Rong Yu, Zhenqi Wang, Conghui Zhang, Shaopeng Guan
In the housing rental market, some intermediaries often publish malicious rental prices or provide false housing information, taking advantage of the asymmetry and opacity of the rental market, to harm the interests of tenants. Blockchain has the characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and trustworthiness, which can well address the problems faced in the housing rental market. In this paper, we establish a secure transaction platform for housing rental based on blockchain. First of all, we replace the trusted third party in the traditional house rental platform using the blockchain technology to reduce the trust cost of the platform. Then, we adopt an identity access mechanism based on zero-knowledge proof to ensure the identity legality of users in the housing rental platform. Finally, homomorphic encryption algorithms are employed to protect the private information of users in the process of housing transactions. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme can well solve the drawbacks of the traditional housing rental platform and ensure the safety of transactions between the rental parties on the platform.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The emergence of blockchain technology has paved the way for innovative solutions in various domains, particularly in enhancing democratic processes. This research paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of a Web3 blockchain decentralized voting application (DAPP) built using React JS for frontend development and Solidity for smart contract implementation. The objective of this study is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of employing blockchain technology to create a secure, transparent, and decentralized voting system. The proposed DAPP leverages the immutability and transparency features of blockchain technology to ensure the integrity of the voting process. Smart contracts coded in Solidity are utilized to execute the voting mechanism, ensuring tamper-proof recording and tallying of votes. React JS, a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, is employed to develop an intuitive and user-friendly frontend interface, enhancing accessibility and usability for voters. Key aspects addressed in this research include the architecture of the DAPP, the design of smart contracts for voting logic, integration of React JS components for frontend development, and security considerations to prevent vulnerabilities and attacks. Additionally, the paper discusses the implications of decentralized voting systems on democracy, including increased trust, transparency, and participation.
Open access
3 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In today's world we are surrounded with lot of IoT devices and sensors. This IoT devices has made our life easier and more comfortable utilizing the Blockchain and increase the security and efficiency of network. key features of Blockchain will bring resistance to unauthorized modification and devices. The Rapid development in this technology of IoT is getting into pool and Rapid more data is transmitted and process over the communication channels. As a result, these devices is deployed worldwide and even more advanced requirement in the practical application and performance. Most of the devices are highly centralized architecture and which then suffers from technical limitation as well as they suffer from cyber attacks. To solve this problem, we propsed a system in which a gateway is introduced. The role of the Gateway in smartphones is the most beneficial, yet it is a unified structure that presents many security issues such as integrity, certification and availability. This network consists of three levels, including smart home devices, gateways and clouds. Blockchain infrastructure is provided in the gateway layer so that data can be processed and shared as blocks. Blockchain guarantees the confidentiality of internal data outside smart homes and the availability by way of authentic communication between the application of the network for Ethereum-based Blockchain technologies, including time and precision, to promote decentralization and overcome the central architecture issue.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In recent years block chain technology have gained popularity because of its secure and decentralized architecture. Block chain is a fault-tolerant distributed ledger without administrators. Block chain is originally derived from crypto currency, but it is possible to be applied to other industries. Security is enhanced by the methods of hashing, immutable ledger property, consensus protocol, proof of work (POW) mechanism etc. The design put forward facilitates the conversion of a randomly long input message to a message digest of fixed length and is implemented on FPGA. The use of FPGA provides the added advantage of fast parallel processing and computing, adaptability and real time application. The objective is to optimize the design and efficiently implement the conversion of a randomly long message to a fixed length output using the concepts of block chain.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Alexandre Augusto Giron, Jean Everson Martina, Ricardo Felipe Custódio
Steganography is one of the ways to hide data between parties. Its use can be worrisome, e.g., to hide illegal communications. Researchers found that public blockchains can be an attractive place to hide communications; however, there is not much evidence of actual use in blockchains. Besides, previous work showed a lack of steganalysis methods for blockchains. In this context, we present a steganalysis approach for blockchains, evaluating it in Bitcoin and Ethereum, both popular cryptocurrencies. The main objective is to answer if one can find steganography in real case scenarios, focusing on LSB of addresses and nonces. Our sequential analysis included 253 GiB and 107 GiB of bitcoin and ethereum, respectively. We also analyzed up to 98 million bitcoin clusters. We found that bitcoin clusters could carry up to 360 KiB of hidden data if used for such a purpose. We have not found any concrete evidence of hidden data in the blockchains. The sequential analysis may not capture the perspective of the users of the blockchain network. In this case, we recommend clustering analysis, but it depends on the clustering method's accuracy. Steganalysis is an essential aspect of blockchain security.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin is one of popular cryptocurrencies widely used over the world, and its blockchain technology has attracted considerable attention. In Bitcoin system, it has been reported that transactions are prioritized according to transaction fees, and that transactions with high priorities are likely to be confirmed faster than those with low priorities. In this paper, we consider performance modeling of Bitcoin-blockchain system in order to characterize the transaction-confirmation time. We first introduce the Bitcoin system, focusing on proof-of-work, the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin blockchain. Then, we show some queueing models and its analytical results, discussing the implications and insights obtained from the queueing models.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In recent years, the number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has grown at an explosive rate. With the dramatic surge of the IoT, security issues have also come to the fore. Consequently, ensuring the security of the IoT communication community environment and trust between entities have become important research topics. In this paper, we design a passwordless IoT authentication mechanism, namely, T-Auth, to address these issues. The identity of a device in T-Auth is based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs), a hardware-based device fingerprint technology, which can greatly improve the security level compared to hardcoded passwords. A smart contract is a program that runs on the blockchain, which provides design flexibility and operational reliability. Our mechanism establishes a new trust architecture that enables devices to exchange information securely and reliably. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a new authentication mechanism that utilizes PUFs and combines them with blockchain to greatly improve the security and reliability of a system. Additionally, by leveraging Ethereum smart contracts, our mechanism supports cross-service group authentication.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ponzi schemes are financial scams that lure users under the promise of high profits. With the prosperity of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies, there has been growing anecdotal evidence that this classic fraud has emerged in the blockchain ecosystem. Existing studies have proposed machine-learning based approaches for detecting Ponzi schemes, i.e., either based on the operation codes (opcodes) of the smart contract binaries or the transaction patterns of addresses. However, state-of-the-art approaches face several major limitations, including lacking interpretability and high false positive rates. Moreover, machine-learning based methods are susceptible to evasion techniques, and transaction-based techniques do not work on smart contracts that have a small number of transactions. These limitations render existing methods for detecting Ponzi schemes ineffective. In this paper, we propose SADPonzi, a semantic-aware detection approach for identifying Ponzi schemes in Ethereum smart contracts. Specifically, by strictly following the definition of Ponzi schemes, we propose a heuristic-guided symbolic execution technique to first generate the semantic information for each feasible path in smart contracts and then identify investor-related transfer behaviors and the distribution strategies adopted. Experimental result on a well-labelled benchmark suggests that SADPonzi can achieve 100% precision and recall, outperforming all existing machine-learning based techniques. We further apply SADPonzi to all 3.4 million smart contracts deployed by EOAs in Ethereum and identify 835 Ponzi scheme contracts, with over 17 million US Dollars invested by victims. Our observations confirm the urgency of identifying and mitigating Ponzi schemes in the blockchain ecosystem.
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is a new class of technology in computer science that combines cryptography and distributed computing. It provides a digitally timestamped database where the network of computers can communicate and collaborate without trusting each other. Blockchain can be used in an enormous number of applications in industries like supply chain management, identity verification, voting system, Real estate, and health care system, etc. Bitcoin is the first application of public blockchain, is used to exchange cryptocurrency by rolling out the involvement of a centralized third-party system or single consortium like government, bank, organization. etc. One of the major issues of blockchain is user privacy leaks. This paper focused to detail the underlying concepts of blockchain, identify the user privacy leaks in various phases of blockchain concerning bitcoin application, and finally discussed the available solutions like deterministic key generation, mixing services, ring signature, zero-knowledge proof, and quantum-resistant algorithms.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The technological advancements and a qualitative improvement in the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning leads to the creation of realistic-looking but phoney digital content known as deepfakes .These manipulated videos can quickly be shared via social media to spread fake news or disinformation which not only impacts those who are deceived it also harms social media sites by diminishing faith.These deepfake videos cannot be checked since there are no regulatory mechanisms in place .As a result these untrustworthy outlets will post whatever they wish causing confusion in society in some ways.Current solutions are unable to provide digital media history tracing and authentication it is essential to develop successful methods for detecting deepfake video as a result it is necessary to determine the source or origin of such deepfake footage.That’s why we are implementing blockchain techniques to trace back and determine the origin of digital media blockchain techniques helps in the effective recognition of deepfake video and calculating the trust factor of user.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Block chain is a time-stamped series of records of data that cannot be altered and is managed by a cluster of systems not owned by a single person, company, or entity. A chaincode, also known as a smart contract, is a digital code that controls the transfer of cryptocurrencies or assets directly, among the parties under specific conditions. A major drawback with regards to Blockchain as a technology is the fact that its transaction speed is less compared to the centralized system.In the future, for Blockchain technology to be accepted in industries, there is a need for improvement with regards to the speed.To counter this drawback, we have come up with this paper in which an approach to increase the speed of transactions by changing the current Hashing Algorithm (SHA3) in the Hyperledger Fabric to Blake3 has been done.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
e-Auction improves the efficiency of bid transaction. However, the protection of bidders’ privacy, transaction fairness and verifiability, transaction data security, high cost of third-party auction center, and other issues have attracted more attention. According to the transaction process and basic principles of the sealed auction, we explored the problems existing in the current sealed-bid e-auction schemes. Based on the blockchain technology, we proposed a sealed-bid e-auction scheme with smart contract technology, Bulletproofs zero-knowledge proof protocols, and Pedersen commitment algorithm. The proposed scheme constructed an auction mechanism without the third-party auctioneer so as to restrict the behaviors of auction parties for the sake of auction security, reliability, fairness, and privacy protection. Compared with the related sealed e-auction schemes based on blockchain technologies in six metrics, we conducted the experiment to show that the proposed scheme protected the bid information from leakage well and successfully verified the winning bid price and the related bidder by all transaction participants without the third-party auctioneer.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market is mushrooming in recent years. The concept of NFT originally comes from a token standard of Ethereum, aiming to distinguish each token with distinguishable signs. This type of token can be bound with virtual/digital properties as their unique identifications. With NFTs, all marked properties can be freely traded with customized values according to their ages, rarity, liquidity, etc. It has greatly stimulated the prosperity of the decentralized application (DApp) market. At the time of writing (May 2021), the total money used on completed NFT sales has reached $34,530,649.86$ USD. The thousandfold return on its increasing market draws huge attention worldwide. However, the development of the NFT ecosystem is still in its early stage, and the technologies of NFTs are pre-mature. Newcomers may get lost in their frenetic evolution due to the lack of systematic summaries. In this technical report, we explore the NFT ecosystems in several aspects. We start with an overview of state-of-the-art NFT solutions, then provide their technical components, protocols, standards, and desired proprieties. Afterward, we give a security evolution, with discussions on the perspectives of their design models, opportunities, and challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study on the current NFT ecosystems.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin has emerged in 2008, and after decades of development, it has become the largest trading currency by far. The core of the blockchain is to ensure the anonymity of user transactions. As more and more analysis algorithms for blockchain transactions appear, the anonymity of the blockchain is increasingly threatened. We propose Tomen, an encryption application for the communication process in the bitcoin transaction process, combined with the encryption principle method of Tor. The goal is to achieve the application of the anonymization of bitcoin transaction communication.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Recently, to enhance the security of the Internet of Things (IoT), research on blockchain-based encryption algorithms has been actively conducted. However, because blockchains have complex structures and process large amounts of data, there are still many difficulties in using the conventional blockchain-based encryption algorithms in an IoT system that must have low power consumption and be ultra-lightweight. In this study, to address these problems (1) we simplified the conventional Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based blockchain structure, and (2) we proposed a new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) algorithm with enhanced security by periodically changing the secret key and initialization vector (IV) in the conventional AES-CBC encryption algorithm. Because the DAG, which is the conventional blockchain structure, randomly transmits data to multiple blocks, there may be overlapping blocks, and the quantity of transmitted data is not limited; thus, the time and power consumption for encryption and decryption increase. In this study, a simplified DAG was designed to address these problems so that packets can be transmitted only to three blocks, without overlapping. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed in this paper, an IoT system consisting of 10 clients and one server was implemented in hardware, and an experiment was conducted. Through the experiment, it was confirmed that when the proposed AES-CBC algorithm was used, the time taken and the amount of power consumed for encryption and decryption were reduced by about 20% compared to the conventional AES-CBC algorithm.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Medical images carry a lot of important information for making a medical diagnosis. Since the medical images need to be communicated frequently to allow timely and accurate diagnosis, it has become a target for malicious attacks. Hence, medical images are protected through encryption algorithms. Recently, reversible data hiding on the encrypted images (RDHEI) schemes are employed to embed private information into the medical images. This allows effective and secure communication, wherein the privately embedded information (e.g., medical records and personal information) is very useful to the medical diagnosis. However, existing RDHEI schemes still suffer from low embedding capacity, which limits their applicability. Besides, such solution still lacks a good mechanism to ensure its integrity and traceability. To resolve these issues, a novel approach based on image block-wise encryption and histogram shifting is proposed to provide more embedding capacity in the encrypted images. The embedding rate is over 0.8 bpp for typical medical images. On top of that, a blockchain-based system for RDHEI is proposed to resolve the traceability. The private information is stored on the blockchain together with the hash value of the original medical image. This allows traceability of all the medical images communicated over the proposed blockchain network.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
There is an urgent need to solve the problems of secure storage, reliable sharing, access control and privacy protection in medical industry. In this paper, we propose EHRChain, a blockchain-based EHR system using attribute-based and homomorphic cryptosystem to solve the above problems. First, we design a medical record storage scheme to realize secure high capacity medical data storage and reliable sharing based on blockchain technology and IPFS. Second, we propose an improved cryptographic primitive called SHDPCPC-CP-ABE. Our SHDPCPC-CP-ABE realizes the functions of semi-policy hiding and dynamic permission changing based on partial ciphertext simultaneously. Furthermore, our program achieves the neutrality of the subject of judicial identification in medical disputes and fine-grained access control of medical data. Third, our system applies an additive homomorphic cryptosystem, Paillier cryptosystem with optimized parameters on patients’ privacy protection during the process of the medical insurance claim. After analysis and experiment, we have proved that the SHDPCPC-CP-ABE is indistinguishable under chosen plaintext attack and takes one third of the time of CP-ABE when changing access policy. Our system has higher performance than other EHR systems based on blockchain.
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain has opened up research opportunities to develop a proofreading system in many digital services. The research in this area is still in progress to merge the legal aspects with the technical process to create a self-sustained system. This paper has presented the proof of concept for implementing a remote internet-based voting system providing the physical absence of any invigilating authority thereby providing the provision for voters to cast the vote from home location. The blockchain-based system along with the implemented cryptosystem has been designed to provide reliability, security, anonymity of the votes and the voters. The system is also resistant to the prediction of the winning party until the results are announced thereby building the citizen trust as it adds transparency and security to the voting system.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Xianxian Li, Jie Li, Feng Yu, Xuemei Fu · 6 authors
Encrypted image retrieval may return incorrect or incomplete results due to threats from malicious cloud servers. Most of the existing solutions focus on the efficiency and accuracy of retrieval, lack of verification of the completeness of search results, to achieve the reliability of search results and the transparency of the search process, we explore characteristic such as the decentralization and tamper-proof of blockchain, proposed a blockchain-based encrypted image retrieval scheme. This scheme stores the encrypted index on the blockchain (Ethereum), through the blockchain consensus mechanism and the function of searching on the smart contract, ensures the integrity and correctness of search results, then outsources the corresponding encrypted images to the cloud server to reduce storage cost, and designs a double-layer index structure using the bag of visual word model and simhash in the process of image similarity index. Experiments show that the reliability, high retrieval efficiency, and precision of the scheme also have a good privacy protection effect.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In cryptography, many different data structures are used to store and encrypt data. Merkle Tree is such a data structure that provides a way to prove data integrity and validity. It requires less memory or disk space than other data structures, resulting in simple and fast computation. This paper first explains the detailed principles and then introduces the application fields of Merkle Tree. Merkle Tree uses the hash value of the data block as leaf node tags and the encrypted hash of the child node tags as other node tags. As data structures evolve and innovate, Merkle Tree provides help and inspiration for the future new data structures. Furthermore, we investigate various applications using Merkle Tree technology, including Smart Grid, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Interplanetary File System, Image Authentication, Public Security Audit of Cloud Computing, SIMulator for Blockchain Applications, Hardware Memory Integrity, and Certificate Transparency. These researches show that Merkle Tree applies to a wide range of fields and has great potential. In brief, the paper aims to help researchers better understand the Merkle Tree features and various roles and effects in different environments, contributing to the development of cryptography.
Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
Cloud Data Security Solutions
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Zengpeng Li, Mamoun Alazab, Sahil Garg, M. Shamim Hossain
Insufficient parking space and traffic congestion are important usual suspects in our urban life. Organisation and managing available parking spaces have raised a lot of awareness. Traditional centralized parking approaches are with an insidious single point of failure and unsuitable for large organization because the manager is overburdened with authority and responsibility. The malicious service provider enables to (i) track the precise mobility patterns of citizens. (ii) collect the data to infer privacy-sensitive information, e.g., where the parking requester (i.e., driver) socialize, work, and live; (iii) analyze trajectories to monitor the location of the driver for entertainment (e.g., discovering one-night stands). To design a decentralized smart and practical parking platform without compromising the privacy of the entities is an urgent issue for the smart city. Blockchain (or distributed public ledger technology) is a near-ideal decentralized and distributed solution for centralized parking-space-recommendation systems. However, most of the existing parking recommendation solutions on top of blockchain ignore to protect the privacy of drivers during parking spot detection and matching phases while cannot maintain the property of anonymity of the drivers. In this paper, an efficient and privacy-preserving parking-space recommendation service platform, named as PriParkRec, along with the proof-of-concept solution to protect the requester's privacy in PriParkRec while maintaining most of the benefits of current parking-space sharing service, i.e., accountability, (anonymous) authentication, (anonymous) payment, and reputation ratings. Indeed, PriParkRec service relies on well-known privacy-enhancing cryptographic building blocks (e.g., oblivious PRF, private set intersection, anonymous credentials, anonymous payment, and smart-contract, etc), these building blocks are carefully integrated together to achieve privacy and security goals to revolutionize the existing car-parking service system coming with the private blockchain and industrial internet of things (IIoTs) technologies.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Smart Parking Systems Research
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
N. Suganthi, Gokul Sridharan, E Shravanth, K. Veena
Abstract: Democratic rule is based on safe and open electoral systems that can preserve their authenticity. The conventional voting processes are hampered significantly by electoral fraud and security breaches as well as centralized management and inefficiencies in auditability and accessibility. The issues of electoral systems reduce public trust along with lowering the credibility of election results. This paper introduces a new three-tier blockchain-based e-voting system designed to enhance voter privacy alongside system scalability and end-to-end verifiability to restore trust in electoral processes. Voter verification at Layer 1 (Identity Verification) combines Decentralized Identity (DID) with Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and multimodal biometric techniques involving fingerprint scanning, facial recognition technology, and voice analysis. The system enables only the participation of valid voters while also protecting their private data and fulfilling different user needs. The system's Layer 2 (Vote Casting & Secure Storage) employs a hybrid consensus algorithm combining Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) and Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) to store votes securely while reducing energy consumption. The system leverages Triple-Blind Signatures to provide complete voter anonymity by decoupling voter identities from their votes as well as any accompanying metadata. Lattice-based post-quantum cryptography is employed to encrypt votes which are distributed across sharded blockchain subnets for enhanced performance without sacrificing fault tolerance. The system accumulates votes via Merkle roots and verifies them via zk-SNARKs in Layer 3 (Result Processing & Transparency) that allows public observation without compromising voter privacy. A Live Audit Dashboard provides voters with the capability to check their vote in real time which facilitates transparent and accountable voting processes. The suggested system attains a secure and open electronic voting process using sophisticated cryptographic protocols in a decentralized setup compliant with international requirements while enabling digital democratic participation.