Blockchain Papers

Weilong Wang, Yingjie Wang, Yan Huang, Chunxiao Mu · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Meng Li, Yifei Chen, Chhagan Lal, Mauro Conti · 6 authors

Security and privacy issues have become a major hindrance to the broad adoption of Ride-Hailing Services (RHSs). In this article, we introduce a new collusion attack initiated by the Ride-Hailing Service Provider (RHSP) and a driver that could easily link the real riders and their anonymous requests (credentials). Besides this attack, existing work requires heavy computations to execute user matching, and it is challenging for riders to verify matching results. Meanwhile, a malicious driver may cancel an assigned ride order due to its short distance. To address these issues, we present a RHS system named Nereus to support collusion resistance, efficiency, verifiability, and accountability. First, we integrate a smart contract into a Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave to establish aprivate smart contractfor collusion resistance. We use a Bloom filter to achieve efficient matching. Second, we leverage privacy-preserving range query and Merkle proofs to make matching results verifiable. Meanwhile, we adopt short group signatures to provide anonymous authentication and deposit commitments to hold the runaway driver accountable. We formally state and prove the security and privacy of Nereus. We build a prototype based on Ethereum and SGX to conduct extensive performance analysis in regard to gas costs, computational costs, and communication overhead. Experimental results show that Nereus significantly improves over existing schemes in terms of computational costs.

Sarra Namane, Imed Ben Dhaou

The Internet of Things is gaining more importance in the present era of Internet technology. It is considered as one of the most important technologies of everyday life. Moreover, IoT systems are ceaselessly growing with more and more devices. They are scalable, dynamic, and distributed, hence the origin of the crucial security requirements in IoT. One of the most challenging issues that the IoT community must handle recently is how to ensure an access control approach that manages the security requirements of such a system. Traditional access control technologies are not suitable for a large-scale and distributed network structure. Most of them are based on a centralized approach, where the use of a trusted third party (TTP) is obligatory. Furthermore, the emergence of blockchain technology has allowed researchers to come up with a solution for these security issues. This technology is highly used to record access control data. Additionally, it has great potential for managing access control requests. This paper proposed a blockchain-based access control taxonomy according to the access control nature: partially decentralized and fully decentralized. Furthermore, it presents an overview of blockchain-based access control solutions proposed in different IoT applications. Finally, the article analyzes the proposed works according to certain criteria that the authors deem important.

Jun Huang, Debiao He, Yitao Chen, Muhammad Khurram Khan · 5 authors

The development of secure and reliable voting mechanism has attracted more and more attention from academia and industry. Many researchers are trying to design a secure and reliable voting system. However, many existing blockchain-based proposals have more or less problems, such as limited number of participants, weak fault-tolerant mechanisms and inadequate privacy protection, which makes it difficult to apply them to the real world to solve the above problems. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a blockchain-based self-tallying voting protocol to achieve high available, secure and anonymous voting. More specifically, we adopt threshold secret sharing to deal with abstention problem (this is a difficult problem to solve in self-tallying voting systems). We adopt homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proof to achieve anonymity and verifiability of encrypted data. Through the analysis and performance testing, and comparison with existing similar proposals, the results show that our scheme has advantages in security and robustness, and the performance test shows that our scheme has good practicability and scalability.

Stjepan Ivček

Iako je robustan i siguran, Proof of Work mehanizam konsenzusa suočava se s izazovima poput skalabilnosti, centralizacije, dostupnosti te negativnog utjecaja na okoliš. Samim time pojavila se potreba za alternativnim metodama konsenzusa. Proof of Stake i njegove varijacije nameću se kao rješenje. Konsenzusi obrađeni u radu su redom: Proof of Stake, Proof of Activity, Delegated Proof of Stake, Proof of Authority, Pure Proof of Stake te Proof of History. Svaki od navedenih pokušava, uz dodatne tehnologije razvijene oko mehanizma, riješiti probleme Proof of Work konsenzusa. Pojavom PoS konsenzusa i njegovih varijacija povećana je dostupnost za pojedinca da se uključi u rad mreže. Potrošnja energije je uvelike smanjena i generira se manje elektroničkog otpada. Skalabilnost se poboljšala u odnosu na PoW. Centraliziranost je jedan od izazova gdje bi se u budućnosti mogao vidjeti najveći napredak. U praktičnom dijelu rada, istraživanjem Solana blockchaina zaključili smo da je poprilično centraliziran.

