication system to safeguard the various users' authentication information, the whole system placed a major emphasis on block chain technology. The technology not only improves security but also makes the role-based access control system and anonymous authentication system more user-friendly.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cloud Data Security Solutions
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This paper proposes a blockchain-based traceability system of photos. Thanks to a novel scheme that securely chains certificates of image data originating from a trusted origin certificate, the system authenticates the provenance of original and converted images, e.g., which digital camera created it. The system requires a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) of digital cameras to authenticate the trusted origin certificate signed by the certified digital camera. It does not require a PKI of image conversion software. The proposed solution is suitable for the traceability system of photos on the Internet as the scheme of chaining certificates applies to any image conversion software, including open source-based photo editing applications and cloud server software that converts image data of photos. We have implemented a prototype of the traceability system using Ethereum as a permissioned blockchain and evaluated the system's feasibility.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Deepfake is as a matter of fact a medium where one individual is supplanted by another who appears as though him. The profound bogus demonstration has been continuing for quite a long while. Profound phony uses incredible strategies, for example, AI and man-made consciousness to create and control visual and sound substance with high potential for the gadget. Profound misrepresentation relies upon the sort of impartial association called and the programmed encoder. These are essential for an encoder, which lessens a picture to a lower dimensional ideal and an ideal introduction picture. I examined various answers on various advances via web-based media stages like twitter and face book. From these examinations we are roused to extend this objective. In our proposed framework, we centre around identifying profound phony recordings utilizing blockchains, keen agreements, and secure hashing calculations. We utilize a few calculations to relieve the issue, for example, the SHA string
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Dec 1, 2021·2021 IEEE International Conferences on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing & Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical & Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) and IEEE Congress on Cybermatics (Cybermatics)
We design and validate a new block propagation protocol for the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of the Bitcoin blockchain. Despite its strong protection for security and privacy, the current Bitcoin blockchain can only support a low number of transactions per second (TPS). In this work, we redesign the current Bitcoin's networking protocol to increase TPS without changing vital components in its consensus-building protocol. In particular, we improve the compact-block relaying protocol to enable the propagation of blocks containing a massive number of transactions without inducing extra propagation latency. This improvement is achieved by replacing the existing store-and-forward compact-block relaying scheme with a cut-through compact-block relaying scheme. Since our protocol only needs to rework the current Bitcoin's networking protocol and does not modify the data structures and crypto-functional components, it can be seamlessly incorporated into the existing Bitcoin blockchain. To validate our design, we implement a Bitcoin network simulator on Network Simulator-3 (NS-3) to run different block propagation protocols. The experimental results confirm that our new block propagation protocol could increase the TPS of the Bitcoin blockchain by 100x without compromising security and consensus-building.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Xueqiang Yan, Xueli An, Wenxuan Ye, Mingyu Zhao · 5 authors
The subscriber data management locates at the heart of the mobile network by providing identity management and granting subscriber access to various network services. The subscriber data is usually stored in the core network, the handling of which shall be compliant with regulatory requirements on data protection. Inspired by the current research on the privacy issues of Internet applications, this work is the first attempt to consider data management from mobile network architecture perspective with the goal of making data processing natively transparent. This work proposes a novel subscriber data management scheme based on the combination of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technologies. Moreover, corresponding procedures are defined to ensure subscriber’s control over personal subscription data (including authentication data) by implementing authentication, authorization and access control in the blockchain platform. To avoid blockchain bloat and privacy issues caused by transparency of blockchain, off-chain data storage architecture is adopted, and is realized in the form of DHT for its expressive features like scalability and look-up speed.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Caching and Content Delivery
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Decentralized finance has grown up dramatically in recent years, covering various cryptocurrency or blockchain financial applications. With the support of blockchain technology, people have shown great enthusiasm and trust in decentralized financial services. However, due to sharing personal information with other institutions, users' privacy and data security will be difficult to be guaranteed. Moreover, various encryption methods such as homomorphic encryption focus on protecting the data stored on the blockchain, but few enhance client-side data security. Motivated by this condition, we develop an image-based privacy-preserving scheme to store users' financial service data as images. Transferring the numerical service data into images ensures that users can comprehend the content and prevent data recognized by the machine. We evaluate our scheme through conducting numerical evaluations from image attack effectiveness and smart contract functions' efficiency analysis.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Traditional paper certificates have difficulties in preservation and management, causes tampering and forgery. A secure decentralized-based platform could mitigate the risk with-out any third-party intervention using Ethereum in the core. This work proposed a novel architecture to generate digital certificates using a distributed ledger automatically. Further, it authenticates the same using private keys with trusted certificate authorities. The framework is tested on FU540 (RISC-V) architecture. A detailed mechanism for generating and authenticating certificates is validated on FU540 board with blockchain integration. Mechanism flow starts with the admin. It adds the source organization blocks having the user detail records to the distributed ledger. Verifiers put the request to the source authorizer to perform verifications. This protocol could protect private information and identify the inter mediators who tried to diversify
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin (BTC) is probably the most transparent payment network in the world, thanks to the full history of transactions available to the public. Though, Bitcoin is not a fully anonymous environment, rather a pseudonymous one, accounting for a number of attempts to beat its anonymity using clustering techniques. There is, however, a recurring assumption in all the cited deanonymization techniques: that each transaction output has an address attached to it. That assumption is false. An evidence is that, as of block height 591,872, there are several millions transactions with at least one output for which the Bitcoin Core client cannot infer an address. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on sound graph theory for identifying transaction inputs and outputs. Our solution implements two simple yet innovative features: it does not rely on BTC addresses and explores all the transactions stored in the blockchain. All the other existing solutions fail with respect to one or both of the cited features. In detail, we first introduce the concept of Unknown Transaction and provide a new framework to parse the Bitcoin blockchain by taking them into account. Then, we introduce a theoretical model to detect, study, and classify, for the first time in the literature, unknown transaction patterns in the user network. Further, in an extensive experimental campaign, we apply our model to the Bitcoin network to uncover hidden transaction patterns within the Bitcoin user network. Results are striking: we discovered more than 30,000 unknown transaction DAGs representing money flows never observed before. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed framework is the only one that enables a complete study of the unknown transaction patterns, hence enabling further research in the field, for which we provide some directions.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Smart contracts based on the Ethereum blockchain network have attracted attention from finance, media, and academic domains. As a result, smart contracts have been targeted by cyber attackers for the purpose of cryptocurrency theft. The smart contract honeypot is a commonly used attack method. An attacker who makes a honeypot lures other weak attackers who target vulnerable contracts by seeming to have exploitable flaws. The honeypot attacker then steals cryptocurrency from the weak attackers using a hidden trap. In this paper, we propose a machine-learning model that can detect such honeypots with high performance and prevent theft before it occurs. We use a term-frequency inverse document-frequency method to extract feature words and word2vec to learn distributed representations for the Solidity bytecode. As a result, we achieved higher PR-AUC scores in honeypot detection compared with previous efforts. Based on this, we demonstrate that the smart contract code contains useful information for honeypot detection. Furthermore, our proposed method works without using features that become available after theft. Hence, the method enables us to predict incidents and reduce the number of honeypot victims.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Lela Mirtskhulava, Maksim Iavich, Marina Razmadze, Nana Gulua
Slicing a network is a key innovative feature to deliver 5G (the fifth generation) services. 5G aims to enhance mobile broadband, deliver massive machine-type and low latency communications with ultra-reliability. This generation manages the huge scale of the devices of the Mobile Internet of Things (MIoT). 5G has been invented for controlling security addressed to the threats found in 2G/3G/4G networks consequently. 5G preventive measures include enhanced authentication capabilities, subscriber identity protection, and additional security techniques. New 5G network technologies introduced new threats for the industrial organizations. GSMA (The GSM Association) announced that Mobile Internet of Things (IoT) requires more security in 5G as the number of IoT devices and connections are exponentially increasing. "The IoT needs to be securely coded, deployed and managed throughout its lifecycle". Common IoT architecture is subjected to the following common attacks: 1) attacks on IoT devices through the running application; 2) remote attacks over the internet; 3) physical attacks; 4) attacks through the cloud 5) attacks through Wi-Fi or mobile air interface. Moreover, IoT devices are being used to form DDoS attacks where each IoT device forms the specific data resulting a volume-based attacks. Blockchains are considered as a main solution to solve various issues in 5G such as Mobile IoT security problems and Electronic Healthcare Records sharing problems. We analyse Hashing based Post-Quantum Signatures for enhancing blockchain security.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Vikram Kanth, Chad Bollmann, Murali Tummala, John McEachen
As digital trust has declined, services purporting to provide privacy and anonymity have become increasingly popular in today's online environment. While there are several examples of these types of applications, blockchain-based services like Bitcoin and Ethereum have emerged as a potential answer to some of these privacy concerns. Unfortunately, many of the same features that facilitate that privacy and anonymity can also be leveraged by nefarious actors to transmit and store information covertly. These features can also be used by government and military organizations for communications purposes. In this paper, we present a generic information hiding model incorporating anonymity that builds on existing classical steganographic models like the Prisoners' Problem. We then analyze our model with regards to blockchain protocols and present a novel blockchain-based address embedding scheme. Finally, we implement our scheme using the Ethereum platform.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Smart contracts have enabled a paradigm shift in computing by leveraging decentralized networks of trust to achieve consensus at scale. Oracle networks further extend the power of smart contracts by solving the so-called "oracle problem". Such networks enable smart contracts to make use of the vast amount pre-existing data available on the web today without jeopardizing the integrity of the underlying network of trust. By leveraging oracle networks, smart contracts can make decisions based on data corresponding to the physical world. To this end, we introduce Georacle - an oracle service that enables geospatially aware smart contracts in a way that respects the space constrained nature of blockchain environments. Contracts can query the location of objects in a given area, map between street addresses and coordinates, and retrieve the geometry of a desired region of space while conserving gas consumption and avoiding unnecessary data processing.
Many countries have been using online voting systems instead of ballot papers. In such voting systems, voters can cast votes online using their cell phones, laptops, and other internet-connected devices. Online voting systems have centralized databases where a malicious attacker can hack, change or manipulate the database. Therefore, current online voting systems present a security concern for any government. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer technology in which data is stored in a tamper-proof ledger and maintained by participating peers. In this paper, we propose a secure online voting system using Ethereum Blockchain and Ethereum Smart Contracts. A voter can cast her vote securely after scanning her fingerprint and iris recognition. Our proposed methodology uses Paillier homomor-phic encryption and the private key shifting technique to ensure voter privacy and identity security.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mustafa Takaoğlu, Adem Özyavaş, Naim Ajlouni, Ali Alshahrani · 5 authors
Data security and data hiding have been studied throughout history. Studies show that steganography and encryption methods are used together to hide data and avoid detection. Large amounts of data hidden in the cover multimedia distort the image, which can be detected in visual and histogram analysis. The proposed method will solve two major drawbacks of the current methods: the limitation imposed on the size of the data to be hidden in the cover multimedia and low resistance to steganalysis after stego-operation. In the proposed method, plaintext data are divided into fixed-sized bits whose corresponding matching bits’ indices in the cover multimedia are accumulated. Thus, the hidden data are composed of the indices in the cover multimedia, causing no change in it, thus enabling considerable amounts of plaintext to be hidden. The proposed method also has high resistance to known steganalysis methods because it does not cause any distortion to the cover multimedia. The test results show that the performance of the proposed method outperforms similar conventional stenographic techniques. The proposed Ozyavas–Takaoglu–Ajlouni (OTA) method relieves the limitation on the size of the hidden data, and hidden data is undetectable by steganalysis because it is no longer embedded in the cover multimedia.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Rapid advances in the Internet of Video Things (IoVT) deployment in modern smart cities has enabled secure infrastructures with minimal human intervention. However, attacks on audio-video inputs affect the reliability of large-scale multimedia surveillance systems as attackers are able to manipulate the perception of live events. For example, Deepfake audio/video attacks and frame duplication attacks can cause significant security breaches. This paper proposes a Lightweight Environmental Fingerprint Consensus based detection of compromised smart cameras in edge surveillance systems (LEFC). LEFC is a partial decentralized authentication mechanism that leverages Electrical Network Frequency (ENF) as an environmental fingerprint and distributed ledger technology (DLT). An ENF signal carries randomly fluctuating spatio-temporal signatures, which enable digital media authentication. With the proposed DLT consensus mechanism named Proof-of-ENF (PoENF) as a backbone, LEFC can estimate and authenticate the media recording and detect byzantine nodes controlled by the perpetrator. The experimental evaluation shows feasibility and effectiveness of proposed LEFC scheme under a distributed byzantine network environment.
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
A healthcare information system allows patients and other users to remotely login to medical services to access health data through the Internet. To protect the privacy of patients and security over the public network, secure communication is required. Therefore, the security of data in transmission has been attracting increasing attention. In recent years, blockchain technology has also attracted more attention. Relevant research has been published at a high rate. Most methods of satisfying relevant security-related regulations use modular and exponential calculation. This study proposes a medical care information preservation mechanism that considers the entire process of data storage in devices from wearable devices to mobile devices to medical center servers. The entire process is protected and complies with HIPAA privacy and security regulations. The proposed scheme uses extended chaotic map technology to develop ID-based key negotiation for wearable devices, and thereby reduces the amount of computing that must be carried out by wearable devices and achieve lightness quantify. It also uses the non-tamperability of the blockchain to ensure that the data have not been tampered with, improving data security. The proposed mechanism can resist a variety of attacks and is computationally lighter than the elliptic curve point multiplication that has been used elsewhere, while retaining its security characteristics.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has become very trendy and penetrated different domains, mostly due to the popularity of cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology offers decentralized nodes for e-voting and is used to create e-voting systems, mainly because of their end-to-end verification benefits. This technology is an excellent replacement for traditional e-voting solutions with distributed performance, reliability and security. The following article provides an overview of e-voting systems based on blockchain technology. The main purpose of this analysis was to examine the current state of blockchain-based voting systems, as well as any associated difficulties in predicting future events.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Financial technology (FinTech) as part of financial inlcussion changes conventional business models to be information technology minded. The presence of FinTech in the wider community makes it easy for access to financial service products and transactions and payment systems more practically, efficiently, and economically. Unfortunately, as the security risk in transacting increases, cyber security in the financial services industry and FinTech service providers is considered a major target by cybercriminals. This study proposed a security management approach through hybrid blockchain method implemented through flask framework and encryption to protect transaction data. The results are promising. Referring to accuracy, this study successfully reduces data leakage and misuse of personal data and financial data in FinTechs.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques