Gonzalo Munilla Garrido, Johannes Sedlmeir, Matthias Babel
Analyses that fulfill differential privacy provide plausible deniability to individuals while allowing analysts to extract insights from data. However, beyond an often acceptable accuracy tradeoff, these statistical disclosure techniques generally inhibit the verifiability of the provided information, as one cannot check the correctness of the participants' truthful information, the differentially private mechanism, or the unbiased random number generation. While related work has already discussed this opportunity, an efficient implementation with a precise bound on errors and corresponding proofs of the differential privacy property is so far missing. In this paper, we follow an approach based on zero-knowledge proofs~(ZKPs), in specific succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge, as a verifiable computation technique to prove the correctness of a differentially private query output. In particular, we ensure the guarantees of differential privacy hold despite the limitations of ZKPs that operate on finite fields and have limited branching capabilities. We demonstrate that our approach has practical performance and discuss how practitioners could employ our primitives to verifiably query individuals' age from their digitally signed ID card in a differentially private manner.
Eman Ashraf, Nihal F. F. Areed, Hanaa Salem, Ehab H. Abdelhay · 5 authors
Recently, there has been considerable growth in the internet of things (IoT)-based healthcare applications; however, they suffer from a lack of intrusion detection systems (IDS). Leveraging recent technologies, such as machine learning (ML), edge computing, and blockchain, can provide suitable and strong security solutions for preserving the privacy of medical data. In this paper, FIDChain IDS is proposed using lightweight artificial neural networks (ANN) in a federated learning (FL) way to ensure healthcare data privacy preservation with the advances of blockchain technology that provides a distributed ledger for aggregating the local weights and then broadcasting the updated global weights after averaging, which prevents poisoning attacks and provides full transparency and immutability over the distributed system with negligible overhead. Applying the detection model at the edge protects the cloud if an attack happens, as it blocks the data from its gateway with smaller detection time and lesser computing and processing capacity as FL deals with smaller sets of data. The ANN and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models were evaluated using the BoT-IoT dataset. The results show that ANN models have higher accuracy and better performance with the heterogeneity of data in IoT devices, such as intensive care unit (ICU) in healthcare systems. Testing the FIDChain with different datasets (CSE-CIC-IDS2018, Bot Net IoT, and KDD Cup 99) reveals that the BoT-IoT dataset has the most stable and accurate results for testing IoT applications, such as those used in healthcare systems.
Abstract In recent years, With the rapid development of blockchain technol- ogy, there has been an increased interest in solving various opera- tional challenges. For the e-voting system at present, voter’s privacy, immutability of votes and third party dependency are major issues. These issues can very well be solved by blockchain technology. In this paper, we have proposed a decentralized framework for e-voting based on blockchain technology that contributes significantly to the implementation paradigm. We have implemented it on the Ethereum platform and developed a fully functional smart contract to store and validate votes. The research provides deep insight into the design of smart contract transactions in an e-voting system from a computa- tional cost perspective. In order to authenticate the voters, We have done voter verification in two phases. In the first phase, the voter reg- isters through a secure code, whose(code) Keccak-256 hash is stored on the blockchain, and in the second phase, the voter is verified by the managing authority. Based on the literature review, we found a lack of standardization for blockchain-based e-voting systems. So we have tried to fill this gap of standardization. In addition, we have also inspectedour model against various security attacks and found that our model is robust against double-spend attack, re-entrancy attack, DDoS etc.
Decentralized electronic voting solutions represent a promising advancement in electronic voting. One of the e-voting paradigms, the self-tallying scheme, offers strong protection of the voters' privacy while making the whole voting process verifiable. Decentralized smart contract platforms became interesting practical instantiation of the immutable bulletin board that this scheme requires to preserve its properties. Existing smart contract-based approaches employing the self-tallying scheme (such as OVN or BBB-Voting) are only suitable for a boardroom voting scenario due to their scalability limitation. The goal of our work is to build on existing solutions to achieve scalability without losing privacy guarantees and verifiability. We present SBvote, a blockchain-based self-tallying voting protocol that is scalable in the number of voters and therefore suitable for large-scale elections. The evaluation of our proof-of-concept implementation shows that the protocol's scalability is limited only by the underlying blockchain platform. We evaluated the scalability of SBvote on two public smart contract platforms -- Gnosis and Harmony. Despite the limitations imposed by the throughput of the blockchain platform, SBvote can accommodate elections with millions of voters.
Traditional voting systems like ballot voting or voting using EVMs (electronic voting machines) basically rely on paper and other human resources during the voting phase, which is time consuming as well as costly. The elections generally have a central system, where an organization looks after the election and manages it. The problem here is that the election is handled by a single organization that has full control. In this work-in-progress paper, we suggest a decentralized application based on blockchain technology and smart contracts that supports e-voting systems. To implement distributed electronic voting systems we propose using a blockchain technology. The paper proposes a unique electronic voting system backed by blockchain that addresses restrictions in existing systems and recommends the favoured blockchain frameworks for building a decentralized e-voting web application. The E-voting system is secure, transparent, protects the privacy of the voters and also, does not allow duplicate votes.
Christian Killer, Bruno Rodrigues, Eder J. Scheid, Muriel Figueredo Franco · 5 authors
Blockchains (BC) and Distributed Ledgers (DL) offer favorable properties, especially immutability and decentralization, which are suitable for voting systems’ Bulletin Boards (BB). In recent years, an influx of BC-based voting systems have been observed. Distributing trust among multiple trustees is a crucial reason to adopt BCs and DLs in voting systems. The practical deployment must be decentralized, too, and not just done through virtualizing interconnected systems. As discussed widely, adopting a BC or DL can incur threats to a system that assumed a trusted and centralized Public Bulletin Board (PBB). Therefore, the exploitation of BCs or DLs requires careful consideration of cryptographic mechanisms and the overall system design, as well as the adversary model. Besides these operational necessities, the long-term privacy of ballots is essential. Thus, the key question investigated in this article is: Can BC, and DL-based voting systems be considered harmful? Hence, first (i) requirements of BC-based voting systems are provided, followed by (ii) terminology definitions, and (iii) complemented by the design and implementation of a fully decentralized voting system: Æternum, which achieves Unconditional Privacy (UP) and neither relies on computational hardness assumptions nor on a trusted Trusted Third Party (TTP). Achieving UP is crucial because future adversaries may be able to break hardness assumptions. Æternum does not present a Single-Point-of-Failure (SPoF) either, since (i) the PBB in use is based on a permissioned DL, and (ii) the final tally and proofs can be verified by anyone, without requiring trust in any authority.
Niki Hrovatin, Aleksandar Tošić, Michaël Mrissa, Branko Kavšek
Currently, the computational power present in the sensors forming a wireless sensor network (WSN) allows for implementing most of the data processing and analysis directly on the sensors in a decentralized way. This shift in paradigm introduces a shift in the privacy and security problems that need to be addressed. While a decentralized implementation avoids the single point of failure problem that typically applies to centralized approaches, it is subject to other threats, such as external monitoring, and new challenges, such as the complexity of providing decentralized implementations for data mining algorithms. In this paper, we present a solution for privacy-aware distributed data mining on wireless sensor networks. Our solution uses a permissioned blockchain to avoid a single point of failure in the system. Contracts are used to construct an onion-like structure encompassing the Hoeffding trees and a route. The onion-routed query conceals the network identity of the sensors from external adversaries, and obfuscates the actual computation to hide it from internally compromised nodes. We validate our solution on a use case related to an air quality-monitoring sensor network. We compare the quality of our model against traditional models to support the feasibility and viability of the solution.
The anonymity and de-anonymity of blockchain and Bitcoin have always been a hot topic in blockchain related research. Since Bitcoin was created by Nakamoto in 2009, it has, to some extent, deviated from its currency attribute as a trading medium but instead turned into an object for financial investment and operations. In this paper, the power-law distribution that the Bitcoin network obeys is given with mathematical proof, while traditional de-anonymous methods such as clustering fail to satisfy it. Therefore, considering the profit-oriented characteristics of Bitcoin traders in such occasion, we put forward a de-anonymous heuristic approach that recognizes and analyzes the behavioral patterns of financial High-Frequency Transactions(HFT), with realtime exchange rate of Bitcoin involved. With heuristic approach used for de-anonymity, algorithm that deals with the adjacency matrix and transition probability matrix are also put forward, which then makes it possible to apply clustering to the IP matching method. Basing on the heuristic approach and additional algorithm for clustering, finally we established the de-anonymous method that matches the activity information of the IP with the transaction records in blockchain. Experiments on IP matching method are applied to the actual data. It turns out that similar behavioral pattern between IP and transaction records are shown, which indicates the superiority of IP matching method.
Siddharth Singh, Rohit Prasad, Usha Dhankhar, Seema Malik
The revolutionary concept of blockchain has given a rise to multiple facets of secure, accountable, online services. We witness the rise of E-voting as a critical topic related to online services. Blockchain with smart contracts emerges as a good candidate to use in the development of safer, cheaper, more secure, more transparent, and easier to use e-voting systems. Ethereum and its network are one of the most viable candidates for the implementation of an e-voting system using blockchain, due to their consistency, widespread use, and provision of smart contracts logic. An e-voting system must be secure, as it should prevent duplication of votes while being fully transparent and protecting the privacy of the voters involved. In this work, we have implemented and tested a sample voting web - application as a smart contract for the Ethereum network using the Ethereum wallets and the Solidity language. Eventually, when elections are held, the Ethereum blockchain will store votes and voting results. Users can connect their Ethereum wallet and vote for the candidate they want to, and these transaction requests are processed by the consensus of each Ethereum node. These agreements create a transparent voting environment.
Maira Andrade, Steve Sharman, Leon Y. Xiao, Philip Newall
OBJECTIVE: Online gambling has increased the accessibility and range of gambling products available to people all over the world. This trend has been particularly noticeable in the United Kingdom. Cryptocurrency-based gambling is a new, largely unregulated, way to gamble online, which uses mostly anonymous blockchain-based technologies, such as Bitcoin. The present research investigated consumer protection features of 40 frequently visited and U.K.-accessible cryptocurrency-based online gambling operators. METHOD: A content analysis was performed by visiting all 40 cryptocurrency-based online operators and recording their safer gambling and consumer protection practices. Coded features included aspects of the sign-up process, features of any safer gambling pages, customer support practices, and Identity verification. RESULTS: Results revealed significant failings in the account registration process; none of the operators verified the identity of new users, and 35% required only an email or no personal information for sign-up. Overall, 37.5% of operators offered no safer gambling tools and a further 20% offered only one. Additionally, 64.7% of operators continued to email promotional material after being informed of a user's impaired control when gambling. Less than half of the analyzed operators held a valid license (47.5%), and none of the operators with an available deposit page required identity verification before enabling deposits. CONCLUSIONS: These results highlight the potential risks for young and vulnerable individuals, especially when a lack of identity verification is paired with the inherent anonymity of cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for greater policy and research attention toward cryptocurrency-based online gambling. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
Anonymity and privacy in the electoral process are mandatory features found in any democratic society, and many authors consider these fundamental civil liberties and rights. During the election process, every voter must be identified as eligible, but after casting a vote, the voter must stay anonymous, assuring voter and vote unlinkability. Voter anonymity and privacy are the most critical issues and challenges of almost all electronic voting systems. However, vote immutability must be assured as well, which is a problem in many new democracies, and Blockchain as a distributed technology meets this data immutability requirement. Our paper analyzes current solutions in Blockchain and proposes a new approach through the combination of two different Blockchains to achieve privacy and anonymity. The first Blockchain will be used for key management, while the second will store anonymous votes. The encrypted vote is salted with a nonce, hashed, and finally digitally signed with the voter’s private key, and by mixing the timestamp of votes and shuffling the order of cast votes, the chances of linking the vote to the voter will be reduced. Adopting this approach with Blockchain technology will significantly transform the current voting process by guaranteeing anonymity and privacy.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Rainer Stütz, S. Rollet · 6 authors
One of the defining features of Bitcoin and the thousands of cryptocurrencies that have been derived from it is a globally visible transaction ledger. While Bitcoin uses pseudonyms as a way to hide the identity of its participants, a long line of research has demonstrated that Bitcoin is not anonymous. This has been perhaps best exemplified by the development of clustering heuristics, which have in turn given rise to the ability to track the flow of bitcoins as they are sent from one entity to another. In this paper, we design a new heuristic that is designed to track a certain type of flow, called a peel chain, that represents many transactions performed by the same entity; in doing this, we implicitly cluster these transactions and their associated pseudonyms together. We then use this heuristic to both validate and expand the results of existing clustering heuristics. We also develop a machine learning-based validation method and, using a ground-truth dataset, evaluate all our approaches and compare them with the state of the art. Ultimately, our goal is to not only enable more powerful tracking techniques but also call attention to the limits of anonymity in these systems.
Yousif Mohammed Wahab, Alaan Ghazi, Aras Al-dawoodi, Muthana Alisawi · 7 authors
Election is a basic democratic tool that offers an official mechanism for the people to express their opinions in order to form a government by democratic means. Electronic voting has evolved into the most significant application of e-governance and e-democracy. Few countries have recently taken the opportunity to test and use electronic voting systems. Also, many countries expect that internet voting will become a reality during the next decade. In the conventional voting system, the electors authenticate themselves by displaying credentials; this move is open to the public and is validated by poll workers. During this authentication, they are manually checked before being eligible to vote. The standard system of voting is more costly and needs more human capital. Because of these factors, the whole world is heading toward the trend of e-voting. Electronic voting devices are supposed to be the answer to the shortages. A secure e-voting system must meet many criteria, including uniqueness, performance, fairness, stability, safety, authentication, and anonymity. Blockchain is a modern security solution, which is capable of securing e-voting system. Blockchain is distributed ledger. Each block contains only one transaction. Block chain provides security using cryptography and hashing. Blockchain provides a perfect infrastructure to provide secure e-voting netwms.ork. Blockchain along with smart contracts need hour to improvise an e-voting system. This paper presents a secure blockchain based framework for an e-electronic voting in Iraq.
Transaction-order-manipulation attacks have become commonplace in public blockchains such as Ethereum, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. In these blockchains, a miner can unilaterally determine the order of transactions inside a block, and this ordering is not checked by other users, leaving room for the miner to manipulate the order for its own benefit. This gap is also evident from existing security results for permissionless blockchains. As prime examples, the breakthrough work of Garay et al. (Eurocrypt 2015) and Pass et al. (Eurocrypt 2017) showed the security properties of consistency and liveness for Nakamoto's seminal proof-of-work protocol. However, consistency and liveness do not provide any guarantees on the relationship between the order in which transactions arrive into the network and the finalized order in the ledger.
Giuseppe Crincoli, Giacomo Iadarola, Piera Elena La Rocca, Fabio Martinelli · 6 authors
We are recently witnessing an exponential use of blockchain technology since information infrastructures are increasingly moving from the concept of centralisation to the decentralization ones. Blockchain technology is strictly related to the exchange of sensitive information, and its massive adoption is corresponding to interest from attackers. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically detect whether a Smart Contract (i.e. a contract between two parties concerning the exchange of goods and services, it is executed automatically and is governed by a source code written by a developer, contains clearly conditions accepted by both parties and resides on a distributed and decentralised network of computers) exhibits vulnerability. The proposed method relies on model checking and, through the adoption of μ-Calculus rules, is aimed to detect four different vulnerabilities on Smart Contracts modeled as automata. We preliminary evaluate the proposed method on a dataset composed by 40 (vulnerable and legitimate) contracts, by obtaining a precision ranging from 0.98 to 1 and a recall equal to 1, confirming that the proposed method can be promising in vulnerable Smart Contract detection.
Bitcoin emerged as the most successful cryptocurrency due to the fact that it evaluates in 2009. Other than its security tightness, the principal settlements are probably to be its key to achievement: anonymity and isolation. In this paper, we offer an entire description of the info that make this type of cryptocurrency a thrilling problem for studies in a private society. We're carrying out an intensive overview of nameless bitcoin research papers published up to now and describe a number of the conditions that require research on that topic. Keywords Bitcoin, Blockchain statistics, Mining channel, E-pockets, and so on.
The rapid development and wide application of distributed network systems have made network security especially access control and data privacy ever more important. Blockchain technology offers features such as decentralization, high confidence, and tamper-resistance, which are advantages to solving auditability, resource consumption, scalability, central authority, and trust issues all of which are challenges for network access control by traditional mechanisms. This document presents general information for blockchain access control systems from the views of blockchain system properties, components, functions, and supports for access control policy models. Considerations for implementing blockchain access control systems are also included.
Fengyin Li, Li Xiao, Peiyu Liu, Xueqing Sun · 6 authors
Blockchain gives a new method for distributed data ledgering. The smart grid obtains efficient two-way data transmission and information control. It effectively monitors and regulates the grid by collecting real-time electricity consumption data of users. However, online data collection brings privacy leakage. To solve the problem of privacy leakage in the electricity data collection in the smart grid, a privacy-aware electricity data collection model is proposed. Firstly, we propose a new group blind signature scheme by introducing the blind feature into the identity-based encryption method. Secondly, by applying the proposed group blind signature scheme to the electricity data collection process, we propose a privacy-aware electricity data collection model. The proposed model ensures the conditional anonymity and traceability of user identity and the privacy protection and unforgeability of electricity consumption data.
Distributed ledger technology has paved the way for new innovative approaches in the field of security and privacy. Self-sovereign identity contributed to empowering individuals to have control over their digital identifiers. The presented self-sovereign-based access control system utilizes both technologies.
E-voting plays a vital role in modern social life. However, traditional e-voting systems usually rely on a trusted third party and therefore non-verifiable and prone to a single point of failure. In recent years, many researchers have tried to turn to blockchain to eliminate the vulnerabilities of e-voting systems. However, blockchain-based e-voting brings new problems in protecting voters’ privacy and ballots’ confidentiality, and causes a great performance degradation. In this paper, we propose AvecVoting, an anonymous and verifiable blockchain-based e-voting scheme, providing both strong security and high performance. Specifically, we utilize threshold encryption and one-time ring signature to protect voters’ privacy and ballots’ confidentiality. Furthermore, to improve the performance, we introduce the concept "counter" to count the ballots. Through the carefully designed RandomSortition and reputation-based PayOff algorithms based on smart contracts, AvecVoting can achieve correct counting even when some counters are untrustworthy. Our security and performance analyses show that AvecVoting provides strong security such as anonymity, non-repeatability, confidentiality, verifiability, etc., and meanwhile overcome the performance issues caused by blockchain and provides good efficiency in both voting and counting stages.
Despite decades of development progress, the current e-voting systems still suffer several challenges especially in terms of security and privacy. Some of the key reasons behind this issue include lack of transparency in the process and inadequate privacy guarantee for the voters. To address these issues, we propose and construct zVote, a blockchain-based e-voting platform that aims to create a transparent and secure system for remote e-voting. With the use of blockchain, the voting result can be verifiable by the public, thereby eliminating the trust in the election authorities. Furthermore, we leverage homomorphic encryptions and zero-knowledge proofs to protect the privacy of users, especially in terms of anonymity and membership privacy, while retaining the correctness and verifiability of the votes. We provide formal definitions and proofs of the construction’s security. Our proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates the feasibility and practicality of zVote.
Digitization of a secure electoral system capable of ensuring fairness and privacy has been a long-standing challenge for a variety of reasons. One is the system's reliance on a third-party organization to manage and verify election results, rendering it insecure. There is a possibility that data will be altered during the election process. As a result, a decentralized e-voting system application capable of verification will be developed in this work using blockchain technology. The Ethereum network and the Truffle framework will be used to implement smart contracts as self-executing electoral agreements. The Ganache (local blockchain) network design demonstrated that the prototype is capable of recording every voting transaction on the network without the use of a central database. The voter can verify the election result by inspecting each voting transaction on the local blockchain. The proposed design will ensure that all voting transactions are stored in a decentralized database, ensuring that no administrative control over the ballot is exercised.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohammad Salahuddin, Priyesh Kadbe, Rajat Wanjarkar
In place of traditional electoral systems, the implementation of e-voting systems is widely adopted which still has major problems in the results. Online voting is an alternative to the old paper voting system and today's popular Electronic Vote Machine (EVM). E-voting systems are very susceptible to manipulation issues, such as alteration of election results by hacking or by the manufacturer of the voting system. To solve this problem, we use distributed ledger technology to create a voting application that is accessible to everyone and everywhere. Blockchain, which is the technology behind the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency, has attracted a lot of attention globally in recent years. This paper proposes a blockchain-based voting system that removes some limitations of existing voting systems. The application is based on the Ethereum blockchain which makes the entire system secure and immutable in nature. The presented implementation is suitable for small-scale elections such as inside corporate homes, meeting rooms, and more.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
V Lalitha, S. Samundeswari, R Roobinee, Lakshme S Swetha
Casting a vote is not only the right of a citizen but also a responsibility of the citizen. The citizens of a country get an opportunity to vote for their representatives who will represent the needs and suggestions of citizens. These representatives are elected through the process called elections. The traditional electoral system necessitates the actual presence of the voter which causes discomfort to the physically challenged people. Also, there are chances of vote tampering. This paper discusses the proposed solution that will solve the above problems. Our proposed solution is to use an Online Voting System using Ethereum Blockchain. This web-based voting system helps the voters to vote from any location. The system validates the voters with the help of their Aadhar cards linked with their voter id. After which the system requires the voters to scan their face and fingerprint which will be verified with the data in the database. Blockchain technology encrypts the vote and thus it prevents every vote from tampering. It makes sure that a voter can vote only once for one candidate. The system fetches the election results quickly and thus reduces the labour cost and counting errors.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques