Suzana Mesquita de Borba Maranhao Moreno, Jean-Marc Seigneur
The traditional way to prove someone’s address using formal documents like utility bills may not be feasible for some people, like those living in very poor neighborhoods, because they do not have these documents. In this paper, we propose an alternative way to prove someone’s address using a decentralized social trust solution. Because our design choices, this solution is able to work offline and does not need a logically centralized repository of all issued proof-of-address, in oppose to what would be achieved by using existing accretionary ID solutions. We validated this proposal by building a mobile application, using it in a real experiment in a Brazilian favela, and collecting mobile data. We also interviewed 20 people to complement our validation and help to guide the next steps of this work. The experiment showed that the solution is viable and easy to use. It is possible to adopt an approach like the one proposed to prove other facts, like gender, sex and income. These proofs may be used for different initiatives, like social programs, purpose-driven lending or other decentralized finance services.
Xiaotong Sun, Xi Chen, Charalampos Stasinakis, Georgios Sermpinis
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) provides a decentralized governance solution through blockchain, where decision-making process relies on on-chain voting and follows majority rule. This paper focuses on MakerDAO, and we find three voter coalitions after applying clustering algorithm to voting history. The emergence of a dominant voter coalition is a signal of governance centralization in DAO, and voter coalitions have complicated influence on Maker protocol, which is governed by MakerDAO. This paper presents empirical evidence of multicoalition democracy in DAO and further contributes to the contemporary debate on whether decentralized governance is possible.
This work proposes the use of blockchain for offline voting. Using the Smart contract feature of the Ethereum blockchain network. The voter’s registration is made. An offline token is generated which is used for offline voting. The offline token and the voting information are sent to the vote counters Smart contact. This is where the votes are counted and results extracted. However if a voter can share the cast vote to another voter who will send the new token to the vote counters. In a situation a vote is submitted by multiple voters, the counter has the ability to identify and count such votes only once.
Lloyd Mar J. Dela Torre, Renz Vincent M. Mengoy, Rowin Edward E. Quindoza, Nathalie Jane S. Tamondong · 5 authors
University student elections are usually held using paper ballots [2] or online survey forms [4]–[7] where security is a concern [8]. This paper presents the creation of a blockchain-based voting system as a solution for the security issues of university student council elections. Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology where security is improved by storing transactions in several independent storages [10] [11]. In this study, NEAR Protocol was used in creating the voting system. It was simulated in the NEAR Testnet and as-pect was used to check the smart contract operation. Finally, ISO 25010 was used to check the overall performance of the voting system. As-pect testing showed that the smart contract works as intended and the voting system passed the ISO 25010 product quality evaluation.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Robin Singh Bhadoria, Arka Prabha Das, Abul Bashar, Mohammed Zikria
A democratic election is a crucial event in any country. Therefore, the government of the country is concerned with creating more competitive and fairer elections. This paper discusses the survey and scope of Blockchain technology adoptions in conducting elections. A distributed digital ledger is used in the Blockchain technology that is utilized for recording transactions happening between two parties. Ledger conducts this processing in an efficient and effective manner with latest secure mechanism of encryption algorithms. Therefore, the data stored in several blocks in each transaction is secure, transparent, and tamper-proof, which ultimately improves the transparency and voter confidentiality. This paper demonstrates how the benefits of the Blockchain technology such as immutability, transparency and end-to-end verifiability can be utilized by the national governments around the world to ensure fair democratic elections. In short, we aim to present a rigorous mechanism of a Blockchain based e-voting system, its efficiency based on different consensus algorithms and the overall progress and analysis based on some critical parameters to anticipate the feasibility of the successful implementation of the proposed e-voting system.
With the continuous appreciation of cryptocurrency, cryptojacking, the act by which computing resources are stolen to mine cryptocurrencies, is becoming more rampant. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on cryptojacking network traffic and propose CryptoJacking-Sniffer (CJ-Sniffer), an easily deployable, privacy-aware approach to protecting all devices within a network against cryptojacking. Compared with existing approaches that suffer from privacy concerns or high overhead, CJ-Sniffer only needs to access anonymized, content-agnostic metadata of network traffic from the gateway of the network to efficiently detect cryptojacking traffic. In particular, while cryptojacking traffic is also cryptocurrency mining traffic, CJ-Sniffer is the first approach to distinguishing cryptojacking traffic from user-initiated cryptocurrency mining traffic, making it possible to only filter cryptojacking traffic, rather than blindly filtering all cryptocurrency mining traffic as commonly practiced. After constructing a statistical model to identify all the cryptocurrency mining traffic, CJ-Sniffer extracts variation vectors from packet intervals and utilizes a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to further identify cryptojacking traffic. We evaluated CJ-Sniffer with a packet-level cryptomining dataset. Our evaluation results demonstrate that CJ-Sniffer achieves an accuracy of over 99% with reasonable delays.
P Ramesh Naidu, Dileep Reddy Bolla, G Prateek, Sheetal S Harshini · 6 authors
Only about half of the elections are deemed to be free and fair, according to a study. Electoral fraud not just mutilates the nature of portrayal, but also has an impact on political, social, and monetary outcomes. Homomorphic encryption and blockchain technologies can be utilized to secure free and fair elections. In this paper, we aim to allow only the eligible citizens to vote by automatically checking their eligibility status from a federally approved application and then securing the voter’s data using homomorphic encryption rather than encrypting the vote cast by the voter. By doing this, statistical analysis can be performed on the data which results in a unique set of insights that may otherwise remain unknown. We have developed a system using the ganache as the local blockchain and the voter data and vote cast is stored in the blockchain.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In today’s society, voting is crucial to choosing the representatives of the people. The current voting process is filled with a vast array of disputes and manipulations. The leader must be selected in a precise manner without any malpractices. In addition, the people and authorities are not happy with the election results and label them unpredictable. We offer a better solution to the current problems, such as tampering, non-residents voting outside of the polling place, quick results analysis, quick counting, and reduced use of staff and funds during the electoral franchise process. In this offer, blockchain technology is used to create the distributed application (dApp) framework that will be used for the proposed e-voting system. Additionally, it offers unique characteristics such as immutability, transparency, privacy, and reception freedom that reduce crimes involving the processing of sensitive data in the electoral process. Ganache, MetaMask, and specified dagger hashing algorithm are used to develop the dApp. A key strength of this paper is the statistical analysis of transactions on the blockchain. Moreover, it also provides security to voters’ identity and leads to immediate acceptable counting results with more accuracy.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Privacy preservation is highly expected in the Bitcoin Network. However, only applying pseudonyms cannot completely ensure anonymity/unlinkability between payers and payees. Current approaches mainly depend on a mixer service, which obfuscates payer-payee relationships of transactions. While the mixer service improves transaction privacy, it still suffers from some severe security threats (e.g., DoS attack and collusion attack), and does not support effective and reliable off-chain payment in a parallel mode. In this article, we propose a mixing protocol for the Bitcoin Network based on zero-knowledge proof, called SofitMix. It is the first mixing protocol that can effectively resist both the DoS attack and the collusion attack. It can also support a set of parallel off-chain payments in a reliable way no matter whether some payers abort a transaction. We analyze and prove SofitMix security following the Universal Composability model with regard to fair exchange, unlinkability, collusion-resistance, DoS-resistance and Sybil-resistance. Through a proof-of-concept implementation, we demonstrate its validity and fairness. We also show its advance on off-chain payment reliability and DoS attack resistance, compared to TumbleBit.
Uzma Jafar, Mohd Juzaiddin Ab Aziz, Zarina Shukur, Hafiz Adnan Hussain
Electronic voting systems must find solutions to various issues with authentication, data privacy and integrity, transparency, and verifiability. On the other hand, Blockchain technology offers an innovative solution to many of these problems. The scalability of Blockchain has arisen as a fundamental barrier to realizing the promise of this technology, especially in electronic voting. This study seeks to highlight the solutions regarding scalable Blockchain-based electronic voting systems and the issues linked with them while also attempting to foresee future developments. A systematic literature review (SLR) was used to complete the task, leading to the selection of 76 articles in the English language from 1 January 2017 to 31 March 2022 from the famous databases. This SLR was conducted to identify well-known proposals, their implementations, verification methods, various cryptographic solutions in previous research to evaluate cost and time. It also identifies performance parameters, the primary advantages and obstacles presented by different systems, and the most common approaches for Blockchain scalability. In addition, it outlines several possible research avenues for developing a scalable electronic voting system based on Blockchain technology. This research helps future research before proposing or developing any solutions to keep in mind all the voting requirements, merits, and demerits of the proposed solutions and provides further guidelines for scalable voting solutions.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Decentralize online voting procedure that build the for a long time, interviewing genuine trust needs has already been a challenge. Every country seems to have its own online governance model, ranging from paper ballots to online signatures. They're have to facing many challenges towards the trust towards voting systems. Voting a ballot framework has been utilized by various nations since it less the expense and the time which used to consumed by utilizing conventional democratic. Blockchain innovation invites the straightforwardness and security requirements to the unbiased political race. It's a decentralised, immutable ledger system in its whole. Voting using the internet, casting a ballot framework permits the citizens to make their choice from any spot whenever which prompts expanding the elector support count. The aim of this paper is to present a Decentralize Smart Contract Voting System. The suggested system uses the ganache tool and technology to create a local primary network that provides additional security and transparency while exploiting Blockchain technology. The voter's identity is verified using the metamask. More security improvements have been made, and problems have been fixed from the smart Contract.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Uzma Jafar, Mohd Juzaiddin Ab Aziz, Zarina Shukur, Hafiz Adnan Hussain
The importance of democratic voting systems in any nation has increased the mistrust of conventional voting methods. Other digital voting methods have been challenged due to a lack of transparency, security, rigging and scalability. Blockchain (BC) is a decentralized, distributed ledger technology for recording and keeping safe transactions. Unfortunately, BC implementation in large-scale elections is still being challenged because the amount of information in the Electronic Voting (EV) system increased, and storage space and processing costs are also growing. Moreover, existing BC technologies have scaling problems. Off-chain (OC) and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) solutions, among others, have been suggested to alleviate the scaling problem. Throughput and latency are crucial performance metrics for a BC system. Sharding is a viable option for addressing BC's scalability and performance issues. Therefore, this paper proposes a model to shard the current BC to scale the main chain to achieve performance securely. The proposed system is distributed using Ethereum and works as an OC that is in sync with the district-level databases, updated the main-chin periodically by authorities, and is faster in terms of cost-effectiveness, scalability and data storage. Some limitations are involved, such as the authorities should be trusted to avoid malicious attacks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized learning approach, meaning it learns from data housed locally on devices such as tablets, cellular phones, and more, and does not collect nor transfer user-sensitive data but merely learns from the data utilizing a shared model and sending periodical updates. Using federated learning throws out the problems associated with user privacy and the high bandwidth needed to transmit resource-intensive files to a central server for training. However, FL systems may be compromised to make a wrong decision or disclose private data once the attacker modifies the FL model and/or its paraments. The main contribution of this paper includes (1) introducing a comprehensive study that explores the FL and how it applies to different domains like healthcare and medicine, Insurance and Finance, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Virtual Reality, and 5G. (2) Develop a Hashgraph-based federated learning Approach (HFLA) to protect the 5G network against poisoning and membership inherence attacks. The HFLA was evaluated using our Federated 5G testbed and proved its superiority compared to other existing FL approaches.
Blockchain technologies allow for records to be publicly secured, without the need of a trusted authority. The Bitcoin white paper introduced blockchain technology in 2008, and Bitcoin is currently the most widely adopted protocol for this type of technology. One of the most common use-cases for Bitcoin is to use the underlying data structure as a public ledger for an electronic cash system. Using this public ledger, Bitcoin protocol allows direct transfer of value between peers (users or machines). The transfer of value occurs via transactions published on the ledger. Alternatively, transactions can be exchanged directly, peer-to-peer, and published on the ledger at a later stage. The latter approach improves transfer speed and system efficiency (e.g. bandwidth and data storage). Due to its vulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks, however, the direct exchange of unpublished transactions was abandoned in the early days. In this paper, we propose a new method to send and receive unpublished Bitcoin transactions (i.e. peer-to-peer) using a recently introduced network protocol called QUIC, an alternative to TCP. QUIC allows for fast handshakes, secure and authenticated sessions, and it supports network switches (e.g. Wi-Fi to 5G). Using this protocol, we introduce a new type of peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions, called QUIC Bitcoin Transactions. QUIC Bitcoin Transactions provide a secure and fast way to exchange unpublished transactions between users and machines. Finally, we introduce QUIC Bitcoin Channels, fast and encrypted Bitcoin payment channels. QUIC Bitcoin Transactions and QUIC Bitcoin Channels guarantee secure and encrypted peer-to-peer transactions, and they can be widely adopted without new hardware requirements, as they are implemented in TCP/IP application space.
H. Jayasooriya, D. M. P. S. Bandara, N. Hemachandra, N. Kuruwitaarachchi · 5 authors
In order to reduce limitations and as a practical substitute for voting on paper, electronic voting has developed gradually as a feasible alternative. The last decade's worth of related studies implies that, building a secure e-voting system using web 2.0 technology that assures the integrity of the votes while also giving transparency has been a long-standing difficulty. In a network of centralized systems, a single party has the right to administer data sources. Since the centralized voting systems are more vulnerable to data manipulation issues, the trust has faded in the voters on behalf of the entire process. In this paper authors discuss the solution with blockchain which is secured. The proposed implementation is ideal for small or medium-scale elections, and this includes several basic components of our methodology in three fictitious modules: the administrative module, the Voters module, and the Blockchain module. Node JS, Ganache, and Web3 JS are used as the main technologies. In conclusion, it is expected to implement a secure system for conducting web-based digital voting that ensures the integrity of the votes registered. Furthermore, it intends to enhance the system in the future to accommodate large-scale elections with a viable solution to the blockchain trilemma issues.
The organization of free, democratic, and transparent elections requires on the one hand an independent national electoral authority that manages all the stages of the electoral process and on the other hand the use of new information and communication techniques to manage the election process. E-voting offers the ability to vote online anytime and from anywhere using a computer, smartphone, or tablet. In addition, it saves time and reduces costs and effort spent in the process. However, the security of e-voting applications deployed on the internet is a difficult task due to the increasing number of cyber-attacks and application vulnerabilities. On the other hand, blockchain technology is an emerging technology with a strong cryptographic foundation. In this paper, the authors propose a new secure e-voting system based on Ethereum blockchain. In addition, they propose a hierarchical coloured petri net (HCPN) model for their e-voting system using CPN Tools. They verify by means of simulation techniques and state space analysis important properties such as absence of deadlocks and livelocks.
Javier José Díaz Rivera, Talha Ahmed Khan, Waleed Akbar, Muhammad Afaq · 5 authors
Zero Trust Networking (ZTN) is a security model where no entity in a network infrastructure is trusted. The first bastion of security for achieving ZTN is to have strong identity verification. Several standard methods for assuring a robust identity exist (E.g., OAuth2.0, OpenID Connect). These standards employ the use of JSON Web Tokens (JWT) during the authentication process. However, the use of JWT for One Time Token (OTT) enrollment has a latent security issue. A JWT can be intercepted by a third party and the information of the payload can be exposed, revealing the details of the enrollment server. Furthermore, an intercepted JWT could be used for enrollment by an impersonator as long as the JWT remains active. Our proposed mechanism aims to secure the ownership of the OTT by including the JWT as encrypted metadata into a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). The mechanism uses the blockchain Public Key of the intended owner for encrypting the JWT, and the blockchain assures the JWT ownership by mapping it to the intended owner's blockchain public address. Our proposed mechanism is applied to an emerging Zero Trust framework (OpenZiti) alongside a permissioned Ethereum blockchain using Hyperledger Besu. The Zero Trust Framework provides the enrollment functionality, while our proposed mechanism based on blockchain and NFT assures the secure distribution of OTTs that is used for the enrollment of identities.
In the distributed environment, when all parties carry out the cooperative computing, there are problems of low scalability and privacy leakage. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a scheme that integrates the secret sharing and distributed steganography. Arnold transform is performed to encrypt the secret before the communication, and this transform can effectively improve the robustness of secret transmission. After a secret is embedded in a cover, the scheme uses random numbers to generate multiple sub-stego-objects, then carries out the distributed storage and communication for these sub-stego-objects. The identity of the sender is verified by the receiver using Schnorr zero-knowledge proof at the local, which reduced interaction between the sender and the receiver, and no more information is not obtained by the receiver except the stego-object. As a result, the receiver does not communicate directly with the sender, which, to some extent, can avoid the attention of the steganography from external attackers. Additionally, this scheme can still work even in the case that some users were disconnected from the system after a stego-object is transmitted. After analyzing how the scheme supports more senders, the correctness of the scheme is also proved in detail.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency based on blockchain. All historical Bitcoin transactions are stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, but Bitcoin owners are generally unknown. This is the reason for Bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity, therefore it is often used for illegal transactions. Bitcoin addresses are related to Bitcoin users' identities. Some Bitcoin addresses have the potential to be analyzed due to the behavior patterns of Bitcoin transactions. However, existing Bitcoin analysis methods do not consider the fusion of new blocks' data, resulting in low efficiency of Bitcoin address analysis. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes an incremental Bitcoin address cluster method to avoid re-clustering when new block data is added. Besides, a heuristic Bitcoin address clustering algorithm is developed to improve clustering accuracy for the Bitcoin Blockchain. Experimental results show that the proposed method increases Bitcoin address cluster efficiency and accuracy.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the succession of its waves, the transmission of this disease and the number of deaths caused by it have been increasing. Despite the various vaccines, the COVID-19 virus is still contagious and dangerous for affected people. One of the remedies to this is precaution, and particularly social distancing. In the same vein, this paper proposes a remote voting system, which has to be secure, anonymous, irreversible, accessible, and simple to use. It therefore allows voters to have the possibility to vote for their candidate without having to perform the operation on site. This system will be used for university elections and particularly for student elections. We propose a platform based on a decentralized system. This system will use two blockchains communicating with each other: the public Ethereum blockchain and the private Quorum blockchain. The private blockchain will be institution-specific. All these blockchains send the necessary data to the public blockchain which manages different data related to the universities and the ministry. This system enables using encrypted data with the SHA-256 algorithm to have both security and information security. Motivated by the high energy consumption of blockchain and by the performance improvements in low-power, a test is performed on a low-power embedded platform Raspberry PI4 showing the possibility to use the Blockchain with limited resources.