Saba Abdulbaqi Salman, Sufyan Al-Janabi, Ali Makki Sagheer
Developing a solid e-voting system that offers fairness and privacy for users is a challenging objective. This paper is trying to address whether blockchain can be used to build an efficient e-voting system, also, this research has specified four blockchain technologies with their features and limitations. Many papers have been reviewed in a study covered ten years from 2011 to 2020. As a result of the study, the blockchain platform can be a successful public ledger to implement an e-voting system. Four blockchain technologies have been noticed from this study. These are blockchain using smart contracts, blockchain relying on Zcash platform, blockchain programmed from scratch, and blockchain depending on digital signature. Each blockchain model has details about its features and limitations. Finally, this study suggests developing a blockchain platform that can avoid limitations of currently used blockchain platforms by ensuring authentication, privacy, security for remote e-voting processes.
Abstract: The electronic voting has emerged over time as a replacement to the paper-based voting to reduce the redundancies and inconsistencies. The historical perspective presented in the last two decades suggests that it has not been so successful due to the security and privacy flaws observed over time. This project is about decentralizing authority to record, count and verify votes and the voters, rather than having a central authority. We are using blockchain technology which is a distributed database. With its immutability property and decentralized architecture, it can run and support a voting scheme that is open, fair and independently verifiable. The project will be developed in Ethereum framework which primarily uses Solidity as a language. Ethereum’s backbone is its decentralized virtual machine called Ethereum Virtual Machine. The application will be deployed on the thirdweb(web3.0). Overall this project is a potential roadmap for blockchain technologies developing in the nation to support complex applications. Keywords: Blockchain, Cryptography, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum Framework, Solidity, Decentralization, Hashing, Dapp, Web3, Digitalizing.
Although the traditional P2P botnet has significant resilience against termination, its dependence on neighbor lists (NL) has left it vulnerable to infiltration and destruction. In addition, it is not sufficient in protecting the botmaster’s identity. To overcome these weaknesses, we proposed BlockchainBot, a botnet model that leveraged IoT devices as maintainers, and integrated blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). The BlockchainBot was able to fully deploy bots on public blockchains. It was versatile for multiple botnet applications and eliminated the dependence on NL. In addition, we further introduced a novel method, the forking of a channel, to kick out spy nodes that infiltrate a botnet. To further enforce the resistance against a single point of failure (SPoF), we introduced bot-cluster dispersing to prevent clustering around full nodes and more evenly scatter bots to prevent hostile takeovers. The analysis of the security of BlockchainBot indicated that it had strong resilience against DDoS attacks, Sybil attacks, and forensic investigations. Furthermore, the security of the forking of the channel and bot-cluster dispersing were also shown to be effective. The robustness of the BlockchainBot against the Sybil attack was also briefly discussed. Experimental results authenticated the effectiveness and performance of the BlockchainBot, as compared to previous models.
İlk kripto para birimi olan Bitcoin, son zamanlarda araştırmacılardan büyük ilgi görmektedir. Bitcoin literatürüne daha fazla katkı sağlamak için araştırmacılar tarafından yapılan çalışmalar bulunmaktadır. Bununla birlikte, Bitcoin literatürünü farklı çalışmalarla desteklemek önemlidir. Bu çalışma, teknoloji kabul modelini güven yapısı ile genişleten entegre bir modelin yapısal geçerliliğini test ederken, kullanıcıların Bitcoin'i kolay ve faydalı olarak algılamalarına ve Bitcoin'e olan güvenlerine dayalı olarak Bitcoin kullanma niyetlerini açıklamayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaçla 206 katılımcıdan online anket kullanılarak veri toplanmıştır. Process macro tekniği ile test edilen modelin yapısal geçerliliği istatistiksel analizlerle doğrulanmıştır. İstatistiksel analiz sonuçlarına göre Bitcoin'in algılanan kullanım kolaylığı, Bitcoin'in algılanan faydası ve Bitcoin'e olan güven ile bu faktörler arasındaki mevcut ilişkiler Bitcoin kullanma niyeti üzerinde etkilidir. Bununla birlikte, kullanıcıların Bitcoin kullanma niyetlerinin cinsiyet, yaş aralığı/jenerasyon, eğitim durumu ve aylık gelir açısından önemli ölçüde farklılık göstermediği belirtilmelidir. Bu çalışma hem teori hem de uygulama için çıkarımların yanı sıra gelecekteki araştırmalar için öneriler sunmaktadır.
Voting is one of the critical processes of modern democracy. It gives freedom to the people to choose a representative leader to implement their ideas and promote policies that benefit them. Elections can also be audited to ensure each vote is counted correctly. However, corruption: ballot forgery, coercion, etc can cause the public to lose trust in this system. Thus, BCT-Voting [8] - a fully secure and decentralized blockchain technology-based e-voting system (DApp) - was proposed as a voting system that can increase transparency and public trust. This system will provide a secure form of electronic voting which will allow for remote voting. The proposed BCT-Voting system has been deployed on the Ethereum framework. It includes five modules – nomination process, voter identity, vote tampering, donation module, and final counting of votes. However, the data retrieval and sorting from the Ethereum blockchain is a complex process because the personal identity of voters is not known. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an Ethereum Query Language (EQL) to query data from the smart contract of the BCT-Voting system. The query method allows voters or The Federal Election Commission (FEC) to retrieve the required information from the Ethereum chain such as which account voted, when, and for who while still maintaining the privacy of the voter. This method of querying provides fast and minimally labor-intensive audits of elections. It includes recounting ballots and efficiently tracking the history of casted votes to ensure that votes were counted and handled correctly. In this system finding duplicate and fraudulent voters will be easy and it will increase the efficiency and transparency of the electoral process.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Smart Contracts (SCs) publicly deployed on blockchain have been shown to include multiple vulnerabilities, which can be maliciously exploited by users. In this paper, we present extorsionware, a novel attack exploiting the public nature of vulnerable SCs to gain control over the victim's SC assets. Thanks to the control gained over the SC, the attacker obliges the victim to pay a price to re-gain exclusive control of the SC.
Blockchain-based systems have gained immense popularity as enablers of independent asset transfers and smart contract functionality. They have also, since as early as the first Bitcoin blocks, been used for storing arbitrary contents such as texts and images. On-chain data storage functionality is useful for a variety of legitimate use cases. It does, however, also pose a systematic risk. If abused, for example by posting illegal contents on a public blockchain, data storage functionality can lead to legal consequences for operators and users that need to store and distribute the blockchain, thereby threatening the operational availability of entire blockchain ecosystems. In this paper, we develop and apply a cloud-based approach for quickly discovering and classifying content on public blockchains. Our method can be adapted to different blockchain systems and offers insights into content-related usage patterns and potential cases of abuse. We apply our method on the two most prominent public blockchain systems - Bitcoin and Ethereum - and discuss our results. To the best of our knowledge, the presented study is the first to systematically analyze non-financial content stored on the Ethereum blockchain and the first to present a side-by-side comparison between different blockchains in terms of the quality and quantity of stored data.
Raja Majid Ali Ujjan, Khalid Hussain, Sarfraz Nawaz Brohi
Implementation of blockchain with e-government has raised several complexities. When an area has satisfied the requirements for e-government implementation, new challenges will appear. As a result of the information technology revolution, governments and industries are being forced to deliver more effective and secure internet services. Every government in the world attempts to provide the public with electronic services that are fast, quick, and beneficial for the users. Blockchain is considered to have significant potential benefits for the government since it is a combination of technologies such as distributed ledgers, privacy, authentication, and consensus mechanisms. However, this advanced technology is still in its development, and e-government faces a number of difficulties and challenges. The goal of this chapter is to evaluate this advanced technology in the context of high-level e-government security and privacy implementation measures and other technical issues during the adaption of blockchain technology.
Abstract Traditionally, governments and companies store data to identify persons for services provision and interactions. The rise of self-sovereign identities (SSIs) based on blockchain technologies provides individuals with ownership and control over their personal data and allows them to share their data with others using a sort of “digital safe.” Fundamentally, people have the sole ownership of their identity data and control when and how it is shared, protecting their privacy. As these data need to be validated to be trusted, they may become a more important data source for digital information sharing and transactions than the formal source of identity controlled by governments. Furthermore, SSIs can be used for interacting digitally with any organization. These developments change the relationship between government, companies, and individuals. We explore information sharing and governance in the digital society using blockchain-based SSIs. In addition, the impact of SSIs on data storage in the digital world is assessed. Technology enactment might result in no greater control or privacy and might only reinforce current practices. Finally, we argue that regulation and a combination of centralized and decentralized governance are still required to avoid misuse and ensure that envisaged benefits are realized.
The Open Vote Network is a self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol suitable for boardroom elections. Currently, it has two Ethereum-based implementations: the first, by McCorry et al., has a scalability issue since all the computations are performed on-chain. The second implementation, by Seifelnasr et al., solves this issue partially by assigning a part of the heavy computations to an off-chain untrusted administrator in a verifiable manner. As a side effect, this second implementation became not dispute-free; there is a need for a tally dispute phase where an observer interrupts the protocol when the administrator cheats, i.e., announces a wrong tally result. In this work, we propose a new smart contract design to tackle the problems in the previous implementations by (i) preforming all the heavy computations off-chain hence achieving higher scalability, and (ii) utilizing zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) to verify the correctness of the off-chain computations, hence maintaining the dispute-free property. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, we develop prototype implementations on Ethereum and conduct multiple experiments for different implementation options that show a trade-off between the zk-SNARK proof generation time and the smart contract gas cost, including an implementation in which the smart contract consumes a constant amount of gas independent of the number of voters.
Proof of Authority (PoA) is a type of permissioned consensus algorithm with a fixed committee. PoA has been widely adopted by communities and industries due to its better performance and faster finality. In this paper, we explore the \textit{unfairness} issue existing in the current PoA implementations. We have investigated 2,500+ \textit{in the wild} projects and selected 10+ as our main focus (covering Ethereum, Binance smart chain, etc.). We have identified two types of order manipulation attacks to separately break the transaction-level (a.k.a. transaction ordering) and the block-level (sealer position ordering) fairness. Both of them merely rely on honest-but-\textit{profitable} sealer assumption without modifying original settings. We launch these attacks on the forked branches under an isolated environment and carefully evaluate the attacking scope towards different implementations. To date (as of Nov 2021), the potentially affected PoA market cap can reach up to $681,087$ million USD. Besides, we further dive into the source code of selected projects, and accordingly, propose our recommendation for the fix. To the best of knowledge, this work provides the first exploration of the \textit{unfairness} issue in PoA algorithms.
Raya AlAbri, Abdul Khalique Shaikh, Saqib Ali, Ali H. Al‐Badi
Blockchain technology provides a stable spot in electronic voting systems by providing a transparent platform for an election which prevents the failures faced by the traditional electronic voting systems and makes it a more accurate and secure platform for voting. However, little attention has been paid to the possible impacts of new technological disruptions on politics and the electoral systems. The main goal of this paper is to design a framework for electronic voting systems using Blockchain technology. To achieve this goal, the paper outlines these three objectives: (1) to explore and identify the challenges in existing voting systems, (2) to identify the methods that could enhance the security and privacy of the electoral voting systems using Blockchain technology, and (3) to design a framework for electronic voting systems that use Blockchain technology in order to address the flaws in current voting systems. A mixed approach is applied in this study to explore the opportunities and challenges of the Blockchain voting system, and design the framework accordingly.
Today’s online voting systems pose security concerns and cannot be used for public elections, while offline voting costs significantly more. As a result, a decentralized electronic voting system is emerging, backed by blockchain technology. With blockchain technology applied to online voting, the system can guarantee transparency and confidentiality because individual voter information and aggregate information are stored in a distributed fashion. Due to its decentralized nature, a blockchain-based voting system is more secure than the existing central server-based online voting system. In this study, an Ethereum-based electronic voting system was developed. This system resolves the issue of fraudulent voting by enhancing the safety and reliability of the electronic voting system.
Voting is a well-proven method of democratizing human societies and achieving consensus to avoid any conflicts. The unbiased trusted third parties are involved to conduct and administer the voting. However, in the past, various incidents of misconduct and biases were reported in the voting process. The blockchain eliminates the need for any trusted third party by using consensus algorithms and smart contracts, hence is the best fit to conduct voting as blockchain provides tamperproof, transparent, secure, and auditable voting solutions. Blockchain uses public-private key cryptography to ensure end-to-end encryption and uses hash functions and hashes to tamperproof voting ledgers. Quantum computing is going to be a major threat to the blockchain as current public-private key cryptography and hash functions are being used in almost all blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) belonging to the Pre-quantum cryptography era. This research article critically reviews the advancement and current state of blockchain-based online voting systems, their features, and challenges along with advancements in quantum computing, post-quantum cryptography. This research article proposes a system design of a voting system on the blockchain using post-quantum cryptography along with systematic and critical views and conclusions towards quantum-resistant blockchain for a future online voting system in the post-quantum cryptography era.
As a recent decentralized business model, Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) challenges the management paradigms of conventional organizations and represents the future of democracy-based systems. However, DAOs are facing challenges that can be divided into two categories, including policy-based and technical challenges. Detecting misbehaving nodes is a crucial challenge that is considered in both categories. Designing mechanisms to report malicious behaviors while maintaining anonymity is essential for the survival and efficiency of DAOs. In this paper, we clarify the problem, and introduce Blockchain-Based Anonymous Reporting (BBAR) as a collective monitoring mechanism in DAOs with its requirements and implementation methods.
A movement for a more transparent and decentralized Internet is globally attracting more attention. People are becoming more privacy-aware of their online identities and data. The Internet is constantly evolving. Web2 focused on companies that provide services in exchange for personal user data. Web3 commits to user-centricity using decentralization and zero-server architectures. The current digital society demands a global change to empower citizens and take back control. Citizens are locked into big-tech for personal data storage and their for-profit digital identity. Protection of data has proven to be essential, especially due to increased home Internet traffic during the COVID pandemic. Citizens do not possess their own travel documents. The European Commission aims to transition this governmental property towards self-sovereign identity, introducing many new opportunities. Citizens are locked into banks with non-portable IBAN accounts and unsustainable legacy banking infrastructures. Migration to all-digital low-fraud infrastructures and healthier competitive ecosystems is essential. The overall challenge is to return the power to citizens and users again. The transition to a more decentralized Internet is the first crucial step in the realization of user-centricity. This thesis presents the first exploratory study that integrates governmental-issued travel documents into a (decentralized) societal infrastructure. These self-sovereign identities form the authentic base to a private and secure transfer of money and data, and can effectively provide trust in authenticity that is currently missing in online conversations. A fully operational zero-server infrastructure that incorporates all our requirements has been developed for Android using the P2P network overlay IPv8, and a personalized blockchain called TrustChain...
Voting is essential for any modern society. E-voting has been grabbed remarkable attention in recent years as it reduces the cost of the process and increases transparency. Blockchain technology opened the door to a new approach to evoting. Some studies were conducted to design e-voting schemes utilizing blockchain as a public bulletin board, providing the ability for verifiability and self-tallying. In this paper, we propose a novel trustless e-voting scheme based on blockchain technology that minimizes the intervention of authorities in the process, and voters can vote remotely using their own mobile devices. This scheme prevents voters from selling their votes, and anyone can cast his/her vote for free. In addition, everyone in the network can tally the final result and verify the correctness of the votes.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The distributed cryptocurrency networking is critical because the information delivered through it drives the mining consensus protocol and the rest of the operations. However, the cryptocurrency peer-to-peer (P2P) network remains vulnerable, and the existing security approaches are either ineffective or inefficient because of the permissionless requirement and the broadcasting overhead. We design and build a Lightweight and Identifier-Oblivious eNgine (LION) for the anomaly detection of the cryptocurrency networking. LION is not only effective in permissionless networking but is also lightweight and practical for the computation-intensive miners. We build LION for anomaly detection and use traffic analyses so that it minimally affects the mining rate and is substantially superior in its computational efficiency than the previous approaches based on machine learning. We implement a LION prototype on an active Bitcoin node to show that LION yields less than 1% of mining rate reduction subject to our prototype, in contrast to the state-of-the-art machine-learning approaches costing 12% or more depending on the algorithms subject to our prototype as well, while having detection accuracy of greater than 97% F1-score against the attack prototypes and real-world anomalies. LION therefore can be deployed on the existing miners without the need to introduce new entities in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Ali Dorri, Clemence Roulin, Shantanu Pal, Sarah Baalbaki · 6 authors
In recent years, blockchain technology has received tremendous attention. Blockchain users are known by a changeable public key (PK) that introduces a level of anonymity; however, studies have shown that anonymized transactions can be linked to deanonymize the users. Most of the existing studies on user deanonymization focus on monetary applications; however, the blockchain has received extensive attention in nonmonetary applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we study the impact of deanonymization on the IoT-based blockchain. We populate a blockchain with data of smart home devices and then apply machine learning algorithms in an attempt to classify the transactions to a particular device that, in turn, risks the privacy of the users. Two types of attack models are defined: 1) informed attacks: where attackers know the type of devices installed in a smart home and 2) blind attacks: where attackers do not have this information. We show that machine learning algorithms can successful classify the transactions with 90% accuracy. To enhance the anonymity of the users, we introduce multiple obfuscation methods which include combining multiple packets into a transaction, merging ledgers of multiple devices, and delaying transactions. The implementation results show that these obfuscation methods significantly reduce the attack success rates to 20%–30% and, thus, enhance the user privacy.
With the expansion of democracy across the world together, various kinds of election frauds like vote buying, booth rigging, booth polling, and so on have become quite prevalent. The neo concept of E-voting system emerged some three decades back. It deploys voting computers connected to a public network for conducting the election process as contrasted to the manual voting system of paper ballots. Despite this, it has been widely unsuccessful in curbing election frauds. Therefore, with the exponentially elevating demand of a secure and transparent E-voting system, it has become the need of the hour to introduce some radical improvisations in the current E-voting system rendering it easily accessible across the masses along with providing consistent voting results. This chapter provides an insight on blockchain technology as an important service provider to the modern society and elaborates the development and implementation of a distributed ledger technology-based application to optimize the current E-voting system. The decentralized architecture of blockchain technology and its role in distributing digital information synchronously across a network to maintain the integrity of polled and un-polled votes across all EVMs in the network will be the highlight of the chapter. Conclusively, the importance of a blockchain-deployed E-voting system to curb the limitations of the existing E-voting system in the light of hosting a cost-friendly, transparent, and secured nationwide election will be analyzed.
Blacklists are a widely-used Internet security mechanism to protect Internet users from financial scams, malicious web pages and other cyber attacks based on blacklisted URLs. In this demo, we introduce PhishChain, a transparent and decentralized system to blacklisting phishing URLs. At present, public/private domain blacklists, such as PhishTank, CryptoScamDB, and APWG, are maintained by a centralized authority, but operate in a crowd sourcing fashion to create a manually verified blacklist periodically. In addition to being a single point of failure, the blacklisting process utilized by such systems is not transparent. We utilize the blockchain technology to support transparency and decentralization, where no single authority is controlling the blacklist and all operations are recorded in an immutable distributed ledger. Further, we design a page rank based truth discovery algorithm to assign a phishing score to each URL based on crowd sourced assessment of URLs. As an incentive for voluntary participation, we assign skill points to each user based on their participation in URL verification.
Online voting is convenient and flexible, but amplifies the risks of voter coercion and vote buying. One promising mitigation strategy enables voters to give a coercer fake voting credentials, which silently cast votes that do not count. Current systems along these lines make problematic assumptions about credential issuance, however, such as strong trust in a registrar and/or in voter-controlled hardware, or expecting voters to interact with multiple registrars. Votegral is the first coercion-resistant voting architecture that leverages the physical security of in-person registration to address these credential-issuance challenges, amortizing the convenience costs of in-person registration by reusing credentials across successive elections. Votegral's registration component, TRIP, gives voters a kiosk in a privacy booth with which to print real and fake credentials on paper, eliminating dependence on trusted hardware in credential issuance. The voter learns and can verify in the privacy booth which credential is real, but real and fake credentials thereafter appear indistinguishable to others. Only voters actually under coercion, a hopefully-rare case, need to trust the kiosk. To achieve verifiability, each paper credential encodes an interactive zero-knowledge proof, which is sound in real credentials but unsound in fake credentials. Voters observe the difference in the order of printing steps, but need not understand the technical details. Experimental results with our prototype suggest that Votegral is practical and sufficiently scalable for real-world elections. User-visible latency of credential issuance in TRIP is at most 19.7 seconds even on resource-constrained kiosk hardware, making it suitable for registration at remote locations or on battery power. A companion usability study indicates that TRIP's usability is competitive with other e-voting systems including some lacking coercion resistance, and formal proofs support TRIP's combination of coercion-resistance and verifiability.