Blockchain is opening up new avenues for the development of new sorts of digital services. In this article, we'll employ the transparent Blockchain method to propose a system for collecting data from many sources and databases for use in local and national elections. The Blockchain-based system will be safe, trustworthy, and private. It will assist to know the overall count of the candidates who participated and it functions in the same way as people's faith in their governments does. Blockchain technology is the one that handles the actual vote. We use the secure hash algorithm for resolving this problem and tried to bring a solution through the usage of this booming technology. A centralized database in a blockchain system keeps track of the secure electronic interactions of users in a peer-to-peer network.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Electronic voting has partially solved the problems of poor anonymity and low efficiency associated with traditional voting. However, the difficulties it introduces into the supervision of the vote counting, as well as its need for a concurrent guaranteed trusted third party, should not be overlooked. With the advent of blockchain technology in recent years, its features such as decentralization, anonymity, and non-tampering have made it a good candidate in solving the problems that electronic voting faces. In this study, we propose a multi-candidate voting model based on the blockchain technology. With the introduction of an asymmetric encryption and an anonymity-preserving voting algorithm, votes can be counted without relying on a third party, and the voting results can be displayed in real time in a manner that satisfies various levels of voting security and privacy requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed model solves the aforementioned problems of electronic voting without significant negative impact from an increasing number of voters or candidates.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The border gateway protocol (BGP) has become the indispensible infrastructure of the Internet as a typical inter-domain routing protocol. However, it is vulnerable to misconfigurations and malicious attacks since BGP does not provide enough authentication mechanism to the route advertisement. As a result, it has brought about many security incidents with huge economic losses. Exiting solutions to the routing security problem such as S-BGP, So-BGP, Ps-BGP, and RPKI, are based on the Public Key Infrastructure and face a high security risk from the centralized structure. In this paper, we propose the decentralized blockchain-based route registration framework-decentralized route registration system based on blockchain (DRRS-BC). In DRRS-BC, we produce a global transaction ledge by the information of address prefixes and autonomous system numbers between multiple organizations and ASs, which is maintained by all blockchain nodes and further used for authentication. By applying blockchain, DRRS-BC perfectly solves the problems of identity authentication, behavior authentication as well as the promotion and deployment problem rather than depending on the authentication center. Moreover, it resists to prefix and subprefix hijacking attacks and meets the performance and security requirements of route registration.
We discuss the problem of facilitating tax auditing assuming "programmable money", i.e., digital monetary instruments that are managed by an underlying distributed ledger. We explore how a taxation authority can verify the declared returns of its citizens and create a counter-incentive to tax evasion by two distinct mechanisms. First, we describe a design which enables auditing it as a built-in feature with minimal changes on the underlying ledger's consensus protocol. Second, we offer an application-layer extension, which requires no modification in the underlying ledger's design. Both solutions provide a high level of privacy, ensuring that, apart from specific limited data given to the taxation authority, no additional information - beyond the information already published on the underlying ledger - is leaked.
Blockchain public ledger is a trusted medium that provides incorruptible data storage and traceable transactions. However, due to its public verifiability, it is hard to compromise two functionalities at once, a covert channel and a verifiable communication medium. The existing methods are either vulnerable to statistical analysis or lack trustable delivery notifications due to off-chain message delivery. This paper fills the gap by proposing a Multi-addresses Random Set Encoding (MaRSE) to increase message covertness by retaining the natural transactions pattern and resisting statistical attacks. The method uses on-chain message delivery to preserve blockchain-based verification that provides a trustable communication medium for the communicating parties. As a result, our proposed method is robust to a brute force attack due to its unpredictable transaction sequence and high number possibility of addresses combinations. The proposed system has been implemented on Ethereum rinkeby networks with the stegano-transactions being recorded within block numbers 4932833 to 4932893.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bello Musa Yakubu, Muhammad Mahmoud Ahmad, Abdullahi Binta Suleiman, Ahamed Sani Kazaure · 6 authors
Internet broadband usage is increasing dramatically as the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart homes that rely on Internet connectivity for effective communication between them grows. As a result, many network and Internet communication issues arise, including network traffic congestion, insecurity, high connection rates, and excess bandwidth waste. This work aims to create a secure and decentralized smart marketplace (SMP) for a fair, transparent, robust, and less expensive way of trading excess or idle traffic from a smart home by directly paying the owner of the bandwidth. The internet bandwidths may initially come from a direct Tel-com product or from other users (smart homeowners) who decide to sell their excess Internet bandwidth. The research was carried out by integrating a given smart marketplace scenario with blockchain technology using proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus mechanism. The simulation results show that the model is more reliable and appears to be an efficient solution to dealing with excess bandwidth waste and offering safe excess bandwidth trading within a smart city. Besides, the excess bandwidth wastage is controlled at least by 75% by making it available in the SMP for buyers.
This paper proposes a blockchain system, known as GarliChain, to solve the problems of anonymity and privacy of consumers during energy trading in the smart grids. It is inspired by both garlic routing and consortium blockchain. In the GarliChain, identity-based encryption is used to encrypt the messages of consumers twice before transmitting them to other nodes. A stochastic path selection model is presented in this work to route messages from the source node to the destination node. Furthermore, a trust method is proposed to enhance the credibility of nodes in the network. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed system. From the results, the proposed system remains stable as the number of path requests increases. Also, the proposed trust method is 50.56% efficient in detecting dishonest behavior of nodes in the network as compared to 49.20% of an existing fuzzy trust model. Under different sizes of the blocks, the computational cost of the forwarding nodes is minimum. The security analysis shows that the system is safe from both passive and active attacks. Malicious nodes are detected using the path selection model. Moreover, a comparative study of the proposed system with existing systems in the literature is provided.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yuxi Cai, Nafis Irtija, Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou, Andreas Veneris
Summary Blockchain systems rely on oracles to bridge external information to the decentralized applications residing in the systems. Astraea protocols are decentralized oracle designs utilizing majority‐voting mechanism to determine the oracle outcomes and/or rewards to voters. However, the voters are indifferent between voting through a single or multiple identities, as the potential rewards by the decentralized oracles grow linearly with the voters stakes. Additionally, the majority‐voting mechanism may facilitate herd behaviors among the voters, as the voters are rewarded only if they are in agreement with the majority outcomes. In this paper, a novel oracle protocol is introduced by proposing a peer prediction‐based scoring scheme along with non‐linear staking rules, aiming at extracting subjective data truthfully. Specifically, an incentive compatible scoring scheme is designed so that voters uniquely maximize their expected score by honest reporting. The voters are rewarded when their report achieves a relatively high score compared to the rest of the voters, as opposed to the existing schemes, where a reward is only given when they agree to the majority. Furthermore, a non‐linear stake scaling rule is proposed to discourage Sybil attacks. Detailed simulation results are presented to show the operation of the proposed oracle protocol and its improvement compared to indicative mechanisms proposed in the existing literature.
Sarah Al-Maaitah, Mohammad Qatawneh, Abdullah Quzmar
Democracy in any country must have a transparent voting system that meets the people's needs to give the power to the right person. Furthermore, the existing traditional voting systems suffer from major drawbacks and missing the lack of security and transparency. This survey paper discusses the possible opportunity for applying BC technology in e-voting systems to improve the process of voting by tackling the issues of trustless, privacy, and security. This paper aims to evaluate different applications of blockchain as a service to implement distributed electronic voting systems. Some of them have been only a draft paper; others are implemented in the real world. A blockchain-based e-voting application improves security, privacy, and decreases the cost, even more, which can be achieved.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Anti-piracy is fundamentally a procedure that relies on collecting data from the open anonymous population, so how to incentivize credible reporting is a question at the center of the problem. Industrial alliances and companies are running anti-piracy incentive campaigns, but their effectiveness is publicly questioned due to the lack of transparency. We believe that full transparency of a campaign is necessary to truly incentivize people. It means that every role, e.g., content owner, licensee of the content, or every person in the open population, can understand the mechanism and be assured about its execution without trusting any single role. We see this as a distributed system problem. In this paper, we present Argus, a fully transparent incentive system for anti-piracy campaigns. The groundwork of Argus is to formulate the objectives for fully transparent incentive mechanisms, which securely and comprehensively consolidate the different interests of all roles. These objectives form the core of the Argus design, highlighted by our innovations about a Sybil-proof incentive function, a commit-and-reveal scheme, and an oblivious transfer scheme. In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency. Moreover, we effectively optimize several cryptographic operations so that the cost for a piracy reporting is reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions. With the security and practicality of Argus, we hope real-world anti-piracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully transparent incentive mechanism.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Building an electronic voting system that meets legislators' legal criteria has been a long-standing challenge. Distributed ledger technologies are a revolutionary innovation in the field of information technology. Blockchain technologies can be used in an unlimited number of ways to profit from sharing economies. All current electronic voting methods have a fundamental design problem. They're designed to be tightly controlled, which means there seems to be one source in charge of the code base, database, and system outputs, as well as the monitoring tools to ensure the results are accurate. Due to the lack of an independently verified output, these centralized systems struggle to gain the trustworthiness necessary by voters, either restricting voter participation or casting doubt on the election's declared results. The study seeks to use the cryptographic ledger as a safe transaction database to establish an immutable, verifiable, and secure online voting system. Voters will be able to independently audit the inclusion of their vote, as well in the election's overall outcome, using this public ledger, while knowing that the results cannot be altered due to the immutability of the Blockchain.
In the digital era where hacking and bypassing a system is easy, tampering of data is always possible leading to bad situations. Blockchain is used to store data which is near impossible to change or tamper with as it is very secure in nature. Voting as a process in any nation is an essential event and if votes get miscalculated by any external source it will be harmful. To avoid such kinds of situations and making it more comfortable blockchain technology comes in acknowledgment. This paper proposes a decentralized national e-voting system based on blockchain technology. It includes an admin panel to schedule the voting, manage candidates and declare the results. The web application will provide the users with an interface to enter their Aadhar card ID (text input) and a photo of themselves at the time of voting. The eligibility of the voter will be checked at the time they enter their Aadhar card ID. Eligible voter's phone numbers will be verified via One Time Password (OTP). After voter verification, individual voters will be considered eligible for voting. During voting, voters will be monitored through a webcam/front camera. The votes will be stored in a blockchain and any tampering would be detected easily. The address and the corresponding constituency will be checked in the backend. Voting results will be declared on a specified date and will be handled by the admin. The results will be displayed graphically with various options to choose from and will also include past results and statistics.
Face recognition and analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
R. Shashidhara, Nisha Ahuja, M. Lajuvanthi, S. Akhila · 6 authors
Abstract Software‐defined networking (SDN) is a programmable architecture for networking domain in which the security is provided by devising the network policies with the help of the network administrator. This is very cumbersome for the administrator to handle different attacks at various planes in SDN architecture. Blockchain can be used to prevent various attacks in SDN by providing a decentralization authentication environment. In this article, a secure Blockchain‐based privacy‐preserving protocol is proposed to thwart various security vulnerabilities in the SDN architecture. The proposed approach uses Modified‐Delegated Proof of Stake as the consensus protocol to ensure safety and reliability in the network. Besides, a security protocol is designed using cryptographic primitives and analyzed using a detailed security analysis. Initially, the consensus protocols are implemented using solidity smart contracts and deployed to the public Blockchain using Ethereum. Consequently, the proposed approach is simulated on OMNet++ using INET framework. The experimental results show that the proposed SDN‐Chain is secure, efficient, less incentive to centralize, and practically implementable in resource‐limited wireless and mobile environments.
Abstract With the advancement of technology and economy, the scale of the smart home industry has exploded. While improving people’s lives, smart home systems are facing threats to privacy leaks, malicious attacks, and structural security. Effective security mechanisms are very important for protecting valuable data in smart home systems. Access control helps information systems prevent malicious access, thereby reducing the risk of privacy leakage. Blockchain can provide security support for the Internet of Things system due to its advantages of decentralization and immutability. Therefore, in this paper, a smart home access control scheme based on blockchain is proposed. The scheme uses Hyperledger Fabric and implements access control strategies through smart contracts. By designing a hybrid access control model based on dynamic attribute-based access control and static access control matrix, the remote access control initiated by the user through the Internet and the access control between local devices are well guaranteed at the same time. Through safety analysis and performance evaluation, the feasibility of the proposed scheme is demonstrated.
Due to the large population movement, many countries and institutions need to modernize their voting systems to support a moving society that is becoming more oriented towards Internet technologies. Electronic voting is a service that is not only used by governments but can be used by numerous institutions to benefit in time, cost, and distance access. The use of new technologies should enable the promotion of confidence and credibility of the voting system by allowing auditing of control mechanisms that deal with the privacy of vote, ballot security, and integrity. One of the recent technologies that have attracted a lot of interest in many different areas is Blockchain technology, which represents a collection of linked (chained) data blocks through cryptographic algorithms and stored in a public distributed database. In other words, Blockchain is a distributed data ledger governed by well-known and approved cryptographic principles that are managed by a group of computers that are not owned by a single person or authority. This paper analyses the current trends of usage of Blockchain technologies in the electronic voting system, highlights the challenges and issues raised so far in the community regarding the security and privacy of the vote and the voter, but also other legal aspects.
Modern mobile applications often produce decentralized data, i.e., a huge amount of privacy-sensitive data distributed over a large number of mobile devices. Techniques for learning models from decentralized data must properly handle two natures of such data, namely privacy and massive engagement. Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for such a learning task since the technique learns models from data without exposing privacy. However, traditional FL methods assume that the participating mobile devices are honest volunteers. This assumption makes traditional FL methods unsuitable for applications where two kinds of participants are engaged: 1) self-interested participants who, without economical stimulus, are reluctant to contribute their computing resources unconditionally, and 2) malicious participants who send corrupt updates to disrupt the learning process. This paper proposes Refiner, a reliable federated learning system for tackling the challenges introduced by massive engagements of self-interested and malicious participants. Refiner is built upon Ethereum, a public blockchain platform. To engage self-interested participants, we introduce an incentive mechanism which rewards each participant in terms of the amount of its training data and the performance of its local updates. To handle malicious participants, we propose an audit scheme which employs a committee of randomly chosen validators for punishing them with no reward and preclude corrupt updates from the global model. The proposed incentive and audit scheme is implemented with cryptocurrency and smart contract, two primitives offered by Ethereum. This paper demonstrates the main features of Refiner by training a digit classification model on the MNIST dataset.
Tim Weingärtner, Danielle Alves Batista, Sandro Köchli, Gilles Voutat
Corruption in public procurement is a worldwide appearance that causes immense financial and reputational damages. Especially in developing countries, corruption is a widespread issue due to secrecy and lack of transparency. An important instrument for transparency and accountability assurance is the record which is managed and controlled by recordkeeping systems. Blockchain technology and more precisely blockchain-based smart contracts are emerging technological tools that can be used as recordkeeping systems and a tool to mitigate some of the fraud involving public procurement records. Immutability, transparency, distribution and automation are some of the features of smart contracts already implemented in several applications to avoid malicious human interference. In this paper, we discuss some of the frauds in public procurement, and we propose smart contracts to automatize different stages of the public procurement procedure attempting to fix their biggest current weaknesses. The processes we have focused on include the bidding process, supplier habilitation and delivery verification. In the three subprocesses, common irregularities include human fallibility, improper information disclosure and hidden agreements which concern not only governments but also civil society. To show the feasibility and usability of our proposal, we have implemented a prototype that demonstrates the process using sample data.
Digital voting systems offer significant benefits in terms of accessibility and efficiency for electoral processes. However, ensuring trust in these systems remains a critical challenge due to concerns around vote privacy, integrity, and verifiability. Cryptographic protocols have become essential tools to address these challenges by providing mathematically grounded guarantees of security and transparency. This article examines prominent cryptographic approaches—such as homomorphic encryption, mix-nets, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain technology—applied in digital voting. Their contributions toward enhancing voter privacy, election verifiability, and resistance to coercion are analyzed. The paper concludes with discussion on practical deployment challenges and future research directions.
Pol Alemany, Ricard Vilalta, Raül Muñoz, Ramon Casellas · 5 authors
Hierarchical Software Define Networking (SDN) architectures is used to manage the co-existence of multiple domains by having an element on top. A collaborative relation-ship between domains, might solve this issue. Blockchain may become the key element for this change to happen. This paper presents a Blockchain-based architecture to provide SDN actions to configure connectivity services in transport domains. The results presented show that the use of Blockchain is a promising candidate for inter-domain SDN control.
With the development of new generation information technology, the feasibility of smart city has been significantly improved, and a large number of smart city technologies have been proposed. In this context, a more feasible device access technology is of great significance to ensure the normal operation of smart city network services. Therefore, this paper proposes a secure blockchain device access scheme based on elliptic curve digital signature algorithm and zero knowledge proof algorithm.
Hansrenee Willysandro, Johan Setiawan, Agus Sulaiman
Data is an important thing as a base of an analytic or a hypothesis for concluding participant vote data in the Indonesian General Election. The data needs to be processed and secured, so the integrity of the data is in good condition. It also needs to protect the participant voting rights, so the information is correctly displayed. The research problems include creating a system that protects the integrity of election data and creating a system that protects election rights for each voter. Based on the problems, this research discusses a blockchain-based electronic voting information system that would secure the integrity of data and also protecting the participant voting rights in a General Election. The system uses Ethereum as a blockchain with Solidity as a programming language to build a smart contract and is built in Microsoft Windows platform. In this research, consortium blockchain and biometric fingerprint authentication are used as a problem-solving method, and waterfall steps is used as a system development method. The result of this research is a proposed design of the e-voting system. The conclusion based on this research is a blockchain-based e-voting system that secures the integrity of the data in a selection process and ensures protection to each vote right. Index Terms”Authentication; Blockchain; Data; Integrity; E-Voting; System
Charmee Mehta, Ansh Mehta, Sayyam Gada, Neeta Kadukar
Online voting is one of the new, upcoming alternatives to the traditional systems like Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and age-old ballot paper. Centralized online voting systems are vulnerable to a plethora of problems. Blockchain, with its characteristics, solves many of the problems faced in online voting and traditional systems. Blockchain is immutable i.e. after a vote is cast, it cannot be undone, and it is decentralized and distributed and therefore there is no central authority over the voting system. These characteristics of Blockchain ensure transparency in the election. The paper involves the concept of Blockchain technology and its application in the field of Electronic Voting. The paper proposes a system that implements online voting with an underlying Blockchain system. The proposed system can be implemented to provide services to medium-scale and large-scale corporations. The system has been tested and deployed on the Rinkeby test network, using Ethereum as a framework to develop smart contracts using Solidity. This system can conduct multiple elections simultaneously. This paper also contains a detailed analysis of the operating expenditure in the form of graphs which were tested in several elections. This system has been tested for scalability, efficiency, and usability according to the requirements.