In recent years there have been increased efforts to make supply chains transparent and traceable to better protect the end consumer's interests against counterfeiting, contamination, false claims, and inadequate processes. The actors in the supply chain can also leverage additional visibility to proactively tune their operations in response to upstream or downstream disruptions. Blockchain technology, with its promise of immutability, transparency, and provenance is a natural fit to supply chain problems. Several works have discussed the improved design of supply chains leveraging blockchain technology. There have been attempts to address some of the privacy concerns of participants on the blockchain network by using encryption schemes to hide confidential data and group signatures to hide the participant identities. But these do not handle the complexities of the supply chain, where items are constantly packaged, repackaged, and transformed before reaching the end consumer. Our work presents a blockchain-based model for the supply chain that provides privacy and traceability with efficient contamination tracing while accounting for the aforementioned complexities of the supply chain operations. The last property enables an end consumer to be convinced about a product to be unaffected by identified faulty upstream processes (contamination) without access to the entire history of the product. Our solution makes novel use of cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators to provide these guarantees. The choice of the cryptographic components is grounded in concrete efficiency, and we present an experimental evaluation of the implementation of our protocol on Hyperledger Fabric, a popular platform for enterprise blockchains.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Electronic voting (e-voting) systems have emerged as a convenient alternative to traditional paper-based voting, but they also pose significant security and integrity challenges. Cryptographic techniques provide solutions to ensure confidentiality, verifiability, and integrity in voting systems. This paper explores various cryptographic approaches used in secure voting systems, including homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain-based voting. We analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability in different voting environments. Furthermore, we discuss emerging challenges, threats, and future research directions in securing e-voting systems.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Scarce and niche in the literature just a few years ago, the blockchain topic is now the main subject in conference papers and books. However, the hype generated by the technology and its potential implications for real-world applications is flawed by many misconceptions about how it works and how it is implemented, creating faulty thinking or overly optimistic expectations. Too often, characteristics such as immutability, transparency, and censorship resistance, which mainly belong to the bitcoin blockchain, are sought in regular blockchains, whose potential is barely comparable. Furthermore, critical aspects such as oracles and their role in smart contracts receive few literature contributions, leaving results and theoretical implications highly questionable. This literature review of the latest papers in the field aims to give clarity to the blockchain oracle problem by discussing its effects in some of the most promising real-world applications. The analysis supports the view that the more trusted a system is, the less the oracle problem impacts.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Robert Alexandru Dobre, Radu Preda, Radu Alexandru Badea, Mihai Stanciu · 5 authors
A notable increase in the distribution of digital images was fueled by the social media platforms. In the fight for attention, the posts containing images have more chances to make users stop scrolling through the crowded news feed than the posts containing only text. The effect is enhanced if the photos that are used in the posts are professional grade. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more businesses have moved to online. Every business makes efforts to catch the attention of potential customers with high quality images. These situations could lead to intended or accidental image copyright infringement. This paper proposes a system that can be used to detect and avoid copyright infringement. Photographers can use it to register their photos and businesses can use it to check if the image they want to use is copyright protected or not. If it is, the system also allows the purchase of the right to use the photo. The solution is based on blockchain because of its immutability property. Businesses can look for images on many sites, thus it is very probable that recompressed versions of the same photo would be stored in different places. Therefore, it is important to develop an algorithm that can extract a signature that is resistant to JPEG compression from the image. The signature should be stored on the blockchain along the identification data of the copyright owner.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Vehicular local advertising enables roadside retailers to provide timely and location-aware advertisements to on-road vehicular users to attract more in-store visits. However, the prevalence of the vehicular local advertising has raised increasing transparency and accountability concerns on the spatial keyword query process, such as why a vehicular user receives advertisements from specific spatial entities as well as the timely detection of the advertising misbehavior. In this paper, we develop a transparent and accountable vehicular local advertising system by utilizing the tamper-proof and open nature of the blockchain technology. Considering the large scale of the spatial-keyword database and the expensive computation and storage cost on the blockchain, we introduce two design strategies, digest-and-verify and divide-then-assemble. In specific, a large-scale spatial keyword database is digested and stored on the blockchain. The spatial keyword query is then conducted with modular executions of two off-chain spatial keyword query functions, the results of which are efficiently assembled and verified in an advertising smart contract. By doing so, expensive on-chain computation and storage overheads are significantly reduced at a cost of acceptable off-chain overheads. We define the security requirements of the vehicular local advertising system as Auditing Security and achieve the notion with the security analysis. We also conduct real-world experiments to show the efficiency of the blockchain-based vehicular local advertising system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Daniel Adkins, Archita Agarwal, Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz
Blockchain databases are storage systems that combine properties of blockchains and databases like decentralization, tamperproofness, low query latency and support for complex queries. Blockchain databases are an emerging and important class of blockchain technology that is critical to the development of non-trivial smart contracts, distributed applications and decentralized marketplaces.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain, which started as a cryptocurrency bitcoin, has recently been applied to various fields such as finance, distribution, and public services beyond the category of cryptocurrency. In this paper, we propose a music distribution model to protect music copyrights and rights holders' rights based on blockchain and smart contract technology. By designing and implementing a blockchain-based music distribution model, it organizes music assets into blocks and distributes them among blockchain participating nodes, providing integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation of assets, and a single point of blockchain advantage. Single Point of Failure (SPOF) problem can be minimized. Blockchain allows musicians to easily approve and manage their music copyright with distributed ledger technology. Rights holders can automatically and immediately receive royalties from the music industry, even if no broker is involved in the distribution process. By distributing and managing music using the proposed model, we can provide all transaction information and related tasks in the music market safely and transparently.
Music and Audio Processing
Digital Rights Management and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Befekadu G. Gebraselase, Bjarne E. Helvik, Yuming Jiang
Blockchain has been considered as an important technique to enable secure management of virtual network functions and network slices. To understand such capabilities of a blockchain, e.g. transaction confirmation time, demands a thorough study on the transaction characteristics of the blockchain. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the transaction characteristics of Bitcoin -- the first blockchain application, focusing on the underlying fundamental processes. A set of results and findings are obtained, which provide new insight into understanding the transaction and traffic characteristics of Bitcoin. As a highlight, the validity of several hypotheses/assumptions used in the literature is examined with measurement for the first time.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract Today, blockchain uses a list of various blocks for storing a distributed flat of invariable information that informs of a set of replicated logical things in the Internet of Things (IoT). In the blockchain, a set of blocks includes various transactions containing a cryptographic hash value and a timestamp. Blockchain‐as‐a‐service (BaaS) as a new service in cloud providers presents an infrastructure for accessing users to execute, manage, and monitor blockchain applications without high secured infrastructure requirements. Recently, BaaS concepts widely have used the management of IoT applications in different layers such as network, data, control, and resource. This paper provides a systematic review of recent research studies in BaaS models. The main goal behind this review is to categorize the applied scenarios, trends, evaluated Quality of Service (QoS) factors, new challenges, and open directions on BaaS models in IoT management. To evaluate the existing research studies in this field, five analytical research questions are proposed to analyze the technical aspects of each study. The analytical results based on existing research questions specify that the BaaS models are applied to network layer to manage IoT environment more than other layers. Also, security and privacy are two important factors to evaluate the existing BaaS models in cloud‐edge IoT environments. Finally, the integration of BaaS models on IoT environments with interconnections of cloud‐edge computing and software defined networks creates great secure opportunities for smart environment applications to monitor, manage, and improve all the atomic services and resources.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) field, more and more data are generated by IoT devices and transferred over the network. However, a large amount of IoT data is sensitive, and the leakage of such data is a privacy breach. The security of sensitive IoT data is a big issue, as the data is shared over an insecure network channel. Current solutions include symmetric encryption and access controls to secure the data transfer, but they have some drawbacks such as a single point of failure. Blockchain is a promising distributed ledger technology that can prevent the malicious tampering of data, offering reliable data storage. This paper proposes a distributed access control system based on blockchain technology to secure IoT data. The proposed mechanism is based on fog computing and the concept of the alliance chain. This method uses mixed linear and nonlinear spatiotemporal chaotic systems (MLNCML) and the least significant bit (LSB) to encrypt the IoT data on an edge node and then upload the encrypted data to the cloud. The proposed mechanism can solve the problem of a single point of failure of access control by providing the dynamic and fine-grained access control for IoT data. The experimental results of this method demonstrated that it can protect the privacy of IoT data efficiently.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
E-voting is an application of in the election process. E-voting was developed to make the election process easier, safer and more practical. Blockchain technology is explained as a safe technology because of its distributed nature. Tso et al's e-voting is one of the e-voting mechanism that uses the ethereum smart contract blockchain. Tso et al e-voting application use asymmetric cryptography for the safety of its users in the form of Paillier's algorithm. This study proposed use of the AES-256 algorithm to secure key data on smart cards for e-voting process, SHA-256 for authentication, and secure communication protocols to secure the key in sending process. The key is stored in a ciphertext format with AES-256 encryption and SHA-256 as authentication algorithm. The results of implementing smart card prototypes as key storage in the Tso et al e-voting application shows that the proposed e-voting scheme has a key storage time of 0.774 seconds, a memory capacity of 572 bytes, with 0.472 seconds generation speed.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mustufa Haider Abidi, Hisham Alkhalefah, Usama Umer, Muneer Khan Mohammed
Currently, the furious competitiveness in global markets and speedy improvements in information technology lead to shorter product life cycles, lesser transportation capabilities, and increased demands as well. In most business scenarios, the supply chain network is becoming one of the most vital focusing areas. In the supply chain network, blockchain technology is a promising solution for secure information sharing. However, it is a bit critical in maintaining security at each level of the blockchain and hence the public–private–key cryptography is more commonly preferred. This study intends to construct a new privacy preservation model in the field of supply chain networks based on blockchain technology by undergoing three major phases, namely, (a) data sanitization, (b) key generation, and (c) restoration. Further, the sensitive fields in the original data are selected during the data sanitization phase, and in the key generation phase; the optimal key is generated to hide the selected sensitive fields. The hidden data with the secured key is transferred from the source (manufacturer) to destination (vendor) in the supply chain network via the blockchain. The restoration process takes place in the receiver side with the help of the same key. Among all these data flow methods, the optimal key selection is the critical issue that needs to be overridden to make the data transmission secured. As a novelty, a new optimization algorithm referred to as Whale with New Crosspoint-based Update (WNU), which is the advanced version of Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), is developed here to select the optimal key. Finally, the proposed WNU model is analyzed in terms of Hiding Failure (HF) rate, Information Preservation (IP) Rate, and False Rule generation (FR), and Degree of Modification (DM). The proposed secured information sharing in supply chain management (SCM) with blockchain technology will be validated by comparing it over the traditional models in terms of security as well.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Farah Maath Jasem, Ali Makki Sagheer, Abdullah M. Awad
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system largely used for online financial transactions. It gained popularity due to its anonymity, privacy, and comparatively low transaction cost. Its wallet heavily relies on Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). Weaknesses in such algorithms can significantly affect the safety and the security of bitcoin wallets. In this paper, a secure key management wallet was designed based on several changes in the wallet parts. In the cold wallet, we employed an image-based passphrase to achieve a strong entropy source of master seed. The hot wallet, the proposed key_ Gen algorithm is modifying to the key generation step of the ECDSA that it is to generate a fresh key pair at each transaction. The final part ensures recovering all keys on both hot and cold wallets without daily backups in case of losing the wallet. The findings prove that the proposed cold wallet is resisting against a dictionary attack and overcoming the memorizing problem. The proposed hot wallet model acquires good anonymity and privacy for bitcoin users by eliminating transaction likability without additional cost. The execution time for signing a transaction of the proposed model is~70 millisecond, which is then important in the bitcoin domain.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Oct 8, 2020·Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing
Bitcoin is undoubtedly the most used distributed ledger technology nowadays. Bitcoin's OP_RETURN operator allows for saving arbitrary data on the blockchain. This comes as an extension of Bitcoin's core usage (i.e. cryptocurrency) and opens up a multitude of use cases. These range from benign applications (e.g. ownership of a digital/physical asset) to illegal/malicious scenarios (e.g. blockchain-based botnets). In this paper, we present a system that provides advanced analytic and visual capabilities with regard to the OP_RETURN operator. Furthermore, we showcase a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the OP_RETURN along with a number of interesting findings.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Ethereum cryptocurrency system becomes prevalent with the increasing number of daily transactions. It is a high-quality channel to secretly transfer information because senders and recipients are pseudonymous and transactions are tamper-resistant. Several existing covert channels have been designed for several years. However, most of the existing covert channels can either be detected by their special patterns or have low embedding rate. In this paper, we first use the VALUE field of a transaction in the Ethereum system to construct a HMAC-based multiple-bit embedding (HMAC-based MBE) scheme. We further proposed a Hash-based multiple-bit embedding (Hash-based MBE) scheme to enhance the covertness. Theoretical and experimental analysis show that both schemes have either higher embedding rate or better covertness than that of the existing works.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Since the initial launch of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, decentralized digital currencies have long been of major interest in both the academia and the industry. Till today, there are more than 3000 different cryptocurrencies over the internet. Each one relies on mathematical soundness and cryptographic wit to provide unique properties in addition to securing basic correctness. A common misbelief for cryptocurrencies is that they provide complete anonymity by replacing people's real-life identity with a randomly generated wallet address in payments. However, this "pseudonymity" is easily breakable under the public ledger. Many attacks demonstrate ways to deanonymize people through observing the transaction patterns or network interactions. Thus, cryptocurrency fungibility has become a popular topic in the research community. This report reviews a partial list of existing schemes and describes an alternative implementation, Eth-Tumbler. Eth-Tumbler utilizes layered encryption and multiple signatures and thus efficiently hides a user under k-anonymity.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
It is well known that users on open blockchains are tracked by an industry providing services to governments, law enforcement, secret services, and alike. While most blockchains do not protect their users' privacy and allow external observers to link transactions and addresses, a growing research interest attempts to design add-on privacy solutions to help users regain their privacy on non-private blockchains. In this work, we propose to our knowledge the first censorship resilient mixer, which can reward its users in a privacy-preserving manner for participating in the system. Increasing the anonymity set size, and diversity of users, is, as we believe, an important endeavor to raise a mixer's contributed privacy in practice. The paid-out rewards can take the form of governance tokens to decentralize the voting on system parameters, similar to how popular "DeFi farming" protocols operate. Moreover, by leveraging existing "Defi" lending platforms, AMR is the first mixer design that allows participating clients to earn financial interests on their deposited funds. Our system AMR is autonomous as it does not rely on any external server or third party. The evaluation of our AMR implementation shows that the system supports today on Ethereum anonymity set sizes beyond thousands of users, and a capacity of over $66,000$ deposits per day, at constant system costs. We provide a formal specification of our zksnark-based AMR system, a privacy and security analysis, implementation, and evaluation with both the MiMC and Poseidon hash functions.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques