Blockchain Papers

Yao Liu, Zhonghao Yuan, Yunhan Hu

No abstract is available for this record.

Sudheer Chava, Fred Hu, Nikhil Paradkar

Abstract We proxy retail investor attention through Google Trends and find that fungible and non-fungible crypto tokens generate greater attention from high-gambling propensity regions. Crypto attention is higher during bubble-like episodes in the crypto market and for more lottery-like tokens. Moreover, retail crypto attention decreases after sports gambling is legalized. Higher token attention is associated with more contributors and higher fundraising. However, consumer credit default rates spike after periods of high crypto attention, but solely in the subprime segment. Overall, our findings suggest that gambling preferences strongly predict retail investor interest in the crypto market.

Zheng Lijuan, Li Dunyue, Zhang Rui, Zhao Yong-bin · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Nadav Voloch, Maor Meir Hajaj

No abstract is available for this record.

Darcy W E Allen, Jason Potts

The development of Web3 — a stack of decentralised technologies underpinned by blockchains — isn’t simply a technical or financing challenge, it is also a problem of innovation and entrepreneurial discovery. In this paper we apply the lens of user innovation toolkit theory to the development of Web3. Toolkits are an organizational design solution to an innovation problem with sticky and local information. Our aim is to explore how toolkits theory applies to Web3 innovation, proposing that Web3 innovation is being organized through toolkits (e.g., blockchains, token standards, DAO frameworks) that enable efficient organization of sticky information to facilitate innovation. The contribution of this paper is the first application of toolkits theory to Web3, reframing its development as a problem of entrepreneurship and innovation in the context of distributed information. We provide implications for the role of developers as user innovators, the economic problem of emergent toolkit stacking, and the design of toolkit business models.

Yujia Tang, Chang Xu, Can Zhang, Yan Wu · 5 authors

Abstract Tornado Cash, the most popular non-custodial coin mixer on Ethereum, is widely used to protect the privacy of addresses. However, some inappropriate transaction behaviors in Tornado Cash mixing mechanism lead to the risk of privacy leakage. More specifically, the malicious attackers can link multiple addresses of the same users according to the transaction data. Motivated by the above problem, this paper systematically analyzes the privacy issues of Tornado Cash for the first time. In this paper, we give the macroscopic analysis of Tornado Cash based on the on-chain data and formalize two types of transaction patterns. Focus on the presented transaction patterns, we propose three heuristic clustering rules to link the users’ addresses, which reduce the size of users’ anonymity set. Finally, we perform the experiment on real Tornado Cash transaction data to describe the effectiveness of the proposed clustering rules.

Arkan Hammoodi Hasan Kabla, Mohammed Anbar, Selvakumar Manickam, Shankar Karupayah

Recently, the rapid flourish of blockchain technology in the financial field has attracted many cybercriminals’ attention to launch blockchain-based attacks such as Ponzi schemes, Scam wallets, and phishing scams. Currently, Ethereum is the most prominent blockchain-based platform and the first that supports smart contracts. However, the number of phishing scam accounts are reportedly more than 50% of all cybercrimes in Ethereum. In contrast, this paper proposes a detection mechanism called Ethereum Phishing Scam Detection (Eth-PSD) that attempts to detect phishing scam-related transactions using a novel machine learning-based approach. Eth-PSD tackles some of the limitations in the existing works, such as the use of imbalanced datasets, complex feature engineering, and lower detection accuracy. We also investigated the aspects of constructing a new updated and balanced dataset that can be used for evaluating Eth-PSD effectively. Our experimental results indicate that Eth-PSD could efficiently detect the phishing scam on Ethereum with a detection accuracy of 98.11%, with a very low False Positive Rate of 0.01. Taken together, Eth-PSD showed a superior advantage compared to the existing works in reducing the dimensionality of the dataset by feature engineering and achieved an overall detection accuracy with an improvement of at least 6% compared to other existing solutions from the related work.

Shahid Hussain Danwar, Javed Ahmed Mahar, Aneela Kiran

Election allows the voter of a country to select the most suitable group of candidates to run the government. Election in Pakistan is simply paper-based method but some certain political and socio-economic issues turn that simple process in complicated and disputes once. Solutions of such problems are consisting of many methods including the e-voting system. The e-voting system facilitates the voters to cast their votes by electronic means with very easy and convenient way. This also allows maintaining the security and secrecy of the voter along with election process. Electronic voting reduces the human-involvement throughout the process from start to the end. Such system is not established yet in Pakistan. Hence, every election is disputed always. In this paper we proposed the framework of an e-voting system and simulation with the use of blockchain ledger technology. The proposed framework owns the capacity to deal with ballots in Pakistan. The novelty of the framework is that the e-voting system is linked to National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) database which assures voter's validation. The fundamental requirements were kept in consideration during the performance evaluation of the system. The results are processed and depicted specially with reference to the number of voters and voting stations, real time of vote casting, network bandwidth and controlling principles. The results support the decision makers and guide them in the foundation and customization of an e-voting system in Pakistan.

Dr. Isabella Martínez

As cryptocurrencies gain global traction, concerns over user privacy and transaction traceability have intensified. Public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum inherently expose transactional data, compromising user anonymity. In response, various privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques have been developed to conceal user identities, transaction amounts, and flow paths without sacrificing security or decentralization. This paper explores key cryptographic solutions including ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), stealth addresses, and homomorphic encryption as applied in privacy-focused cryptocurrencies such as Monero and Zcash. The study evaluates the effectiveness, scalability, and regulatory implications of these protocols, providing insights into the future of anonymous digital finance.

Tong Liu, Fariza Sabrina, Julian Jang‐Jaccard, Wen Xu · 5 authors

A smart public transport system is expected to be an integral part of our human lives to improve our mobility and reduce the effect of our carbon footprint. The safety and ongoing maintenance of the smart public transport system from cyberattacks are vitally important. To provide more comprehensive protection against potential cyberattacks, we propose a novel approach that combines blockchain technology and a deep learning method that can better protect the smart public transport system. By the creation of signed and verified blockchain blocks and chaining of hashed blocks, the blockchain in our proposal can withstand unauthorized integrity attack that tries to forge sensitive transport maintenance data and transactions associated with it. A hybrid deep learning-based method, which combines autoencoder (AE) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP), in our proposal can effectively detect distributed denial of service (DDoS) attempts that can halt or block the urgent and critical exchange of transport maintenance data across the stakeholders. The experimental results of the hybrid deep learning evaluated on three different datasets (i.e., CICDDoS2019, CIC-IDS2017, and BoT-IoT) show that our deep learning model is effective to detect a wide range of DDoS attacks achieving more than 95% F1-score across all three datasets in average. The comparison of our approach with other similar methods confirms that our approach covers a more comprehensive range of security properties for the smart public transport system.

Jehil Thakkar, Nigam Patel, Chailcy Patel, Kaushal Shah

In conventional voting systems, achieving transparency and reliability is challenging due to the centralized environment. With the advancement in technology, electronic voting has emerged. But in E-voting also, it is essential to maintain the privacy, confidentiality and integrity of the votes and voters, which is challenging. The blockchain technology that has triggered the start of a new era in the digital world is one possible solution. The immutability property and decentralized architecture of blockchain technology make it suitable to create a robust and secure E-voting system. It helps in conducting the elections by maintaining authentication, integrity, transparency, confidentiality and non-repudiation in the system. In this paper, we have evaluated the potential and feasibility of the blockchain system for electronic voting. We have addressed all the possible limitations in the current E-voting system. Using solidity language, we have implemented a small-scale sample E-voting system as a smart contract that includes everything from hosting the election, verifying the voters and counting the votes and have deployed it on an external network. The paper also shows how Zero-Knowledge Proof can help in creating privacy-preserving secure E-voting systems.

Yourong Chen, Hao Chen, Yang Zhang, Meng Han · 6 authors

Owing to the incremental and diverse applications of cryptocurrencies and the continuous development of distributed system technology, blockchain has been broadly used in fintech, smart homes, public health, and intelligent transportation due to its properties of decentralization, collective maintenance, and immutability. Although the dynamism of blockchain abounds in various fields, concerns in terms of network communication interference and privacy leakage are gradually increasing. Because of the lack of reliable attack analysis systems, fully understanding some attacks on the blockchain, such as mining, network communication, smart contract, and privacy theft attacks, has remained challenging. Therefore, in this study, we examine the security and privacy of the blockchain and analyze possible solutions. We systematical classify the blockchain attack techniques into three categories, then discuss the corresponding attack and defense methods based on these categories. We focus on (1) the attack and defense methods of mining pool attacks for blockchain security issues, such as block withholding, 51%, pool hopping, selfish mining, and fork after withholding attacks, in the attack type of consensus excitation; (2) the attack and defense methods of network communication and smart contracts for blockchain security issues, such as distributed denial-of-service, Sybil, eclipse, and reentrancy attacks, in the attack type of middle protocol; and (3) the attack and defense methods of privacy thefts for blockchain privacy issues, such as identity privacy and transaction information attacks, in the attack type of application service. Finally, we discuss future research directions for blockchain security.

P Subha, P. Padmasree, Sowndharya Lakshmi R

The Voting System in India is often corrupted and altered. The idea is to create an unbiased, secure, fast and efficient Voting System. This project is based on the domain of Block Chain wherein the voting database will be highly secure and processed quickly. The Iris Recognition is another aspect of this system which makes the process flawless. The usage of Blockchain based Database to store the data will make the voting information immutable, reliable and can be quickly accessed. The authorized results tracking makes the voting process more secure, quick and efficient since it is semi-automated. The Iris Recognition identifies the unique patterns of Irises using infrared light and generates an encrypted bit pattern which should match at the time of voting, in order to confirm the individual's identity is true. The process of Iris Scanning is backed up with fingerprint recognition exclusively for blind voting candidates since their Iris pattern may not be measured precisely by the Iris Recognition System.

Ning Lu, Xin Xu, Chang Choi, Tianlong Fei · 5 authors

When building the large-scale distributed decision control system based on mobile terminal devices (MTDs), electronic voting (E-voting) is a necessary technique to settle the dispute among parties. Due to the inherent insecurity of Internet, it is difficult for E-voting to attain complete fairness and robustness. In this study, we argue that Bitcoin blockchain offers better options for a more practical E-voting. We first present a coin mixing-based E-voting system model, which can cut off the relationship between the voter’s real identity and its Bitcoin address to achieve strong anonymity. Moreover, we devise a secret sharing-based E-voting protocol, which can prevent voting number from being leaked ahead and further realize strong robustness. We establish the probable security theory to prove its security. In addition, we use the experimental evaluation to demonstrate its efficiency.

George Vlahavas, Kostas Karasavvas, Athena Vakali

Lightweight nodes in the Bitcoin network do not have the capability to synchronize the entire contents of the blockchain. In order to receive information that is relevant to them, they use the Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) protocol to communicate with full nodes, that hold the entire blockchain. Bloom filters are used by the SPV protocol to mitigate known privacy issues. Still, the effectiveness of using Bloom filters comes into question. In this paper, we analyze the behaviour of Bloom filter requests with respect to their target False Positive Rate (FPR) values. Our findings show that small FPR values have very limited bandwidth requirements, while higher values are not suitable for use with bandwidth restricted devices. At the same time, we confirm that privacy implications of Bloom filters are still valid today, when an increasing number of new addresses appears in the Bitcoin blockchain every day. We also study the effect that multiple concurrent requests made by Bloom filter enabled lightweight clients have on the disk and CPU utilization, as well as RAM consumption of full node clients.

Hüseyin ASİLTÜRK, Ali Hakan IŞIK

Covid-19 pandemisi ile birçok gereksinimler uzaktan ve sosyal mesafe kurallarına göre gerçekleştirmektedir. Bu kurallar, eğitim, iş, market alışverişi gibi birçok alanda uygulanmaktadır. Anket veya oy kullanmada bu süreçte zamanla zorunlu hale gelebilecektir. Günümüzde anketlerin çoğu elektronik sistemler üzerinden gerçekleştirilmektedir. Kullanıcılar, oluşturulan anketleri paylaşarak hiçbir temasta bulunmadan fikir alışverişi yapabilmektedir. Çalışmada bir anket sistemi oluşturulmuştur. Bu çalışmada asıl amaç ise anket kayıtları blok zincir altyapısı kullanan etheryum ağında oluşturulan akıllı kontrat üzerine kaydedilerek kayıtların ileri seviyede güvenliği sağlanmasıdır. Çalışmada kullanıcı verilerinin güvenliği ön planda tutulurken kullanım kolaylığı da sağlanmaktadır. Çalışmada, web ara yüzleri için Web3.js, Bootstrap ve MVC teknolojileri kullanılmıştır. Akışı sağlamak için veri kaydı iki alana yapılmaktadır. Bunlardan ilki etheryum tabanlı akıllı kontrat diğeri MySQL veri tabanıdır. Kullanıcı verileri ilk olarak blok ağına kayıt talebinde bulunmaktadır. Bu sürede, kullanıcının kaydı ağa kaydedilinceye kadar beklememesi için veriler MySQL veri tabanına da kaydedilmektedir. Böylelikle kullanıcı beklemek zorunda kalmamakta ve işlemlerine devam edebilmektedir. Kullanıcı sistemden verilerinin kontrolünü yapmak istediğinde kontrol modülünden etheryum test ağındaki veri ile MySQL verisini karşılaştırması istenmektedir. Karşılaştırma sonrası bir sorun olması durumunda profil anahtarı ile yöneticiye başvurulmakta ve tam güvenlik sağlayan blok zincir ağındaki kayıt doğru kabul edilmektedir. Çalışma, ankette bulunan kullanıcı verilerinin güvenliğini üst seviye de sağlaması ile literatüre katkı sağlamaktadır.

Chengkai Rao, Zhaowen Lin

The traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) issues certificates by trusted certification authority (CA). But due to the centralized structure of CA, it brings some problems, such as single-point failure, certificate opacity and so on. Another decentralized system web of trust (WOT) has a high access threshold. In addition, WOT cannot ensure the authenticity of users’ authentication because of lack of incentive, and it cannot authenticate the specific user identity. In this paper, we propose a new distributed identification system based on blockchain, called VAPKI. This system is implemented through smart contracts on Ethereum, which is transparent and immutable. Meanwhile, it can authenticate the fine-grained attributes of user identity and strengthen the authenticity of user identity through transparent authentication. In addition, VAPKI can identify the malicious user through the regular validation tasks (RVTs). In addition, it realizes the credit and deposit mechanism, ensuring users to be honest and trustworthy. This mechanism can also force users to authenticate strictly and punish malicious users found in RVTs.

Shanyun Huang, Wenyin Zhang, Xiaomei Yu, Jiuru Wang · 6 authors

Due to the unique characteristics of blockchain, such as decentralization, anonymity, high credibility, and nontampering, blockchain technologies have become an integral part of public data platforms and public infrastructure. The communication between the stakeholders of a given blockchain can be used as a carrier for covert communication under cover of legal transactions, which has become a promising research direction of blockchain technology. Due to the special mechanism of blockchain, some traditional blockchain covert communication schemes are not mature enough. They suffer from various drawbacks, such as weak concealment of secret information, cumbersome identification and screening of special transactions, poor availability, and low comprehensive performance. Therefore, this paper designs a scheme of covert communication in the Bitcoin blockchain, which takes normal transactions as a mask and leverages the Bitcoin transaction mechanism to embed secret information in the public key hash field. Specifically, we propose a novel key update mechanism combined with the hash algorithm to construct a covert channel. It ensures security and can update the channel to prevent the related problems caused by address reuse. We are taking advantage of the feature of Bitcoin that cannot be double-spent to solve the problem of burning bitcoin when paying bitcoin to a fake public key hash. In our scheme, both parties to the communication are anonymous, and the attacker cannot detect the covert data or track the transaction and address. Our proposed scheme was tested in real Bitcoin blockchain network, and the experimental results were analyzed to verify its security, availability, and efficiency.

Rihab Habeeb Sahib, Prof. Dr. Eman Salih Al-Shamery

Regular E-voting systems for elections may count the votes in less time,less cost,save the privacy of citizens,but still considered risky as votes can be tampered.E-voting systems based on a network distributed ledger show fast results,more trusted,save privacy,cannot be tampered,and distributed in which no central organization controls the system.This paper illustrate an e-voting system to solve the challenge of a massive ledger that is distributed among network-nodes using a data reduction technique as a security-matching-tool,singular value decomposition(SVD) that handle a copy of election results in another form and matched with the SQL-database results to announce a successful election-event representing a transparency-powerful-secured-system

Asep Rizal Nurjaman, Ari Moesriami Barmawi

In an electronic voting system, authentication is used to ensure that the voter is legitimate without knowing his/her identity, while the vote collectors verify the data is received from a legitimate user without knowing the identity of the voter. One of the authentication schemes that fulfilled this requirement is called a deniable authentication scheme, where the receiver can prove the source of the message while another party cannot identify the source of the message. In 2013, Li-Takagi et al. proposed a deniable authentication scheme. However, Li-Takagi's scheme has weaknesses if the receiver fully cooperates with the third party. In this case, the third party can identify the source of a given message. In the proposed method, zero-knowledge proof is introduced to preserve the anonymity of the deniable authentication scheme when the receiver fully cooperates with the third party. Based on the analysis, the proposed scheme fulfills the requirement of the deniable authentication scheme when the receiver fully cooperates with the third party. However, the proposed scheme has additional computation costs for securing the shared secret key. Two attack schemes that are carried out on both Li-Takagi and the proposed scheme are the MITM attack and the impersonation attack. The probability of breaking the proposed scheme using an MITM attack is lower than when using Li-Takagi's scheme, but the probability of breaking the proposed scheme using an impersonation attack is the same as Li-Takagi's scheme.

Jacob Abegunde, Joseph Spring, Hannan Xiao

The development of electronic voting applications remains an active area of research and this has led to the proposal and implementation of many models based on blockchains. However, most of the proposed models are partially decentralized solutions, in which the blockchain is used as a storage media for votes while the application is written in programming tools such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This makes them vulnerable to attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, Single Point of Failure (SPF), and fraudulent record modification. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized electronic voting application, SEVA, in which we placed the whole application (code and data) in Ethereum to protect the application from vulnerabilities. Additionally, we propose a new consensus algorithm, Proof of Smart Vote (PoSV) for SEVA, as a viable energy-saving alternative to the energy-intensive Proof of Work (PoW). We implemented and evaluated SEVA with PoSV and compared it with a partially decentralized model of the application.

Dylan Eck, Adam Torek, Steve Cutchin, Gaby G. Dagher

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency that enables entities to transfer funds psuedo-anonymously. Investigative services like the FBI, however, have been able to subvert this using various techniques. To counter this, the Bitcoin community uses several methods to obscure transactions, including shared send transactions among others. We attempt to peer into these transactions through a pairing of address clustering and shared send untangling and test our experimental results through path finding between addresses. We then implement our methodology to test its effectiveness. Our findings show that while using clustering can improve path-finding results and shared send untangling, we recommend applying heuristics in combination to increase effectiveness.

Vladislav Pascari, Larisa Gagarina, Valentin V. Sliusar

The most promising way to increase voters’ confidence in the remote electronic voting (REV) procedure is a voting method based on Ethereum blockchain platform. However, the existing solutions using this method faced a range of problems: ensuring the secrecy of the vote and openness of the procedure for society, pressure on the voter and a guarantee of the reliability of the whole system. In this work, a method for constructing a REV is proposed that solves these problems. It is similar in structure to the traditional voting method, using the same principle and processes. The Ethereum blockchain based REV process is described in detail. It was shown that received votes are securely stored in the Ethereum blockchain network, and the correctness of the vote addressing to the selected candidate can always be checked in real time. The description of smart contract algorithm that implements the transfer of vote from voter to candidate using transactions and determines the winner who received the highest number of votes was provided. It was demonstrated that keccak256 hashing algorithm and secp256k1 elliptic curve signatures ensure transactions’ maximum protection, reliability, and non-rollability. The developed REV technique based on Ethereum blockchain platform increases the efficiency of data security and confidentiality, transparency and anonymity of the voting procedure, and solves the problem of coercion. The results of the work have been implemented programmatically and can be used not only in the electoral system, but also wherever there is need of remote voting.

Maurantonio Caprolu, Matteo Pontecorvi, Matteo Signorini, Carlos Segarra · 5 authors

Bitcoin (BTC) is probably the most transparent payment network in the world, thanks to the full history of transactions available to the public. Though, Bitcoin is not a fully anonymous environment, rather a pseudonymous one, accounting for a number of attempts to beat its anonymity using clustering techniques. There is, however, a recurring assumption in all the cited deanonymization techniques: that each transaction output has an address attached to it. That assumption is false. An evidence is that, as of block height 591,872, there are several millions transactions with at least one output for which the Bitcoin Core client cannot infer an address. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on sound graph theory for identifying transaction inputs and outputs. Our solution implements two simple yet innovative features: it does not rely on BTC addresses and explores all the transactions stored in the blockchain. All the other existing solutions fail with respect to one or both of the cited features. In detail, we first introduce the concept of Unknown Transaction and provide a new framework to parse the Bitcoin blockchain by taking them into account. Then, we introduce a theoretical model to detect, study, and classify, for the first time in the literature, unknown transaction patterns in the user network. Further, in an extensive experimental campaign, we apply our model to the Bitcoin network to uncover hidden transaction patterns within the Bitcoin user network. Results are striking: we discovered more than 30,000 unknown transaction DAGs representing money flows never observed before. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed framework is the only one that enables a complete study of the unknown transaction patterns, hence enabling further research in the field, for which we provide some directions.