Blockchain Papers

Kamran, Muhammad Hammad Nasir, Muhammad Imran, Joon-Sung Yang

The traditional voting system has many flaws such as election manipulation, security breaches, transparency and privacy issues. These issues occur as the votes can be changed by a central authority in favor of one party when they are being counted manually or there can be human error while counting votes. This system puts a lot of trust in the central authority. Also, there is an economical issue due to the cost of security, human and ballot resources. Many of these issues are solved using the E-Voting system which has been successful in countries like Estonia that have implemented this system of voting. There is still an issue of universal verifiability of votes even in the Estonian E-Voting system. This paper conducts a study of various e-voting systems. From among the various existing methods, an effective blockchain based solution to solve the existing issues of E-voting has been explained. The blockchain is a database, distributed among all users on the network which will help in the verification of all votes cast without the need to put complete trust on a third-party system.

Ke Huang, Yi Mu, Fatemeh Rezaeibagha, Xiaosong Zhang · 5 authors

Blockchain is a publicly distributed ledger used to record transactions in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. In recent years, the successful integrations of Public-Key Cryptographic (PKC) algorithms with cryptocurrencies have driven researchers to pursue the study of PKC. However, it is challenging to technically integrate PKC algorithms with blockchain properly in that the studies of blockchain leverage to broad domains and each existing problem can lead to diverse solutions. For cryptographically-solvable problems, it is important to find a secure and practical integration of PKC algorithm with blockchain. We systematically review three major topics in cryptocurrencies, including security, privacy and scalability. We conduct a case analysis which demonstrates how to integrate PKC with blockchains. As an illustration, we propose mutable blockchain which incorporates multiple PKC schemes and show how to use it to remove double-spending transactions via redaction. We then give a concrete construction. As suggested by our performance evaluation, the adopted PKC algorithms can run scalably and efficiently and avoid bottlenecks in the system.

Doan Van Hieu, Lam Duc Khai

The growth of cryptocurrencies has attracted much attention from a variety of fields, especially in academic research. Their protocol is built and developed on blockchain technology. One of them is Ethereum which is a popular and highest valued cryptocurrency on the market. Therefore, the need for space to store transactions information increases, leading to the creating of blocks is extremely urgent. This work is called Ethereum mining. Miners have to solve a problem called Ethash (Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work) to find the results satisfied the requirements of the problem. In this paper, we proposed a hardware design architecture to perform the Ethash mining system. To obtain the high performance for the Ethashed block mining system, the fast design of the Keccak function is also proposed. The design is implemented on Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA-VC707. The throughput of our proposed Keccak function reaches 8 Gbps with efficiency of 5.5 Mbps/Slice. The hashrate of the mining system reaches 88KH/s at frequency of 19.231MHz.

Jie Ma, Bin Qi, Kewei Lv

Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel cryptographic primitive named reusable group fuzzy extractor (RGFE) allowing any member of a group to extract and reproduce random strings from a fuzzy and non-uniform source of high entropy (called fingerprint). Any group member can anonymously generate a random string for the group using his fingerprint and can be traced when needed, whereas other members can reproduce the string using their own fingerprints. Moreover, a fingerprint can be repeatedly used to generate multiple random strings. Basing on RGFE, we present group-shared Bitcoin wallet, which can be used by a group of users to receive or spend coins via biometrics in a traceable way.

Suryari Purnama, Untung Rahardja, Qurotul Aini, Alfiah Khoirunisa · 5 authors

Distributed business advertising has proliferated in related vehicles, to advance their goods through vehicle communications or frameworks. Despite the possibility of spreading promotions in the vehicle network, but facing difficulties in the organization, especially on security and protection. In particular, vehicles may be sneaky to trick sponsors into getting rewards without spreading advertisements, which can cause “free driving” problems in this exercise. In addition, concerns about possible spill protection may disinterest the vehicle during the time spent on ad implementation. In addition, outside DDoS attacks and interior disappointment purposes can also affect administrative accessibility. To solve this problem, we investigated the ability of blockchain innovations to develop plausible and unknown plans for publication on the vehicle network. We first present a review of a blockchain based advertising deployment system.

Asmae El Fezzazi, Amina Adadi, Mohammed Berrada

Blockchain and machine learning (ML) have emerged as two disruptive technologies that could transform various sectors. Blockchain is known as peer to peer decentralized, distributed ledger technology that enables to store and exchange anything of value, it is deterministic, permanent and immutable. On the other hand, ML is the ability of computers to learn without being programmed, and it is probabilistic. Hence, when blockchain and ML converge, they surely would benefit from each other. Blockchain can enhance security of ML platforms, and ML can provide automation and optimization to the blockchain solutions. In this work, we advocate the importance of enhancing blockchain with ML algorithms, as a proof of principle we address the issue of secure and intelligent e-voting.The use of blockchain technology has brought tremendous different application domains, e-voting is one of them. Most existing e-Voting systems require central authority during the process of authentication and verification of the voter. In this paper we propose a safe online voting approach based on blockchain and ML to provide a solution to this issue. We use blockchain to ensure integrity and transparency of the votes, and ML for automating the verification process of eligible voters based on AI-powered oracle platform for face authentication. The proposed solution offers automation, security, and mobility to the voting system.

R. Sivasankari, R. Akila, S. Revathi, J. Brindha Merin

Smart contracts in Ethereum blockchain network are self-executable scripts used for managing tokenized assets and access rights between different entities on the blockchain network. They are significant addition to blockchain technology for achieving data transparency and reliability in maintaining the digital relationship between two or more entities. However, the smart contract is in its nascent stage and suffers from various limitations, including immutability and code secrecy. In this paper, we address the inability of smart contracts to access the on-chain data. The smart contract currently fetches the on-chain data by taking external oracle assistance, which can be compromised to influence the customers. To address the issue, we propose a decentralized mechanism for accessing the blockchain data directly from the smart contracts by indexing single or multiple parameters of a transaction in each block using the Merkle-Patricia Trie (MPT). The idea is to increase the data transparency of blockchain applications. The paper provides a sequential search methodology that can retrieve transactions from${N}$blocks, satisfying specific conditions, in${O}$(${N}$). The complexity is further reduced to${O}$(N/k) by partitioning the blockchain data into${k}$disjoint subsets to achieve parallelism in the search procedure. We experimentally verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodology with a case study on the Ethereum blockchain data.

Srivatsav Chenna, Nils Peters

Detection of fabricated or manipulated audio content to prevent, e.g., distribution of forgeries in digital media, is crucial, especially in political and reputational contexts. Better tools for protecting the integrity of media creation are desired. Within the paradigm of the Internet of Audio Things(IoAuT), we discuss the ability of the IoAuT network to verify the authenticity of original audio using distributed ledger technology. By storing audio recordings in combination with associated recording-specific metadata obtained by the IoAuT capturing device, this architecture enables secure distribution of original audio footage, authentication of unknown audio content, and referencing of original audio material in future derivative works. By developing a proof-of-concept system, the feasibility of the proposed architecture is evaluated and discussed.

Xiaohan Hao, Wei Ren, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo, Naixue Xiong

The increasing volume of user and household data and number of smart meters compound the challenge of ensuring efficiency and privacy protection of electricity trading in existing smart grids. Therefore, to minimize the cost and latency in electricity trading, in this article, we design a new architecture for smart meters that can support transactions (using a blockchain-based wallet) and initiate transmission switch instructions (using smart contacts). Specifically, our approach comprises a decentralized peer-to-peer electricity trading scheme to enable automated electricity transmission (using smart contract instead of some centralized entity), and our blockchain-based anonymous authentication scheme to facilitate fast and privacy-aware roaming, in order to achieve privacy protection. We demonstrate that our proposed scheme is secure under the universally composable framework.

Narendra K. Dewangan, Preeti Chandrakar

Blockchain technology is in demand due to its key properties, such as immutability, transparency, distributed storage, and non-centric controls. The election is the primary process for forming a government at local, state, or federal levels in any democratic country. A fair election increases people’s faith in their government. An electronic voting system is a safer solution during this pandemic for the democratic voting system. However, the electronic voting system has a number of potential issues, including security and privacy breaches, the fear of cyber-attacks, the hijacking of the session, and identity theft. Using Blockchain, we can overcome many security and privacy issues as Blockchain uses a cryptographic hash and digital signatures for sending and verifying transactions in the peer-to-peer Blockchain network. Identity management is a critical issue in the election system as many fake voters are available and in the traditional election system, many fake votes are counted. We proposed a system that generates the identity of voters using the tokens and stores them in the interplanetary file system (IPFS). The proposed system provides the storage of tokens and verification of tokens during various stages of polling. The proposed system implemented using the IPFS, as well as the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for the digital signature, and verification, and SHA-256 as a cryptographic hash. IPFS is used to store data in a distributed manner using the connected nodes in the network. In the proposed system, we use Go IPFS to store the files in Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). IPFS can store any large file within any format. By splitting the user identity files, we can secure the data and privacy of voters in the Blockchain electronic voting system.

Isaac Adjei-Mensah, Isaac Osei Agyemang, Collins Sey, Linda Delali Fiasam · 5 authors

From online education and trading, all aspects of our lives are affected by digital technology. Among them, the storage of music has also entered the digital era. Music productions created by artists have brought great joy to people. However, when artists upload their works, they are most downloaded and reprinted by others, and copyright information and the issue associated with the sharing of music arise. This will have a significant negative impact on the enthusiasm and motivation of artists. This paper provides an internet database platform for artists, which uses the distributed and tamper-proof technology of the Ethereum blockchain to store music works, and protect the copyright information of each album or music produced by artists in the music industry. Design and implementation of the system model and data storage are proposed and data storage processes based on the Ethereum smart contract are demonstrated in detail. The system stores music information on the blockchain network, using the smart contract to provide artists with a fast and efficient royalty payment. Node.js is applied to carry out the experiments of our system, and we test Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) with available account and private keys for contract development and use block explorer to track music information on the blockchain. Our system enables copyright revenue to be attributed to music creators that will help to eliminate the illegal uploading of music on other websites.

Jesse Victors

Tor hidden services are anonymous servers of unknown location and ownership who can be accessed through any Tor-enabled web browser. They have gained popularity over the years, but still suer from major usability challenges due to their cryptographicallygenerated non-memorable addresses. In response to this difficulty, in this work we introduce the Onion Name System (OnioNS), a privacy-enhanced distributed DNS that allows users to reference a hidden service by a meaningful globally-unique veriable domain name chosen by the hidden service operator. We introduce a new distributed self-healing public ledger and construct OnioNS as an optional backwards-compatible plugin for Tor on top of existing hidden service infrastructure. We simplify our design and threat model by embedding OnioNS within the Tor network and provide mechanisms for authenticated denial-of-existence with minimal networking costs. Our reference implementation demonstrates that OnioNS successfully addresses the major usability issue that has been with Tor hidden services since their introduction in 2002.

Liang Tan, Keping Yu, Caixia Yang, Ali Kashif Bashir

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a typical infrastructure of a smart city. Due to the limited storage and computing capabilities of industrial IoT devices, the data sensed and collected by these devices is usually stored in the cloud, and encryption is usually used to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data in the cloud. However, since the keys used for data encryption and decryption are usually difficult to manage, it is easy to cause security and privacy issues. To this end, this article proposes a blockchain-based IIoT data protection scheme. In this scheme, in order to prevent the loss of the private key and the disclosure of privacy, we use the Shamir secret sharing algorithm to split and encrypt the private key, and publish it on the blockchain. Experimental results show that this scheme can not only effectively prevent data from being stolen, but also effectively protect the encryption key.

K. S. Arikumar, Deepak Kumar A, GowthamC, Sahaya Beni Prathiba

The most shocking events were was the recent discovery of the fraudulent activities in the Punjab National Bank. This is due to frequent systemic failures that detect human errors. Blockchain technology is the greatest solution for this issue. It is surprisingly common for the information settlement mechanism like SWIFT to be on a isolated ledger from the payment settlement mechanism. If the banks uses a ledger that stores information settlement distributed across all the participants, then the fraudulent user may reflect on all the available participants in the transactions, auditors and regulators. Our Paper is a Decentralised Loan Management Web Application (DApp) built on Ethereum blockchain which targets on preventing such fraudulent attacks on Loans sanctions by decentralising the processes. The security features authentication of the user identity, authentication of bank officials and multiple levels of verification of details are implemented using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Ming Li, Jian Weng, Jia-Nan Liu, Xiaodong Lin · 5 authors

With the increasing number of traffic accidents and terrorist attacks by modern vehicles, vehicular digital forensics (VDF) has gained significant attention in identifying evidence from the related digital devices. Ensuring the law enforcement agency to accurately integrate various kinds of data is a crucial point to determine the facts. However, malicious attackers or semi-honest participants may undermine the digital forensic procedures. Enabling accountability and privacy preservation while providing secure data access control in VDF is a nontrivial challenge. To mitigate this issue, in this article, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized solution for VDF named BB-VDF, in which the accountable protocols and privacy-preserving algorithm are constructed. The desirable security properties and fine-grained data access control are achieved based on smart contract and the customized cryptographic construction. Specifically, we design a distributed key-policy attribute-based encryption scheme with partially hidden access structures, named DKP-ABE-H, to realize the secure fine-grained forensics data access control. Further, a novel smart contract is designed to model the forensics procedures as a finite state machine, which guarantees accountability that each participant performs auditable cooperation under tamper resistant and traceable transactions. Systematic security analysis and extensive experimental results show the feasibility and practicability of our proposed BB-VDF scheme.

Mega Apriani, Riri Fitri Sari

ISO/IEC 29192-5 defines three lightweight cryptography hash function algorithms. Some of the lightweight cryptography based on sponge construction are PHOTON and SPONGENT. Given the importance of the hash functions in blockchain technology and the vulnerability and computational power gaps that affect the performance of the blockchain platform, this research will evaluate the SPONGENT-256 and PHOTON-256 hash algorithms to be implemented on Ethereum-based blockchain systems. The implementation of the SPONGENT-256 and PHOTON-256 hash algorithms on an Ethereum-based blockchain system produces output in the form of addresses, public keys and wallets. The experiment results of the SPONGENT-256 algorithm produces is average 0.0328 seconds, with the user time is 0.0208 seconds and the system time is 0.0118 seconds. This will give significant results if implemented on an Ethereum-based blockchain system with many nodes and data to be generated. However, the SPONGENT-256 algorithm requires a lot of memory for processing with 75%. While the KECCAK-256 algorithm uses less memory from the PHOTON-256 and the SPONGENT-256 algorithms with an average memory usage of 55%. Based on the implementation of the SPONGENT-256 hash algorithm on the Ethereum-based blockchain and analysis of the results, it can be concluded that the SPONGENT-256 algorithm can be used as an alternative hash function algorithm for Ethereum-based blockchain system.

Tripti Rathee, Parvinder Singh

No abstract is available for this record.

Kexin Zou, Jinqiao Shi, Yue Gao, Xuebin Wang · 7 authors

Bitcoin is a virtual encrypted digital currency based on a peer-to-peer network. In recent years, for higher anonymity, more and more Bitcoin users try to use Tor hidden services for identity and location hiding. However, previous studies have shown that Tor are vulnerable to traffic fingerprinting attack, which can identify different websites by identifying traffic patterns using statistical features of traffic. Our work shows that traffic fingerprinting attack is also effective for the Bitcoin hidden nodes detection. In this paper, we proposed a novel lightweight Bitcoin hidden service traffic fingerprinting, using a random decision forest classifier with features from TLS packet size and direction. We test our attack on a novel dataset, including a foreground set of Bitcoin hidden node traffic and a background set of different hidden service websites and various Tor applications traffic. We can detect Bitcoin hidden node from different Tor clients and website hidden services with a precision of 0.989 and a recall of 0.987, which is higher than the previous model.

Xiaoqing Wang, Chunping Wang, Kun Zhou, Hongbing Cheng

With the continuous development of blockchain technology, Bitcoin as the first cryptocurrency has drawn massive attention from various sectors. A full node on Bitcoin network has to store over 320GB of data as of March 9, 2021. According to the growth rate of Bitcoin transactions, it is estimated that the size of Bitcoin data on a full node will exceed 400GB within two years. The storage problem makes it difficult for common users to easily store all of Bitcoin data, which weakens the decentralization capability of Bitcoin network. In this work, we propose an efficient storage scheme (ESS) based on the distribution characteristics of the unspent transaction outputs in Bitcoin system. It can prune the storage of the transactions for those low query frequency blocks. When a new block is generated, a node using ESS scheme can quickly verify most of the transaction inputs. Only a small amount of transaction outputs of older blocks need to be retrieved from the full node for payment verification. Experimental results demonstrated that our scheme can reduce the size of a normal node in current Bitcoin system by about 85% at a low communication cost.

Tianyu Zhao, Tao Zhang

Since its introduction, Bitcoin has received extensive attentions. With features like privacy and anonymity, Bitcoin has been widely used. However, the mainstream finance and business worlds have not fully embraced Bitcoin yet. This study analyzes the assumption of anonymity and privacy of Bitcoin, give a threat model to Bitcoin privacy. Then present a comprehensive overview on practical attacks on anonymity and privacy of Bitcoin and proposals to improve anonymity of Bitcoin. Compare the state of-the-art proposals that address the privacy threats and enables strong privacy in Bitcoin. Finally, future research directions on privacy of Bitcoin are discussed.

Juan A. Garay, Yu Shen

Bitcoin Cash, created in 2017, is a "hard fork" from Bitcoin responding to the need for allowing a higher transaction volume. This is achieved by a larger block size, as well as a new difficulty adjustment (target recalculation) function that acts more frequently (as opposed to Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment happening about every two weeks), resulting in a potentially different target for each block. While seemingly achieving its goal in practice, to our knowledge there is no formal analysis to back this proposal up.

MohammadAmin Fazli, Ali Owfi, Mohammad Reza Taesiri

Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have gained a solid foothold within the crypto community, and substantial amounts of money have been allocated to their trades. In this paper, we studied one of the most prominent marketplaces dedicated to NFT auctions and trades, Foundation. We analyzed the activities on Foundation and identified several intriguing underlying dynamics that occur on this platform. Moreover, We performed social network analysis on a graph that we had created based on transferred NFTs on Foundation, and then described the characteristics of this graph. Lastly, We built a neural network-based similarity model for retrieving and clustering similar NFTs. We also showed that for most NFTs, their performances in auctions were comparable with the auction performance of other NFTs in their cluster.

S. Haga, Kazumasa Omote

In recent years, increasingly many companies have entered the pay-as-you-go business because it has become easier to monitor services constantly due to the development and increase in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Research is in progress to introduce cryptographic assets into the payment, but if a private key is stolen, the cryptographic assets associated with it can be stolen. To address this issue, this paper proposes a secure automated payment system using contract wallets. This method ensures the security of cryptographic assets even if the private key is stolen. Secure automated payments are enabled by issuing transactions from IoT devices and using internal transactions to link contract wallets and smart contracts that handle the payment of cryptographic assets. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated on the Ethereum blockchain as a proof of concept, and the cost of gas is measured.

Gaurav Sharma, Denis Verstraeten, Vishal Saraswat, Jean‐Michel Dricot · 5 authors

In a competitive market, online auction systems enable optimal trading of digital products and services. Bidders can participate in existing blockchain-based auctions while protecting the confidentiality of their bids in a decentralized, transparent, secure, and auditable manner. However, in a competitive market, parties would prefer not to disclose their interests to competitors, and to remain anonymous during auctions. In this paper, we firstly analyze the specific requirements for blockchain-based anonymous fair auctions. We present a formal model tailored to study auction systems that facilitate anonymity, as well as a generic protocol for achieving bid confidentiality and bidder anonymity using existing cryptographic primitives such as designated verifier ring signature. We demonstrate that it is secure using the security model we presented. Towards the end, we demonstrate through extensive simulation results on Ethereum blockchain that the proposed protocol is practical and has minimal associated overhead. Furthermore, we discuss the complexity and vulnerabilities that a blockchain environment might introduce during implementation.