Follow blockchain research across journals, conferences, and preprint repositories.
2,071 results · page 51 of 87
Shovon Niverd Pereira, Noshin Tasnim, Rabius Sunny Rizon, Muhammad Nazrul Islam
No abstract is available for this record.
F. Richard Yu, Jeremy J. James, Zhu Li, Zhaowei Ma
Surveillance is being pervasively used, and its recording is extensively applied in practice. Thereby, protection of surveillance recordings, which is related to multimedia security, increasingly attracts research interests. Traditional techniques, such as watermarking, cryptography and steganography, focus on analysing multimedia content, resulting in high complexity and long latency, which makes them not suitable for protecting real-time surveillance applications. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-assisted framework to protect the recordings in real-time surveillance applications. In the proposed framework, we design an algorithm that generates frame fingerprints, which involves real-time extraction of packets from surveillance multimedia streams, SHA3-512 functions, and the verification of frame consistency. We use a blockchain for preserving the frame fingerprints generated by our proposed algorithm. Different from existing works that use simulations to show the performance, we develop a real system using a service-oriented blockchain, virtualisation for distributed ledger technology (vDLT), and the effectiveness of this system is demonstrated.
Wael A. Mahrous, Mahmoud Farouk, Saad M. Darwish
Due to businesses’ growing use of IoT services in their day-to-day operations and the increased use of smart devices, digital forensic investigations involving such systems will need increasingly sophisticated digital evidence collection and processing. The majority of IoT systems are composed of disparate software and hardware components, which may pose security and privacy concerns. Recently, blockchain technology was presented as one of the options for achieving IoT security via the use of an immutable ledger, a decentralized architecture, and strong cryptographic primitives. Integrating blockchain platforms with IoT-based applications, on the other hand, poses a number of difficulties owing to the trustworthiness, integrity, and real-time responsiveness of IoT data. However, certain IoT devices may be incompatible with existing blockchain-based IoT forensic methods for additional digital evidence processing owing to their usage of conventional hash. A critical feature of cryptographic hash functions is that even if just one bit of the input is altered, the output acts pseudo-randomly, making it impossible to identify identical files. However, in the field of computer forensics, it is essential to locate comparable files (e.g., various versions of a file); therefore, we need a hash function that preserves similarity. It is getting more difficult to establish how forensic investigators might utilize traces from such devices. To effectively deal with IoT digital forensics applications, this article presents an improved blockchain-based IoT digital forensics architecture that use fuzzy hash to construct the Blockchain’s Merkle tree in addition to the conventional hash for authentication. Fuzzy hashing enables the identification of potentially damning documents that might otherwise remain undiscovered using conventional hashing techniques. By comparing blocks/files to all nodes in the blockchain network using fuzzy hash similarity, the digital forensics investigator will be able to verify their authenticity. To support the proof of concept, we simulated the suggested model.
B. Sowmiya, E. Poovammal, Kadiyala Ramana, Saurabh Singh · 5 authors
Cloud computing is a continuously evolving technology that can enhance agility, availability, collaboration and scalability of data. Blockchain has a secure, immutable ledger which maintains all the transactions along with the timestamp. The blockchain framework and cloud computing technology jointly provides different ways of computational cost reduction. The existing methods help to identify the anonymous documents which are given in the form of requests from the cloud server. If the anonymized document requests are from the authorized users, then cloud provides better security and hence documents are not available for unauthorized users. But the main issue is access rights available for authorized users on sensitive data of the owner. To maintain the privacy the sensitive data are hidden using cryptographic techniques even for authorized users. The method adopted is Linear Elliptical Curve Digital Signature (LECDS) with Hyperledger blockchain, to prevent private data loss. The Linear regression method is used to classify the user information into two classes namely sensitive and non-sensitive. The non-sensitive data is encrypted using RSA and sensitive data is encrypted using LECC method. Modified Spider optimization search Algorithm (MSOA) is used to verify the integrity of outsourced data and search user query information in a cloud server. The hyper ledger blockchain verifies the user policy to create a private network through which the user communicates the cloud. In the analysis of the proposed method, the results are evaluated using various performance metrics such as security, throughput, classification accuracy and error rate.
Qiang Tang
After its debut with Bitcoin in 2009, Blockchain has attracted enormous attention and been used in many different applications as a trusted black box. Many applications focus on exploiting the Blockchain-native features (e.g. trust from consensus, and smart contracts) while paying less attention to the application-specific requirements. In this paper, we initiate a systematic study on the applications in the education and training sector, where Blockchain is leveraged to combat diploma fraud. We first present a general system structure for digitized diploma management systems and identify both functional and non-functional requirements. We then show that all existing Blockchain-based systems fall short in meeting these requirements. Inspired by the analysis, we propose a Blockchain-facilitated solution by leveraging some basic cryptographic primitives and data structures. Our analysis shows that the proposed solution respects all the identified requirements by design and can be further extended to enhance its security and privacy guarantees. Finally, we investigate the proposed solution’s computational complexity and demonstrate its practicality.
Abdullah Ayub Khan, Mueen Uddin, Aftab Ahmed Shaikh, Asif Ali Laghari · 5 authors
Due to globalization and worldwide connectivity, multimedia data exchange has increased significantly over the Internet in the last decade. The life cycle of multimedia content is also getting more multifaceted as more people are accessing, sharing, modifying and re-using multimedia information. This poses serious challenges for the multimedia industry to provide integrity, reliability and trustworthiness for multimedia investigations against the growing cybersecurity threats. This paper bridges this gap by enabling a secure and transparent digital forensic investigations process using blockchain technology. MF-Ledger a Blockchain Hyperledger sawtooth-enabled novel, secure and efficient digital forensic investigation architecture is proposed where participating stakeholders create a private network to exchange and agree on different investigation activities before being stored on the blockchain ledger. We have created digital contracts (smart contracts) and implemented them using sequence diagrams to handle the stakeholders' secure interaction in the investigation process. The proposed architectural solution delivers robust information integrity, prevention, and preservation mechanism to permanently and immutably store the evidence (chain of custody) in a private permissioned encrypted blockchain ledger.
Gabin Heo, Dana Yang, Inshil Doh, Kijoon Chae
Blockchain is attracting attention as a new solution for problems such as illegal copying, profit distribution, and forgery and falsification in the digital content trading environment, which has become an essential asset in the information age. However, one problem is that it is difficult to propagate digital content to the blockchain network because of a limited capacity to upload to the blockchain. The integrity and transparency of blockchain are also considered as weak points in terms of privacy. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain system, the secret block-based blockchain (SBBC), to address the problems with the blockchain system in the digital content trading environment. SBBC is composed of off-chain and on-chain network components. Off-chain is the part that allows trading digital content through the authentication phase. The digital content that is traded has a digital fingerprint inserted, so if an illegal leak occurs, the destination can be tracked. In addition, the content is encrypted and traded, and only the rightful user can use the digital content, thus ensuring income for the legitimate content author. Next, the on-chain network is licensed to use digital content, and a verification process using a consensus algorithm is performed. The licensed consumer creates a secret block of their transaction and records it only on their ledger. In a private part, secret block creation ensures privacy and solves the network overload that can occur when uploading digital content to the blockchain. Finally, through the verification and agreement of all blockchain participants, a public block is created and recorded in the ledger to finalize the transaction. Consequently, we propose the SBBC system suitable for digital content trading environments and a safe and reliable system through a consensus algorithm in such environments.
Yiming Guo, Xi Chen, Shuang Tian, Le Yang · 9 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Ming Li, Leilei Zeng, Le Zhao, Renlin Yang · 6 authors
With the application of multimedia big data, the problems such as information leakage and data tampering have emerged. The security of images which is one of the most typical multimedia has become a major problem facing the large-scale open network environment. This paper proposed a blockchain-watermarking scheme to protect the privacy, integrity and availability of compressed sensed images, which effectively combines multimedia watermarking, compressed sensing, Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and blockchain technologies. Based on the reliable authentication of watermarking, the confidentiality protection of compressed sensing, the secure storage of IPFS, and the decentralization and non-tamperability of blockchain, the all-round security protection of the image big data based on compressive sensing can be realized. Experiments show that the proposed scheme is effective and feasible.
Alsehli Abrar, Wadood Abdul, Sanaa Ghouzali
Image authentication is an important field that employs many different approaches and has several significant applications. In the proposed approach, we used a combination of two techniques to achieve authentication. Image watermarking is one of the techniques that has been used in many studies but the authentication field still needs to be studied. Blockchain technology is a relatively new technology that has significant research potential related to image authentication. The watermark is embedded into the third-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) in the middle frequency regions to achieve security and imperceptibility goals. Peak signal-to-noise ratio PSNR, structural similarity matrix (SSIM), normalized correlation coefficient (NCC), and bit error rate (BER) are used to measure the performance of image watermarking. We used blockchain technology to avoid involving a trusted third party for authentication. Secure Hash Algorithm 256 (SHA-256) is applied on the watermark to save it into the blockchain. The watermark is encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and embedded into the image. The proposed method is tested on the USP SICI database and the MedPix medical image database. Ethereum blockchain is used to provide security, anonymity, and integrity of data with no third-party intervention. The proposed solution demonstrates enhanced security for image authentication compared with the state-of-the-art.
Soumyashree S. Panda, Debasish Jena, Bhabendu Kumar Mohanta, Srikanta Patnaik
With the omnipresence of technology, intelligent transportation system (ITS) is no more a distant dream but has become an achievable reality. One of the fundamental challenges in the implementation of an ITS is the proper management of security and privacy issues, especially how the system confirms the validity of its users. Most of the existing security mechanisms are based on a centralized framework and assume the registration authority and roadside units to be trustful. Therefore, a distributed framework using Blockchain and, a very lightweight and privacy-preserving authentication protocol employing an interactive zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed. An in-depth analysis of the protocol demonstrates that it meets all the security and privacy requisites of an ITS. In addition, the suggested protocol is also validated using the widely used AVISPA tool. The reliability and effectiveness of the protocol are analyzed through simulation using NS2 which proves the practicality of the protocol.
Niluka Amarasinghe, Xavier Boyen, Matthew McKague
No abstract is available for this record.
B. Sriman, Nitesh Kumar L, K S Prabhaharan, Ramakrishnan Ramanathan · 6 authors
The rise of counterfeit products poses a significant challenge for manufacturers, affecting their brand reputation, sales, and profitability. However, blockchain technology provides a solution by ensuring the identification and traceability of genuine products throughout the supply chain. Blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger that securely stores transactional data in interconnected databases. Leveraging blockchain for product authentication and counterfeit detection offers a tamper-proof system. One effective approach is to utilize Quick Response (QR) codes linked to the blockchain. QR code scanners verify product authenticity by comparing the scanned code with entries in the blockchain database. If a match is found, customers receive confirmation of the product's genuineness. If no match is detected, customers are promptly notified of a counterfeit product, allowing manufacturers to address the issue. Counterfeit products not only harm manufacturers but also jeopardize consumer safety, revenue, brand reputation, and trust. Establishing a reliable system to detect counterfeit products is crucial. Blockchain-based systems provide a decentralized and secure platform, ensuring product authenticity and mitigating counterfeiting risks. By leveraging blockchain and QR codes, manufacturers can protect their brands, boost consumer confidence, and maintain a secure supply chain.
Lingyu Bian, Linlin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Hao Wang · 5 authors
In recent years, the rapid development of blockchain technology has attracted much attention from people around the world. Scammers take advantage of the pseudo-anonymity of blockchain to implement financial fraud. The Ponzi scheme, one of the main scam methods, has defrauded investors of large amounts of money, thereby harming their interests and hindering the application of blockchain. Unfortunately, the current detection technology typically largely relies on the source code of the contract or uses a single feature which does not fully represent the contract characteristics. In such a case, the detection of Ponzi schemes with high efficiency becomes urgent. In this paper, we propose an image-based scam detection method using an attention capsule network (SE-CapsNet) focused on Ethereum. The sequence of bytecode, the opcode frequency, and the application binary interface (ABI) call are extracted as features from the contract bytecode and ABI, further converted into grayscale images, and then mapped into three color channels to generate RGB images, which are used as the input of the model for detecting the Ponzi scheme contract. In addition, we employ fancy PCA for data augmentation to reduce the impact of imbalanced data on the detection results. Experimental results show that the image-based detection method using deep learning models can effectively detect contracts before transactions occur. Among them, our proposed SE-CapsNet obtains great detection results, with an F1 score of 98.38%.
María Óskarsdóttir, Jacky Mallett, Arnþór Logi Arnarson, Alexander Snær Stefánsson
No abstract is available for this record.
Sweeti Sah, B. Surendiran, R. Dhanalakshmi, N. Arulmurugaselvi
No abstract is available for this record.
Simin Ghesmati, Walid Fdhila, Edgar Weippl
No abstract is available for this record.
Seung-Jin Baek, Hocheol Nam, Yongwoo Oh, Muoi Tran · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Ibrahım Alkhammash, Waleed Halboob
No abstract is available for this record.
Vu Trung Duong Le, Thi Hong Tran, Hoai Luan Pham, Duc Khai Lam · 5 authors
The development of low-energy, high-performance hardware for cryptocurrency mining is gaining widespread attention. The mining process for proof-of-work (PoW) in conventional cryptocurrencies’ blockchains is increasingly being replaced by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). This leads to many security threats for the blockchain network because it decreases security and increases power consumption for mining. Therefore, Scrypt, the most representative ASIC-resistant algorithm, was developed to solve this problem. However, there are still some problems and challenges with the current Scrypt hardware. This article presents a new hardware architecture for the Scrypt algorithm intended for a PoW-based cryptocurrency mining system. The proposed Multi ROMix Scrypt Accelerator (MRSA) hardware architecture applies several optimization techniques: configuration, local-memory computing with high-performance pipelined Multi ROMix and rescheduling resources to significantly increase processing speed, flexibility, and energy efficiency. For evaluation, the MRSA is implemented on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to examine its actual performance, consumption, and correctness. Evaluation results on a Xilinx system-on-chip (SoC) with the ALVEO U280 Data Center Accelerator Card FPGA show that the MRSA is much more power-efficient than some of the most powerful commercial CPUs, GPUs, and other FPGA implementations. On the ALVEO U280, the MRSA achieves a maximum hash rate of 296.76 kHash/s, a throughput of 304.9 Mbps when reaching a maximum frequency of 259.94 MHz, and a power consumption of 18.12W. The energy efficiency of the MRSA on the ALVEO U280 SoC is 52.83 and 867.88 times higher than those on an RTX 3090 GPU and an i9-10940X CPU, respectively.
Aritra Banerjee
The idea of smart contracts has been around for a long time. The introduction of Ethereum has taken the concept of smart contracts to new heights because of its integration with Blockchain technology. As a result, the applications of smart contracts have also surged in areas such as e-Voting, Insurance, Crowdfunding, etc. In this paper, we aim to present the construction of a “Fully Anonymous e-Voting” protocol using the concepts of zkHawk and Zcash. zkHawk is a novel smart contract protocol designed during this Ph.D. that improves upon the Hawk protocol by solving the underlying anonymity problem of a trusted manager. We will leverage the concept of zk-SNARKs in Zcash to carry out the voting phase of the election and the zkHawk smart contract protocol to tally the results of the election. The voting phase employing Zcash will be initially designed with Non-Universal zk-SNARKs and improved upon with Universal zk-SNARKs.
Yijun Xia, Jieli Liu, Jiatao Zheng, Jiajing Wu · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Shivani Wadhwa, Divya Gupta, Nagma
In response to the pressing challenges of climate change and biodiversity decline, recent attention has focused on leveraging technological solutions to protect the planet for future generations. The implementation of technology has proven to be instrumental in addressing environmental issues, ranging from renewable energy solutions to sustainable agriculture practices. Among these technological solutions, blockchain has emerged as a promising solution to combat the climate crisis. By utilizing a distributed and decentralized ledger, blockchain enables the monitoring and verification of transactions securely and transparently, without the need for intermediaries. Originally associated with cryptocurrencies, researchers now recognize its potential in tackling climate change beyond financial transactions, encompassing product sustainability tracking and pollution level monitoring. The evolution of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) since the advent of blockchain presents transformative opportunities across social and economic contexts, particularly gaining momentum in the post-COVID-19 economic landscape. Blockchain’s intrinsic qualities, including transparency, immutability, and durability, make it a transformative force in business sustainability. This chapter explores the convergence of blockchain technology and business sustainability, highlighting opportunities and challenges. It explores blockchain technology’s fundamental principles and applications before examining the concept of business sustainability, emphasizing the need for organizations to balance economic growth with social and environmental responsibility.
Paul C. van Oorschot
No abstract is available for this record.