Blockchain Papers

Mohanad Sarhan, Wai Weng Lo, Siamak Layeghy, Marius Portmann

No abstract is available for this record.

Kranthi Kiran Reddy, Gutha Vijay Kumar, Sai Siddu Sirimulla, Chanan Singh · 6 authors

This article explores the use and impact of voting using blockchain technology. As a result of mounting worries about the honesty and security of conventional voting methods, especially in the digital era, the study tackles the requirement for an open, impenetrable, and robust method of conducting elections. A decentralized application on a blockchain platform is designed and implemented using the technique, which makes use of smart contracts for voter registration, ballot generation, and vote counting. The viability of blockchain technology in guaranteeing voter anonymity, data integrity, and cryptographic security are important discoveries. Online voting can be done securely and digitally using blockchain technology. It has great potential to reduce costs and increase voter turnout. Using Blockchain we can secure any application and work securely for that application. Therefore, cryptocurrency, healthcare, real estate, etc. Many applications use blockchain technology. *Blockchain technology encrypts votes, preventing any votes from being tampered with. It allows voters to vote for a candidate only once. The system reduces labor costs and counting errors by providing quick access to election results. This article explains solutions to solve the above problems. Our solution is to use an online voting system based on the Ethereum blockchain. That's why we connect surveys to blockchain technology

T. S. Raja Rajeswari, S. K. Khajashareef, N. Sandhya, P. Chinnasamy

No abstract is available for this record.

Harshita Garg, Mandeep Singh, Vasvi Sharma, Megha Agarwal

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Voting System via Decentralized App using an upcoming well-received technology: Blockchain. In recent years, Blockchain has become the finest way to store data and transmit data safely without any involvement from a third party because of its key features, including anonymity, security, privacy, and reliability. This paper commences by analyzing Blockchain technology and identifying its advantages and disadvantages. The report explains the proposed steps we took to draw out a prototype of the Voting System on DAPP. It further analyzes and explains the problems with the current voting system and how this(Blockchain) technology could immensely contribute to bringing change in the election system of a country by enveloping all the disadvantages of the current system. It describes the advantages of using Blockchain for the voting system and highlights what could still play out as a major disadvantage and an obstruction in encouraging change in methodologies for the voting system. Probing further, it can be deduced how this technology could provide safe, secure, transparent, and decentralization data in the voting or election system. As security is the main highlight in choosing or not choosing a new platform, we also reveal the potential problems with this e-voting system and further propose some ideas that could help resolve the issue, making the system more safe and secure and favorable to rebuild the current system.

Garima Verma

Electronic voting or E-voting is a relatively new form of voting which has an electronic process for voting without using a paper system. This form of voting has several benefits over a traditional paper ballot system in that it can provide faster results with better efficiency and reduction in errors. But while implementing in a large scenario, three major concerns that need to be addressed are security, confidentiality, and reliability of voting data. Blockchain is a technology that allows and opens up a possibility for designing and developing such type of secure and reliable system. The system developed using Blockchain technology can be decentralized eliminating the need of a third party to manage the access control in the process of election. This paper presents an e-voting framework that ensures security, confidentiality, and reliability when people go for e-voting. The comparative results indicate that the proposed scheme is effective and secure.

Muhammad Umar Nasir, Safiullah Khan, Shahid Mehmood, Muhammad Adnan Khan · 6 authors

The study presents a framework to analyze and detect meddling in real-time network data and identify numerous meddling patterns that may be harmful to various communication means, academic institutes, and other industries. The major challenge was to develop a non-faulty framework to detect meddling (to overcome the traditional ways). With the development of machine learning technology, detecting and stopping the meddling process in the early stages is much easier. In this study, the proposed framework uses numerous data collection and processing techniques and machine learning techniques to train the meddling data and detect anomalies. The proposed framework uses support vector machine (SVM) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) machine learning algorithms to detect the meddling in a network entangled with blockchain technology to ensure the privacy and protection of models as well as communication data. SVM achieves the highest training detection accuracy (DA) and misclassification rate (MCR) of 99.59% and 0.41%, respectively, and SVM achieves the highest-testing DA and MCR of 99.05% and 0.95%, respectively. The presented framework portrays the best meddling detection results, which are very helpful for various communication and transaction processes.

Yanan Gong, K. P. Chow, Siu Ming Yiu, Hing Fung Ting

Bitcoin is a popular and widely traded cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin blockchain technology makes it easy for users to conduct pseudo-anonymous financial transactions. However, it also facilitates criminals to secrete their actual identities from law enforcement agencies. Heuristic-based address clustering is the subject regarding Bitcoin de-anonymization. But no heuristic algorithm has a known or potential error rate due to the lack of ground truth. This paper uses sensitivity analysis to validate and verify a constructed Bitcoin simulation model. The evaluation and validation processes examine the model behavior and model outputs from multiple simulation runs to demonstrate fidelity and credibility. The analysis results show no model uncertainties, and the simulation model is stable and can effectively simulate Bitcoin transactions. With a reasonable number of nodes and transaction volumes in the simulated network, the simulation model can be used to verify the effectiveness of two widely used heuristic-based address clustering algorithms and measure the corresponding error rates.

Suhag Pandya

The modern challenges of supply chain control arising from globalisation, decentralisation, and modernisation are rapidly exposed to data leakage, network attacks, and software flaws. Business stakeholders are turning to blockchain technology as a possible solution to improve modern supply chains’ reliability, integration, and visibility. Blockchain is an elaborate structure that remains relevant when managing product traceability, integration, and increasing general transparency. This article explores the possibility of blockchain technology enhancing the transparency, integrity, and security of decentralised voting systems. Blockchain, which is decentralised, irreversible and fully transparent, is an alternative solution to the world’s problems described by manipulation, fraud and lack of transparency inherent in the globalisation of voting systems. The paper considers several models of voting on the basis of blockchain technology, comparing their advantages, which consist of providing the inviolability of the election results as well as minimising the usage of the intermediaries’ services. Evaluating blockchain technology using election procedures as a perspective, this article explores its foundational features, such as cryptographic protections, consensus processes, and ever-executable contracts. Other issues that are named by the study as the challenges for implementing blockchain technology in voting include scalability, energy consumption, and legal issues. This research aims to respond to these questions for enhancing election systems in the digital world by reviewing the literature comprehensively on blockchain technology for decentralised voting and providing a brief overview of the current trend. The results highlight the need for more study into blockchain-based voting systems to resolve the technological and ethical issues that have been raised.

Rajesh B. Walde, Amit Kumar Yadav

Abstract: Information and communication technologies are used by e-Government to deliver governmental services to people and companies instantly, effectively, and efficiently. The majority of current e-government systems are centrally located on redundant servers and databases that may have single points of failure, rendering the systems susceptible to cyber-attacks. Blockchain technology makes it possible to build a decentralised, incredibly secure system without the need for a central authority to monitor transactions. Blockchain technology, which encrypts data and distributes it over the network, improves information security and privacy and gives governments new chances to increase transparency, stop fraud, and foster citizen confidence. In this paper, we primarily cover the overview of blockchain technology, architecture of blockchain, consensus models and the blockchain use cases in e-Government

Quinten Stokkink, Can Umut Ileri, Johan Pouwelse

Web3 networks are emerging to replace centrally-governed networking infrastructure. The integrity of the shared public infrastructure of Web3 networks is guaranteed through data sharing between nodes. However, due to the unstructured and highly partitioned nature of Web3 networks, data sharing between nodes in different partitions is a challenging task. In this paper we present the TSRP mechanism, which approaches the data sharing problem through nodes auditing each other to enforce carrying of data between partitions. Reputation is used as an analogue for the likelihood of nodes interacting with nodes from other partitions in the future. The number of copies of data shared with other nodes is inversely related to the nodes’ reputation. We use a real-world trace of Twitter to show how our implementation can converge to an equal number of copies as structured approaches.

Minxian Wang, Zijian Zhang, Jialing He, Feng Gao · 7 authors

Abstract With the development of 5G, the wireless Internet of Things (IoT) has become possible; how to provide privacy protections for the communication of IoT devices in a more vulnerable wireless transmission environment is a huge challenge. Thus, steganography is introduced as a safe and effective technology. Blockchain systems have been widely used in the area of steganography. Several works attempted to embed covert data into transactions in public blockchain systems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero. However, most of them merely focus on putting covert data into certain fields in transactions based on cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, a Covert Transaction Recognition (CTR) model is proposed by the Text Convolutional Neural Networks and Back Propagation Neural Networks. When utilizing the covert data-embedded field for recognizing, our CTR model can attain 0.79 precision and 0.83 recall on average for seven covert transaction construction schemes. The precision and recall can increase by at most 43 and 47%, respectively, if other unembedded fields were additionally exploited for recognition. We further propose a Practical Covert Transaction Construction (PCTC) model. This model fixes the contents in the embedded fields of the constructed transactions, and generates the contents in other fields using Generative Adversarial Networks. Experimental results demonstrated that the precision and recall are greatly decreased when identifying the covert transactions generated by our PCTC model. The data underlying this article are available in ‘covert-transaction-model’, at https://github.com/1997mint/covert-transaction-model.

Susheela Dahiya, Keshav Kaushik

A distributed ledger, or block chain, provides safe and immutable storage. Through the use of cutting-edge information and communication technologies, e-governance enables for the interchange of information between the government and people or organizations. On the one hand, e-governance services provide efficient and quick access to treatment; on the other hand, they heighten the danger of privacy and security breaches. Without the need of a middleman, a blockchain-based e-governance system provides safe and transparent services. Fake news detection and recognition of sources of news has become a hot subject in the news business as well as on social media. Anyone may readily create or edit digital information and broadcast it on social networking networks in the digital age. On the one side, these social networking sites make modern-day communication more easier, but they’ve also introduced new problems to real-world application, such as the viral transmission of false information with malevolent intent. In this chapter, the authors highlight the role of blockchain in e-governance. Moreover, the applications of blockchain in tracing the fake news on social media are also discussed in this chapter.

Francesco Buccafurri, Vincenzo De Angelis, Sara Lazzaro

Anonymous service delivery has attracted the interest of research and the industry for many decades. To obtain effective solutions, anonymity should be guaranteed against the service provider itself. However, if the full anonymity of users is implemented, no accountability mechanism can be provided. This represents a problem, especially when referring to scenarios in which a user, protected by anonymity, may perform illegally when leveraging the anonymous service. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution to the trade-off between anonymity and accountability. In particular, our solution relies on three independent parties (one of which is the service provider itself) such that only the collaboration of all three actors allows for the disclosure of the real identity of the user. In all other cases, anonymity is guaranteed. To show the feasibility of the proposal, we developed a prototype with user-friendly interfaces that minimize the client-side operations. Our solution is then also effective from the point of view of usability.

Houpeng Hu, Jiaxiang Ou, Bin Qian, Yi Luo · 7 authors

E-voting allows us to build a democratic business in most Internet of things (IoT) systems. For example, we may vote to choose a proper energy broker in a smart grid system. In this study, we focus on e-voting services in an Internet of energy (IoE) system, which is a new-style smart grid. A practical e-voting in IoE may focus on the properties of fairness, decentralization, eligibility, anonymity, compatibility, verifiability, and coercion resistance. It is difficult to fulfil all these properties simultaneously. Traditional voting schemes often use a public bulletin board or administrator in the voting process, which makes them become centralized. Services that offer e-voting via blockchain can make the voting schemes decentralized. However, many of them ignore the complexity of organizing the data of the transactions, which should be confirmed by the miners. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no works have tested the performance in the blockchain while considering practical use cases and constraints. Concerning all the challenges, we propose a practical anonymous voting scheme for IoE called IoEPAV. The proposed scheme fulfils all the mentioned design goals simultaneously. We tested IoEPAV both in different test networks of the Ethereum blockchain to give an overall evaluation. The practical evaluation can show that the proposed scheme is easy to be integrated into a real system like IoE. We also gave a comparison analysis with the state-of-the-art blockchain-based e-voting. All the results show that IoEPAV is decentralized, verifiable, anonymous, and highly efficient.

Wenxuan Yu, Minghui Xu, Dongxiao Yu, Xiuzhen Cheng · 6 authors

Payment channel network (PCN) is a layer-two scaling solution that enables fast off-chain transactions but does not involve on-chain transaction settlement. PCNs raise new privacy issues including balance secrecy, relationship anonymity and payment privacy. Moreover, protecting privacy causes low transaction success rates. To address this dilemma, we propose zk-PCN, a privacy-preserving payment channel network using zk-SNARKs. We prevent from exposing true balances by setting up \textit{public balances} instead. Using public balances, zk-PCN can guarantee high transaction success rates and protect PCN privacy with zero-knowledge proofs. Additionally, zk-PCN is compatible with the existing routing algorithms of PCNs. To support such compatibility, we propose zk-IPCN to improve zk-PCN with a novel proof generation (RPG) algorithm. zk-IPCN reduces the overheads of storing channel information and lowers the frequency of generating zero-knowledge proofs. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of zk-PCN in various settings.

Ari Biswas, Graham Cormode

Differential Privacy (DP) is often presented as a strong privacy-enhancing technology with broad applicability and advocated as a de facto standard for releasing aggregate statistics on sensitive data. However, in many embodiments, DP introduces a new attack surface: a malicious entity entrusted with releasing statistics could manipulate the results and use the randomness of DP as a convenient smokescreen to mask its nefariousness. Since revealing the random noise would obviate the purpose of introducing it, the miscreant may have a perfect alibi. To close this loophole, we introduce the idea of Interactive Proofs For Differential Privacy, which requires the publishing entity to output a zero knowledge proof that convinces an efficient verifier that the output is both DP and reliable. Such a definition might seem unachievable, as a verifier must validate that DP randomness was generated faithfully without learning anything about the randomness itself. We resolve this paradox by carefully mixing private and public randomness to compute verifiable DP counting queries with theoretical guarantees and show that it is also practical for real-world deployment. We also demonstrate that computational assumptions are necessary by showing a separation between information-theoretic DP and computational DP under our definition of verifiability.

Movsowitz Davidow, Danielle, Manevich, Yacov, Toch, Eran

Differential Privacy (DP) is often presented as a strong privacy-enhancing technology with broad applicability and advocated as a de-facto standard for releasing aggregate statistics on sensitive data. However, in many embodiments, DP introduces a new attack surface: a malicious entity entrusted with releasing statistics could manipulate the results and use the randomness of DP as a convenient smokescreen to mask its nefariousness. Since revealing the random noise would obviate the purpose of introducing it, the miscreant may have a perfect alibi. To close this loophole, we introduce the idea of \textit{Verifiable Differential Privacy}, which requires the publishing entity to output a zero-knowledge proof that convinces an efficient verifier that the output is both DP and reliable. Such a definition might seem unachievable, as a verifier must validate that DP randomness was generated faithfully without learning anything about the randomness itself. We resolve this paradox by carefully mixing private and public randomness to compute verifiable DP counting queries with theoretical guarantees and show that it is also practical for real-world deployment. We also demonstrate that computational assumptions are necessary by showing a separation between information-theoretic DP and computational DP under our definition of verifiability.

V. Vijeya Kaveri, V. Meenakshi, S Ananth, P Akshayavarshini · 5 authors

In this digital era, developing a secure as well as democratically responsible vote casting system is becoming an increasingly challenging task. This research study attempts to integrate the blockchain technology to develop a secured and distributed electronic voting system. The primary objective of this research study is to develop a decentralized voting system, which can easily support an open, rational, and easily verifiable democratic plan. The obtain results prove that the proposed smart and reliable electronic voting machine is beneficial for the current and future democratic framework by implementing an essential E-vote casting features along with a provision to allow the citizens to change/update their vote within the given time slot.

Simin Ghesmati, Walid Fdhila, Edgar Weippl

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that promises a multitude of benefits, such as transparency, traceability, and immutability. However, this unique bundle of key characteristics has proved to be a double-edged sword that can put users’ privacy at risk. Unlike in traditional systems, Bitcoin transactions are publicly and permanently recorded, and anyone can access the full history of the records. Despite using pseudonymous identities, an adversary can undermine users’ financial privacy and reveal their actual identities by using advanced heuristics and techniques to identify possible links between transactions, senders, receivers, and consumed services (e.g., online purchases). Hence, a multitude of approaches has been proposed to reduce financial transparency and enhance users’ anonymity. These techniques range from mixing services to off-chain transactions that address different privacy issues. In this paper, we particularly focus on comparing and evaluating privacy techniques in the Bitcoin blockchain (which can be applied in (Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) based blockchains), present their limitations, and highlight new challenges.

Jeethendra Balaji, Jayasree Narayanan

The following paper proposes a blockchain-enabled online voting system with existing technologies. Blockchain technologies enable a plethora of applications that take advantage of distributed economies. The proposed model is a web application built with AngularJS that uses Firebase for security and authentication. The Ethereum Blockchain is used by the project to deploy the smart contract. A smart contract is constructed for each poll to keep track of vote tallies, and when the vote is cast, a transaction is triggered. A voter can see the live status of the poll after they cast their vote.

Aldo Febro, Hannan Xiao, Joseph Spring, Bruce Christianson

No abstract is available for this record.

Maral Hassan Jumaa, Ahmed Chalak Shakir

In democratic societies including Iraq, electronic voting (e-voting) is an available option as a viable voting system. This system is more economically advisable than face-to-face voting by eliminating the need to pay poll staff. It may also make voting more accessible to the population with impairments and those living overseas. This study will propose an e-voting system based on smart contracts by using a decentralized private Blockchain. The proposed e-voting system will provide transparency, accuracy, fairness, eligibility, anonymity, verifiability, and immutability. This research proposed the most secure way of voting with the help of Blockchain using a mobile application that can be used to implement a large-scale solution and cost-effective. The Blockchain-based system has been designed in conjunction with the existing ECC cryptosystem to assure the dependability, anonymity, and security of votes and voters. The system that has been developed can be used to properly conduct elections, using a quick response code (QR Code), face recognition, and fingerprint for identification before casting a ballot to ensure eligibility. This results in using mobile smartphones in the voting process where voters can observe the transparency of their votes. Furthermore, eliminates the possibility of fraud and manipulation of the votes made due to the used blockchain for secure storage.

Young-Sung IHM, Seung‐Hee Kim

This paper presents the design, implementation, and verification of a blockchain-based online electronic voting system that ensures accuracy and reliability in electronic voting and its application to various types of voting using blockchain technologies, such as distributed ledgers and smart contracts. Specifically, in this study, the connection between the electronic voting system and blockchain nodes is simplified using the REST API design, and the voting opening and counting information is designed to store the latest values in the distributed ledger in JSON format, using a smart contract that cannot be falsified. The developed electronic voting system can provide blockchain authentication, secret voting, forgery prevention, ballot verification, and push notification functions, all of which are currently not supported in existing services. Furthermore, the developed system demonstrates excellence on all evaluation items, including 101 transactions per second (TPS) of blockchain online authentication, 57.6 TPS of secret voting services, 250 TPS of forgery prevention cases, 547 TPS of read transaction processing, and 149 TPS of write transaction processing, along with 100% ballot verification service, secret ballot authentication, and encryption accuracy. Functional and performance verifications were obtained through an external test certification agency in South Korea. Our design allows for blockchain authentication, non-forgery of ballot counting data, and secret voting through blockchain-based distributed ledger technology. In addition, we demonstrate how existing electronic voting systems can be easily converted to blockchain-based electronic voting systems by applying a blockchain-linked REST API. This study greatly contributes to enabling electronic voting using blockchain technology through cost reductions, information restoration, prevention of misrepresentation, and transparency enhancement for a variety of different forms of voting.

Lei Yan, Maode Ma, Dandan Li, Xiaohong Huang · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.