Suresh Balaji, S Vishagasudan, K. Ezhilarasi

Voting stands as a cornerstone of democracy in any nation, empowering citizens to select future leaders and express their views within their communities. It fosters an understanding of civic duty and citizenship significance. Online voting systems, digital platforms designed to conduct elections securely, streamline the voting process by eliminating traditional paper ballots and in-person gatherings. These systems safeguard the integrity of each vote by preventing multiple submissions. Contrasting paper-based methods, electronic voting, or e-voting, offers inherent advantages such as heightened efficiency and reduced errors. Such systems promote broader participation by enabling individuals to vote from any location with internet access. Blockchain technology, an emerging decentralized innovation with robust cryptographic underpinnings, holds promise for enhancing various industries. Integrating e-voting with blockchain could address existing e-voting concerns. Here, we propose a blockchain-based voting system to curb fraud and enhance the simplicity, security, and efficiency of the voting process. Keywords: Blockchain, Ethereum, Smart-contracts, Online-voting, Privacy, Trust, Security

Shiyong Huang, Xin Yang, Langyue He, Xiaohan Hao · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Mansi bajpai, Atebar Haider, Alok Mishra, Yusuf Perwej · 5 authors

It has long been difficult to create a safe electronic voting system that provides the transparency and flexibility provided by electronic systems, while maintaining the fairness and privacy of present voting methods. Voting, especially during elections, is a technique where participants do not trust one another since the system might be attacked not just by an outsider but also by participants themselves (voters and organizers). The traditional methods of voting systems find it challenging to maintain the characteristics of an ideal voting system since there is a chance of tampering with results and disturbing the process itself. As a result, the effectiveness of the voting system is increased by translating the characteristics of an ideal voting system into digital space. It greatly lowers the expense of the elections and the work of the inspectors. In this essay, we'll use the open-source Blockchain technology to suggest a new electronic voting system's architecture. New chances to create new kinds of digital services are being provided by Blockchain. Numerous elements of our life have been altered by Blockchain technology, including the ability to save digital transactions via the Internet, confirm their legitimacy, license them, and provide the greatest level of security and encryption. This system offers a distributed architecture for storing the data, which distributes the data among many servers. In addition to maintaining voter identity outside of the vote count, this technology makes the voting process transparent.

Tomislav Babić

Kriptovaluta Bitcoin je pseudonimna, korisnici se ne identificiraju stvarnim imenom nego Bitcoin adresom. Iz raznih razloga, bilo dobronamjernih ili zlonamjernih, korisnicima je u interesu da se njihova Bitcoin adresa ne poveže kako s njihovim stvarnim identitetom tako i s njihovim drugim Bitcoin adresama. U ovom radu analiziran je obrazac ponašanja peeling chain koji se koristi za zametanje traga, sprječavanje povezivanja različitih adresa kao adresa koje pripadaju istoj osobi. Peeling chain može napraviti svaki korisnik Bitcoin sustava, ali upitna je motivacija dobronamjernih korisnika za to. Zlonamjernim korisnicima on omogućuje skrivanje veze između adresa direktno povezanih s ilegalnima aktivnostima i drugih adresa na koje su raspodijelili svoje bitcoine. Zbog toga je prepoznavanje peeling chaina od velike važnosti za sprječavanje ilegalnih aktivnosti poput krađe i trgovine zabranjenom robom. U ovom radu osmišljen je algoritam za detekciju peeling chainova i demonstrirana je njegova uspješnost na različitim skupovima podataka.

Huimin Niu, Ting Li, Xiugang Gong

The security of the tax system is directly related to the development of a country. The conventional process of tax payment laborious steps, so this process becomes a cause of irregularities among taxpayers and tax authorities, increasing the rate of corruption in tax collection. Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology, its unique advantages and promising applications in taxation offer an effective solution to the problems of electronic taxation. However, the transparency of blockchain exists the risk of privacy disclosure, the high degree of anonymity brings the problem of lack of user supervision. Therefore, for balancing the contradiction of taxpayer privacy and supervision, we propose a blockchain-based self-certified and anonymous e-taxing scheme, which uses blockchain as the underlying support, and utilizes cryptography technology such as self-certified public key, Diffie-Hellman, to reduce the taxpayer's reliance on the certificate authority, and protects the taxpayer's anonymity while realizing the tracking of the real identity of malicious taxpayers. The security analysis proves that the scheme has the properties such as anonymity, conditional privacy and unforgeability, etc. Finally, performance analysis shows that compared with similar schemes, the scheme significantly improves the registration efficiency, proving its practicability and implementability.

Ilya Grishkov, Roland Kromes, Thanassis Giannetsos, Kaitai Liang

This paper offers a prototype of a Hyperledger Fabric-IPFS based network architecture including a smart contract based encryption scheme that meant to improve the security of user's data that is being uploaded to the distributed ledger. A new extension to the self-encryption scheme was deployed by integrating data owner's identity into the encryption process. Such integration allows to permanently preserve ownership of the original file and link it to the person/entity who originally uploaded it. Moreover, self-encryption provides strong security guarantees that decryption of a file is computationally not feasible under the condition that the encrypted file and the key are safely stored.

Khandaker Sajidul Islam, Md Babul Islam, Christian Avornu, Jungang Lou · 5 authors

Voting is a vital aspect of human democracy, and efforts have been made throughout civilization to enhance the mechanisms, processes, and methodologies used to vote in a way that is transparent, verifiable, and accessible. Blockchain technology has been significantly widely used to solve multidimensional difficulties in various application sectors including healthcare, banking, electronic voting, etc., in recent decades. In this article, we propose a new e-voting protocol system which is based on blockchain technology without trusted tallying authorities. One of the most challenging challenges in arranging elections is gaining the faith of all voters in the counting process. The current election system frequently results in the recounting of votes cast, raising issues about the authenticity of many of the votes cast. There have even been instances where the opposition has expressed questions due to a lack of transparency in the vote verification and tallying process, there are concerns regarding the election’s overall validity. The current study offers a new voting mechanism which is based on blockchain technology to address this issue. The new protocol allows each voter to rate each candidate by giving different scores to them, instead of voting for a single candidate. Before being submitted, every vote is encoded using a different encryption method. The new protocol assures the validity of the votes cast during the counting procedure and maintains anonymity at the same moment. For the relatively large election, our proposed protocol will be flexible and feasible because the overhead of counting ballots is linear.

Shreyas Tandon, Niharika Singh, Shivani Porwal, Satiram · 5 authors

In current times, electronic voting systems are used for conducting elections but E-voting system has many problems like transparency, credibility, security functionality and reliability and also the complete process is quite slow. Most of these drawbacks can be removed by using Blockchain based E-voting system. Blockchain is a shared, immutable record that allows for the recording of transactions and the tracking of benefits in a network. Blockchain is an immutable and shared record that provides the method of recording transactions and tracking benefits in a network. In this paper, we propose and implement a blockchain based E-voting system using proof of work as the consensus algorithm. We feel this field has a lot of potential and scope of improvement in near future.

Xiao Liang, Ningyu An, Da Li, Qiang Zhang · 5 authors

In the smart grid, the sharing of power data among various energy entities can make the data play a higher value. However, there may be unauthorized access while sharing data, which makes many entities unwilling to share their data to prevent data leakage. Based on blockchain and ABAC (Attribute-based Access Control) technology, this paper proposes an access control scheme, so that users can achieve fine-grained access control of their data when sharing them. The solution uses smart contract to achieve automated and reliable policy evaluation. IPFS (Interplanetary File System) is used for off-chain distributed storage to share the storage pressure of blockchain and guarantee the reliable storage of data. At the same time, all processes in the system are stored in the blockchain, ensuring the accountability of the system. Finally, the experiment proves the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Syada Tasmia Alvi, Mohammed Nasir Uddin, Linta Islam, Sajib Ahamed

Voting is a fundamental democratic activity. Many experts believe that paper balloting is the only appropriate method to ensure everyone’s right to vote. But this method is prone to errors and abuse. Many nations utilize digital voting methods to solve the difficulties of paper balloting. A single flaw in digital voting may lead to massive vote-rigging. Election voting methods must be legal, accurate, safe, and convenient. However, issues with digital voting methods may restrict acceptance. Due to its end-to-end verification capabilities, blockchain technology was developed to address these problems. To guarantee We have used blockchain technology anonymity, privacy, verifiability, mobility, integrity, security, and fairness in voting. By using blockchain our proposed system ensures security, privacy, and integrity. This system provides voter anonymity by keeping the voter information as a hash in the blockchain. It also provides fairness by keeping the casted vote encrypted till the ending time of the election. After ending time, the voter can verify their casted vote, ensuring verifiability. To test our protocol, we put it on Ethereum 2.0, a blockchain platform that uses Solidity as a programming language to create smart contracts. The adoption of smart contracts provides a safe means for performing voter verification, ensuring the correctness of voting results, making the counting system public, and protecting against fraudulent activities. We analyzed the system’s performance based on security and gas costs. It improves in terms of security characteristics and the related cost for the necessary infrastructure.

Dominic Deuber, Viktoria Ronge, Christian Rückert

In recent years, cryptocurrencies have increasingly been used in cybercrime and have become the key means of payment in darknet marketplaces, partly due to their alleged anonymity. Furthermore, the research attacking the anonymity of even those cryptocurrencies that claim to offer anonymity by design is growing and is being applied by law enforcement agencies in the fight against cybercrime. Their investigative measures require a certain degree of suspicion and it is unclear whether findings resulting from attacks on cryptocurrencies’ anonymity can indeed establish that required degree of suspicion. The reason for this is that these attacks are partly based upon uncertain assumptions which are often not properly addressed in the corresponding papers. To close this gap, we extract the assumptions in papers that are attacking Bitcoin, Monero and Zcash, major cryptocurrencies used in darknet markets which have also received the most attention from researchers. We develop a taxonomy to capture the different nature of those assumptions in order to help investigators to better assess whether the required degree of suspicion for specific investigative measures could be established. We found that assumptions based on user behaviour are in general the most unreliable and thus any findings of attacks based on them might not allow for intense investigative measures such as pre-trial detention. We hope to raise awareness of the problem so that in the future there will be fewer unlawful investigations based upon uncertain assumptions and thus fewer human rights violations.

Vikas Chouhan, Anshul Arora

No abstract is available for this record.

Gadde Pranitha, T. Rukmini, T. N. Shankar, Basant Sah · 6 authors

This paper is based on a voting system that's widely used in elections known as electronic voting machines and has the potential to conduct the process securely by blockchain technology. The prime aim of this system for ensuring security, integrity as well as transparency. Voter privacy is one of the prime factors in the electronic voting portal that presents a blockchain-based voting system to overcome several drawbacks of current voting methods by proposing a simple, reliable, fast and inexpensive e-voting system. The election data can be arranged in a chain with several blocks with the best security level for this process that employs for any election to ensure flawless counting.

Authors unavailable

Technological advancements in block chain (BC)-based frameworks have empowered scientists to create innovative inventions such as e-casting ballots. The traditional agreement models utilized proof-of-work (PoW) in the Bitcoin that affected energy utilization and bargained the adaptability for the ballot framework. The existing works evaluates the trust basically only on the centralized party as it was not feasible because of the dynamic changes in the pervasive social networking (PSN) topology and their characteristics. The present research work proposes a block chain based trust evaluation model for the PSN based BC. The proposed hybrid proof of stake-trust (PST) BC is based on the proof-of trust (PoT) and also the proof of stake (PoS) overcomes the issues that are occurring in the e-vote casting. The trust evaluation is performed for public verification and becomes transparent for each node of PSN. The advantage of the proposed method is that a new block will be designed for trust evaluation during the block generation. The process of sharding erases the workload when the network works fast for the individual nodes provides the sum of their alternative parts. Therefore, the model utilizes the agreements for generating the safe process that guarantee the precision to vote it from the time of the election results. The present research work utilizes the proof of stake-trust based BC resulted in security improvement. The model improves the adaptability and execution of the BC based on the ballot framework provided a secured voting system for the government. The proposed PST-BC model showed better results in terms of latency as 15/s when compared with the existing models merkle hash tree -bloom filter that obtained 107.3/s and performance constraints based electron of 18/s.

Pimal Khanpara, Shivam Patel, Sharada Valiveti

In a country like India, resolution of any major issue or conflict primarily lies in the hands of the government. Given that India is one of the world's largest democracies, the voting system is one of the most essential phases, considering its limitations. The voting system is mostly based on a centralized system. As a result, there are many chances of risks like vote tampering, security, transparencies, DoS attacks and many more. Due to these problems, the population of the world, is not fully trusting the voting system. The motive is to overcome the abovementioned loopholes and provide the nation a better environment for a better government. The one solution came out to overcome this problem is a Blockchain Technology. Blockchain is a method of storing information in such a way that it is difficult or impossible to edit, hack, or trick the system. The Blockchain is a distributed ledger that can efficiently and verifiably record transactions between two parties. The Blockchain Technology is used to protect the data from theft and to prevent vote tampering. This paper presents the study and analysis of various blockchain-based voting mechanisms.

Xingyu Li, Ziyu Zheng, Pengyu Cheng, Jin Li · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Cristian Toma, M. Popa, Cătălin Boja, Cristian Ciurea · 5 authors

The paper presents the construction of a proof-of-concept for a distributed and decentralized e-voting application in an IoT embedded device with the help of blockchain technology. A SoC board was used as an IoT embedded device for testing the PoC. This solution ensures complete voter anonymity and end-to-end security for all entities participating in the electronic voting process. The paper outlines the solution’s two layers. Implementation details are presented for the e-voting application, which was deployed inside of an IoT embedded device. The solution and presented protocols provide two major properties: privacy and verifiability. To ensure privacy, the proposed solution protects the secrecy of each electronic vote. As for implementing verifiability, the solution prevents a corrupt authority from faking in any way the process of counting the votes. Both properties are achieved in the presented solution e-VoteD-App.

Buhari Ugbede Umar, Olayemi Mikail Olaniyi, Daniel Oluwaseun Olajide, Eustace M. Dogo

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger of transactions that are linked together cryptographically leading to immutability and tamper-resistance, thereby ensuring the integrity of data. Due to the ability of blockchain to guarantee the integrity of data, it has found wide-range adoption in electronic voting (e-voting) systems in recent years, this is in a bid to prevent manipulation of votes. However, due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, opportunities arise for privacy intrusion of the data being secured. The translation of this privacy flaw in blockchain to e-voting systems is the possibility of violation of the privacy of the electorates. Consequently, in a bid to achieve integrity and privacy of votes in e-voting, this study presents the use of an open-source blockchain system, coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem, towards addressing the privacy concerns of the blockchain. The performance of the system was evaluated and a transaction throughput of 1424 tps was obtained for ten thousand simulated ballot transactions. Further evaluation was carried out on the system, by increasing the number of system transactions. This showed that the mining time of the blockchain increased by an average factor of 0.18 s for every thousand increases in the number of transactions. Also, the response time of the system to a range of user actions was evaluated over an increasing number of voters. Results obtained showed that the response time of the system for vote casting operations increased by an average of 0.33 min per thousand voters while for vote tallying there was an increase in response time by an average of 0.848 min per thousand voters. The scientific value of this study is the development of an integrity and privacy-preserving e-voting system consisting of an open-source nodechain coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem following the security requirements of e-voting systems. The proposed system addresses the issue of integrity in e-voting while still maintaining the privacy of the electorates.

Man Chun Chow, Maode Ma

The futuristic fifth-generation cellular network (5G) not only supports high-speed internet, but must also connect a multitude of devices simultaneously without compromising network security. To ensure the security of the network, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized the 5G Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol for mutually authenticating user equipment (UE), base stations, and the core network. However, it has been found that 5G-AKA is vulnerable to many attacks, including linkability attacks, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. To address these security issues and improve the robustness of the 5G network, in this paper, we introduce the Secure Blockchain-based Authentication and Key Agreement for 5G Networks (5GSBA). Using blockchain as a distributed database, our 5GSBA decentralizes authentication functions from a centralized server to all base stations. It can prevent single-point-of-failure and increase the difficulty of DDoS attacks. Moreover, to ensure the data in the blockchain cannot be used for device impersonation, our scheme employs the one-time secret hash function as the device secret key. Furthermore, our 5GSBA can protect device anonymity by mandating the encryption of device identities with Subscription Concealed Identifiers (SUCI). Linkability attacks are also prevented by deprecating the sequence number with Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH). We use Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and the Scyther tool to formally verify our protocol. The security analysis shows that 5GSBA is superior to 5G-AKA in terms of perfect forward secrecy, device anonymity, and mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA). Additionally, it effectively deters linkability attacks, replay attacks, and most importantly, DoS and DDoS attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation shows that 5GSBA is efficient for both UEs and base stations with reasonably low computational costs and energy consumption.