During the Coincheck incident, which recorded the largest damages in cryptocurrency history in 2018, it was demonstrated that using Mosaic token can have a certain effect. Although it seems attractive to employ tokens as countermeasures for cryptocurrency leakage, Mosaic is a specific token for the New Economy Movement (NEM) cryptocurrency and is not employed for other blockchain systems or cryptocurrencies. Moreover, although some volunteers tracked leaked NEM using Mosaic in the CoinCheck incident, it would be better to verify that the volunteers can be trusted. Simultaneously, if someone (e.g., who stole cryptocurrencies) can identify the volunteers, then that person or organization may be targets of them. In this paper, we propose an anonymous trust-marking scheme on blockchain systems that is universally applicable to any cryptocurrency. In our scheme, entities called token admitters are allowed to generate tokens adding trustworthiness or untrustworthiness to addresses. Anyone can anonymously verify whether these tokens were issued by a token admitter. Simultaneously, only the designated auditor and no one else, including nondesignated auditors, can identify the token admitters. Our scheme is based on accountable ring signatures and commitment, and is implemented on an elliptic curve called Curve25519, and we confirm that both cryptographic tools are efficient. Moreover, we also confirm that our scheme is applicable to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NEM.
Blockchain (BC), a by-product of Bitcoin cryptocurrency, has gained immense and wide scale popularity for its applicability in various diverse domains - especially in multifaceted non-monetary systems. By adopting cryptographic techniques such as hashing and asymmetric encryption - along with distributed consensus approach, a Blockchain based distributed ledger not only becomes highly secure but also immutable and thus eliminates the need for any third-party intermediators. On the contrary, innumerable IoT (Internet of Things) devices are increasingly being added to the network. This phenomenon poses higher risk in terms of security and privacy. It is thus extremely important to address the security aspects of the growing IoT ecosystem. This paper explores the applicability of BC for ensuring enhanced security and privacy in the IoT ecosystem. Recent research articles and projects or applications were surveyed to assess the implementation of BC for IoT Security and identify associated challenges and propose solutions for BC enabled enhanced security for the IoT ecosystem.
In a smart advertising network (SAN), a broker builds user profiles from its wealth of user data, manages advertisements for retailers, and disseminates the advertisements through multiple channels. However, the broker sometimes provides insufficient transparency explanations of advertising activities, which may result in the increasing popularity of ad-blocking software and lower advertising investments from retailers. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based Smart Advertising Network with Privacy-preserving Accountability (SANPA). Specifically, we design a composite Succinct Non-interactive Argument (SNARG) system, that commits advertising policies as cryptographic authenticators in a smart contract. By doing so,SANPAis compatible with the existingSANwithout posing prohibitive implementation cost over the blockchain architecture. Users or retailers can require explanations of an advertising activity by sending a challenge to the smart contract. With the succinctness and privacy preservation of theSNARGsystem, the smart contract can efficiently verify whether the challenged advertising activity follows committed advertising policies without exposing user profile privacy. If any misconduct is identified, the contract enforces public accountability on the misbehaving party by confiscating its cryptocurrency deposits. We conduct extensive experiments to provide both on-chain and off-chain benchmarks, which demonstrates the application feasibility ofSANPA.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the era of big data, modern data marketplaces have received much attention as they allow not only large enterprises but also individuals to trade their data. This new paradigm makes the data prone to various threats, including piracy, illegal reselling, tampering, illegal redistribution, ownership claiming, forgery, theft, misappropriation, etc. Although digital watermarking is a promising technique to address the above-mentioned challenges, the existing solutions in the literature are deemed to be incompetent in big data scenarios due to the following factors: V's of big data, involvement of multiple owners, incremental watermarking, large cover-size and limited watermark-capacity, non-interference, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel big data watermarking technique that leverages the power of blockchain technology and provides a transparent immutable audit trail for data movement in big data monetizing scenarios. In this context, we address all the crucial challenges mentioned above. We present a prototype implementation of the system as a proof of concept using Solidity on Ethereum platform, and we perform experimental evaluation to demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness in terms of execution gas costs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal which deals with watermarking issues in the context of big data.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ripple Effect is a logic puzzle where the player has to fill numbers into empty cells in a rectangular grid. The grid is divided into rooms, and each room must contain consecutive integers starting from 1 to its size. Also, if two cells in the same row or column contain the same number $x$, there must be a space of at least $x$ cells separating the two cells. In this paper, we develop a physical zero-knowledge proof for the Ripple Effect puzzle using a deck of cards, which allows a prover to convince a verifier that he/she knows a solution without revealing it. In particular, given a secret number $x$ and a list of numbers, our protocol can physically verify that $x$ does not appear among the first $x$ numbers in the list without revealing $x$ or any number in the list.
Open access
3 source records
Cryptography and Data Security
Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Christopher Chun Ki Chan, Vimal Kumar, Steven Delaney, Munkhjargal Gochoo
Malicious use of deep learning algorithms has allowed the proliferation of high realism fake digital content such as text, images, and videos, to exist on the internet as readily available and accessible consumable content. False information provided through algorithmically modified footage, images, audios, and videos (known as deepfakes), coupled with the virality of social networks, may cause major social unrest. The emergence of misinformation from fabricated digital content suggests the necessity for anti-disinformation methods such as deepfake detection algorithms or immutable metadata in order to verify the validity of digital content. Permissioned blockchain, notably Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, coupled with LSTMs for audio/video/descriptive captioning is a step towards providing a feasible tool for combating deepfake media. Original content would require the original artist attestation of untampered data. The smart contract combines a varied multiple LSTM networks into a process that allows for the tracing and tracking of a digital content's historical provenance. The result is a theoretical framework that enables proof of authenticity (PoA) for digital media using a decentralized blockchain using multiple LSTMs as a deep encoder for creating unique discriminative features; which is then compressed and hashed into a transaction. Our work assumes we trust the video at the point of reception. Our contribution is a decentralized blockchain framework of deep discriminative digital media to combat deepfakes.
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Siddharth M. Nair, Varsha Ramesh, Amit Kumar Tyagi
The major issues and challenges in blockchain over internet of things are security, privacy, and usability. Confidentiality, authentication, and control are the challenges faced in security issue. Hence, this chapter will discuss the challenges and opportunities from the prospective of security and privacy of data in blockchain (with respect to security and privacy community point of view). Furthermore, the authors will provide some future trends that blockchain technology may adapt in the near future (in brief).
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Summary At present, blockchain is not only applied in the financial field, but also extended to the medical, insurance, internet of things, and many other fields. Its independence leads to more and more significant problems of network isolation. To address the problem of the cooperative operation between different blockchains, this article proposes virtual chain, a storage model supporting cross‐blockchain transaction. It not only ensures that cross‐chain transactions are tamper‐proof and traceable but also realizes completely decentralized storage. First, to tackle the multidimensional heterogeneous problem existing in cross‐chain trading, a data structure based on prefix tree is proposed to manage cross‐chain trading data on top of source chain and target chain. Second, a signature verification mechanism based on elliptic curve is proposed to meet the operational atomicity requirements of both parties of cross‐chain transaction. Third, the data fusion technology is used to expand the block capacity indirectly to achieve the high throughput of cross‐chain transactions. Finally, by using the credibility‐based access control and block chain technology to ensure the security of the data storage model, and conduct security analysis from three aspects of tamper‐proof, data protection and anti‐conspiracy node attack. The experiment shows that the proposed cross‐chain transaction storage model can realize the efficient storage of the heterogeneous data, and satisfy the high requirement of the cross‐chain transaction. Moreover, the virtual chain storage model establishes a safe and reliable working environment.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Traceability and food quality are significant challenges in realizing a reliable food supply chain. The reliability of data in supply chains is one of the critical factors. Ensuring transparency, integrity, and availability is the primary requirement for establishing a proper supply chain network. Blockchain is a distributed structure of immutable records that are chained together to form blocks. It provides a guarantee of storing the data correctly and reliably. Smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts containing the terms of the agreement between the entities involved, provide utility for automation of reputation calculation with the transactions. Reputation systems allow participants to rate each other, thus building trust through reputation. The present reputation systems have bounded scrutiny and lack granularity; hence they are not ideal for supply chains. In this work, we propose a reliable supply chain framework using blockchain and smart contracts. It uses a consortium blockchain network to trace communication between the participants and to calculate reputation scores dynamically. Rewards and penalties are assigned to the participants of the supply chain network based on the food product quality involved in the trade. The network participants have defined roles and the access permissions govern who can access the ledger. An immutable ledger stores all the transactions occurring in the network. Any change in one block will reflect in the consecutive blocks, which ensures the data is reliable and secure. The proposed system is implemented using Hyperledger Composer. The proposed framework is evaluated in terms of throughput and latency for varying asset size and batch size using the benchmarking tool Caliper. Results show that the security and reliability provided by the proposed framework justify the overheads in contrast to a trading model that does not include a blockchain network.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Massive amounts of multimedia data (i.e., text, audio, video, graphics and animation) are being generated everyday. Conventionally, multimedia data are managed by the platforms maintained by multimedia service providers, which are generally designed using centralised architecture. However, such centralised architecture may lead to a single point of failure and disputes over royalties or other rights. It is hard to ensure the data integrity and track fulfilment of obligations listed on the copyright agreement. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present a blockchain-based platform architecture for multimedia data management. We adopt self-sovereign identity for identity management and design a multi-level capability-based mechanism for access control. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype using the proposed approach and evaluate it using a use case. The results show that the proposed approach is feasible and has scalable performance.
Daniel Maldonado-Ruiz, Jenny Torres, Nour El Madhoun
Most of the authentication protocols assume the existence of a Trusted Third Party (TTP) in the form of a Certificate Authority or as an authentication server. The main objective of this research is to present an autonomous solution where users could store their credentials, without depending on TTPs. For this, the use of an autonomous network is imperative, where users could use their uniqueness in order to identify themselves. We propose the framework “Three Blockchains Identity Management with Elliptic Curve Cryptography (3BI-ECC)”. Our proposed framework is a decentralize identity management system where users’ identities are self-generated.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohamed Fartitchou, Khalid El Makkaoui, Nabil Kannouf, Zakaria El Allali
Block chain (BC) is a relatively new technology; which has attracted much attention recently. It has been developed rapidly and can be used in many applications of various domains such as decentralized approaches. Indeed, many companies, even worldwide governments, are now using BC technology to improve the security, scalability, and efficiency of their services. In this paper, we provide an overview of BC security. We start with the basics of BC technology. Next, we give the primary BC security attacks. Finally, we present the BC countermeasures.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The patients' medical image data are one of the most important data in e-health. Medical image data usually play a crucial role in disease diagnosis and implicate unpredictable potential values for improving diagnostic methods and adjusting diagnostic results. To exploit their incredible potential values, medical images need to be shared among different hospitals, medical institutions and insurance companies and others. But how to securely and effectively share these medical image data becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we proposed to combine encryption and digital watermark technology to achieve a secure and privacy-preserving medical image sharing method. The QR code image of the concatenation of authoritative diagnosis results and the hash of the original medical image is generated as the watermark image. The Discrete cosine transform (DCT) and Inverse DCT (IDCT) algorithms are utilized to embed the watermark image. As the watermarked medical images are desensitized, they are stored to a smart contract based blockchain, such as Ethereum, to achieve secure and fair sharing between data owners and users. The experimental results show that the proposed method can resist several attacks meanwhile it is efficient in medical image sharing.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Today's video-sharing systems are platforms that have been developed to be a hub for the introduction and sharing of videos created by video creators from all over the world. These systems generate significant revenue through advertising or copyright transferring they receive from video viewers, which share only certain percentage with video creators. However, To make more profit for video creators, in this paper we proposed a distributed video sharing architecture with the possibility of performing financial transactions that works on the Ethereum. In this new architecture, the Blockchain network separated from storage; because video storage in Blockchain results to be costly for mining in the nodes in the network. Ethereum's smart contract is responsible for monitoring the validity, transparency, immutability, integrity, and security of transactions as well as controlling video access. On the other side of the architecture, there is an Ethereum-compatible distributed file storage called Swarm for video storage. Due to the lack of video storage in the Blockchain network, the integrity of the videos is questionable. To solve this problem in the proposed scheme, a Merkel tree of video hashes in the swarm is created and stored in the Blockchain to ensure the immutability and integrity of the videos and, to be transparent and valid to everyone. Finally, the performance of the proposed architecture in terms of security, structure distribution, downtime probability, fault tolerance, transparency, content integrity, immutability, and sustainability has been compared with similar systems and its performance has been proven.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Віктор Миколайович Чешун, Ihor Muliar, Vasyl Yatskiv, Ruslan Shevchuk · 6 authors
Decentralized applications, architectures and Blockchain are very popular and progressive technologies that are definitely ahead of its time. Nowadays world has a lot of decentralized applications and proposals, however the approaches and concepts decentralized software development based on the Blockchain technology is only emerging. This process is a common thing for new technologies as far as its adaptation takes time and often requires to change a usual approach to it. This article suggests a new way of safe decentralized applications development using Blockchain technologies and Ethereum platform. Ethereum platform-it's a project that is undoubtedly second best after bitcoin for a quite long period of time. Ethereum is presented as a platform for various tasks, such as maintaining a stable application performance in case of any threats. The main object of the research are the decentralized applications, build on a Ethereum platform basis using the smart-contracts algorithm. The study helped to improve an existing crypto-token allocating model which goal is acquiring more stable performance. On the basis of improved model a new method of allocating cryptotokens in decentralized Ethereum applications was developed, defined a main stage of apps elaboration, offered an allocating crypto-token algorithm which is able to use associative tables and dictionaries.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Majd Soud, Sigureur Helgason, Gísli Hjálmtýsson, Mohammad Hamdaqa
Electronic voting (e-voting) plays a crucial role in democratic countries. Unfortunately, implementing a trusted e-voting system is always a challenge. Scholars have been trying to propose solutions to improve e-voting systems. However, existing e-voting approaches still need to adopt new technologies to maintain their integrity and modernity. Unlike other technologies that were used in e-voting, blockchain has the potential for perfecting e-voting requirements and fostering trust in e-voting systems. The first part of this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of blockchain-based e-voting implementations. The second part proposes a blockchain-based e-voting system (TrustVote). TrustVote was realised using public and permissioned blockchain. This work results show that the permissioned blockchain-based implementation of TrustVote outperforms the identical version of the same system that uses public blockchain. The results also show that while several challenges and requirements still need to be addressed, using permissioned blockchain for implementing an e-voting system can help to satisfy many of the requirements for e-voting and pave the road for a new generation of e-voting systems that people can trust.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Sumaia Atiwa, Yunus Dawji, Ahmed Refaey, Sebastian Magierowski
Interest in the efficient implementations of hashing algorithms has received even more attention recently due to the growing application-space for blockchain technology. Consequently, a pressing need has arisen to develop high-performance hashing techniques to support these developments. In this paper, an architecture and VLSI implementation of the newest hashing standard, BLAKE2, is presented. The Equihash algorithm serves as a use case for BLAKE2 in Blockchain. An FPGA-based custom computing machine (FCCM) approach is used. This approach is producing an accelerated Equihash hashing-core system which is 5x faster than an ARM Cortex-A9 based system on a ZC706 SoC chip for 0.27 W. Indeed, this is the first BLAKE2 implementation allowing fast execution, and effective substitution of any previous hash families implementations.
Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
Cryptographic Implementations and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In this paper, we describe valid and invalid bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin is one of the most widespread currencies in the network, which can be used to perform purchases and transactions among nodes. Because of its digital feature, it can undergo some problems and attacks such as double spending (DS), Denial of Service(DoS), packet sniffing and so on. One of the most common challenges is double spending. DS implies spending a balance of given cryptocurrency more than once, viably making a difference between the spending record and the sum of available cryptocurrency. It is suggested that it can be prevented by including Timestamp server, which adds precise time data that is never repetitive. In this paper, the given solution was implemented using Java platform. The experiment results show the progress in preventing DS of bitcoin as soon as we connected the TSA server.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques