This project aims to create a blockchain-based model that addresses key challenges in digital voting. The goal is to develop a secure and transparent system that eliminates common issues such as delays in result announcements, voter identity verification concerns, and security risks [1]. Voting is the backbone of any democracy, and ensuring its integrity is crucial. Traditional digital voting systems often face problems like fraud, manipulation, and lack of transparency. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and tamper-proof nature, offers a promising solution. It functions as a distributed ledger that records transactions securely in a peer-to-peer network, making it nearly impossible to alter past data [2]. This technology brings several benefits to voting, including decentralization, security, transparency, immutability, and voter anonymity [3]. A major highlight of this project is the integration of blockchain with smart contracts, which adds an extra layer of security and automation to the voting process [4]. The system is designed to work on the Ethereum blockchain, using smart contracts written in Solidity and accessed through blockchain wallets [5]. By eliminating the need for a central authority to oversee elections, this approach ensures a fair and transparent voting process where every vote is securely recorded and cannot be tampered with [6]. In essence, this project reimagines digital voting by leveraging blockchain’s strengths, making elections more secure, efficient, and trustworthy.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The invention of blockchain as the niche technology for cryptocurrencies has an opportunity to be used in other application domains as well. This is promoted due to privacy and security offered by blockchains. The blockchain uses a consensus mechanism for accepting any new information. Conventional consensus mechanisms used in the blockchain need high computational power that restricts its usage in resource constrained systems. This paper, focuses on the survey of different consensus methods available for the blockchain. An IoT system consists of a number of interconnected sensors/actuators, such systems have limited resources including compute, storage and energy. This survey aims to study on the consensus methods which are relevant for the IoT networks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is a method in which a confirmation of a transaction is kept by means of a crypto-currency. The record is maintained transversely, linking several computers in a peer to peer network. Contracts, transactions, and the records of them define the economic system of a country. They set boundaries and provide security to the assets. Considering the features of blockchain such as immutability and maintaining the footage of transaction details, this paper highlights the usage of blockchain technology with farmer's portal that keep the footage of selling and buying information of crops. The proposed solution uses the python as a programming language in integration with the blockchain system that will benefit the farmers or vendors and individuals by preserving the contract of trade. An interface for the farmers is designed using a python programming language in addition with blockchain technology, which is used to store the information related to seller, buyer, selling and buying an item and total value transacted.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aditya Dhiran, D. Dinesh Kumar, Abhishek, Anshul Arora
This paper has considered the problem of Video Fraudulence, i.e., attackers can tamper with the original video and can create a fake video of their own. This problem is of great practical importance given the massive volume of online videos available through the World Wide Web, Internet news feeds, electronic mail, corporate databases, and digital libraries. To the best of our knowledge, no such video fraud detection algorithm has been proposed in the literature that can detect, using Blockchain, whether the video has been tampered with. This paper is a comparative study and provides a prototype of how it applies Blockchain to detect video fraudulence. The focus is on the usability of Blockchain and how to implement it to get the desired result. Three features of Blockchain that are Decentralization, Data transparency, and Security and privacy are being used to provide a reliable solution. Some cryptographic algorithms are used to find unique feature in all of the videos that can act as the hash value of the video because, in Blockchains, every node stores the data in the form of the hash value. If the video is tampered with, then the hash value changes and hence any fraud in the video can be detected.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Arjun Suresh, Akshay R. Nair, Aravind Lal, Mohana Kumaran S. · 5 authors
Digital growth with latest technologies have rendered more comfort to end-users in terms of online transactions. But such online transactions have paved for a steep increase in the crime rate with more fraudulent activities. Major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum play a major role in handling such illegal behavior of hackers. Blockchain is the basic concept of cryptocurrencies. It is realized as an immutable ledger which implements transactions in a decentralized manner. As the network is decentralized; achieving consensus between each node can be quite a difficult task. Fortunately, this problem can be solved with the help of consensus algorithms. There are numerous ways in which consensus can be achieved. However, in this paper, on proof-based consensus methods are primarily focused on. The majorities of the proof-based consensus algorithms are susceptible to a 51% attack and also lead to high transaction times. These problems can be overcome using a modified approach on an already existing hybrid proof-based algorithm known as “2-hop blockchain”.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Among the accessory applications of the blockchain, the idea of using it as an immutable register for tracking and certifying documents is recently gaining interest in research and industry. The problems of traceability, non-counterfeiting and unique usage of digital coupons fall within this area; many couponing platforms are hence exploring the possibility of addressing the above limitations with blockchain technologies. In view of the foregoing, in this work we analyse and compare several blockchain-based couponing systems. To do so, we first propose a general schema of digital coupon and define the desirable properties of a couponing system. Then, we select a sample of these systems and we examine them, describing their design choices and summarizing their relevant properties. Finally, we inspect their code and study how the notion of couponing system is interpreted in their smart contracts. We also highlight their distinctive features and relevant implementation solutions. We conclude by discussing what emerged from our analysis and proposing some possible future investigations.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A management of surveillance of video process which is based on block chain technology has been proposed. The system which has been intended contains a network of block chain with internal nodes which are trusted. The distributed ledger of blockchain includes the metadata of the surveillance footage, thereby stopping the possibility of the data forgery. The architecture of proposed system saves and encrypts the footage, generates a license inside the block chain and exports the footage. Since the private database manages the decryption key for the footage in the block chain, it is not exposed by the internal nodes illegally. Also, the internal administrator can handle and export surveillance footage safely by decrypting the frames stored in the block chain and reconstructing the footage which can be later downloaded.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the development of technology, the network structure has changed a lot. Many people regard the Internet of Things as the next-generation network structure, which means all the embedded devices can communicate with each other directly. However, some problems remain in IoT before it can be applied in a large scale. Blockchain, which has become a hot research topic in recent years, may be one of the solutions. However, currently, the transaction speed of blockchain is still a disadvantage compared to traditional transaction methods. This paper focuses on to implement a high-performance blockchain platform. After investigation of the current blockchain consensus algorithm and blockchain architecture, we propose: (1) an improved blockchain consensus algorithm, which is implemented based on the mortgage model instead of probability model; (2) a cross-chain protocol with transverse expansion capacity, which would support the message transmission among chains; (3) a high-performance cross-chain blockchain network structure, which could handle more than 1000 transactions per second per chain by verification. Experiments have been carried out, and shown that the cross-chain blockchain network structure we provided is feasible to meet the requirement of large-scale distributed IoT applications.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Moses Arhinful Acquah, Na Chen, Jeng‐Shyang Pan, Hong-Mei Yang · 5 authors
Biometrics, with its uniqueness to every individual, has been adapted as a security authentication feature by many institutions. These biometric data are processed into templates that are saved on databases, and a central authority centralizes and controls these databases. This form of storing biometric data, or in our case fingerprint template, is asymmetric and prone to three main security attacks, such as fake template input, template modification or deletion, and channel interception by a malicious attacker. In this paper, we secure an encrypted fingerprint template by a symmetric peer-to-peer network and symmetric encryption. The fingerprint is encrypted by the symmetric key algorithm: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm and then is uploaded to a symmetrically distributed storage system, the InterPlanetary File system (IPFS). The hash of the templated is stored in a decentralized blockchain. The slow transaction speed of the blockchain has limited its use in real-life applications, such as large file storage, hence, the merge with IPFS to store just the hashes of large files. The encrypted template is uploaded to the IPFS, and its returned digest is stored on the Ethereum network. The implementation of IPFS prevents storing the raw state of the fingerprint template on the Ethereum network in order to reduce cost and also prevent identity theft. This procedure is an improvement of previous systems. By adopting the method of template hashing, the proposed system is cost-effective and efficient. The experimental results depict that the proposed system secures the fingerprint template by encryption, hashing, and decentralization.
Open access
Biometric Identification and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
E-voting reduced the cost of election and provided convenience to some extent as compared to the traditional approach of pen and paper but it was considered to be unreliable as anyone having access to the machine physically can obstruct the machine and alter the votes. Also in order to control the e
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
G Pazhev, Gr. Spasov, Mitko Shopov, Galidiya Petrova
Abstract The paper presents an implementation of a smart home architecture with two gateways based on collaboration of blockchain technology and Internet of Things (IoT) Message oriented middleware (MOM) architecture for management of internal home appliances. A basic overview of IoT MOM, MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transfer) protocol and blockchain architectures is made and the key characteristics and consensus algorithms are presented. Some challenges and the Ethereum smart contracts concept of the blockchain technology are discussed.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Public blockchains can be abused to covertly store and disseminate potentially harmful digital content which poses a serious regulatory issue. In this work, we show the severity of the problem by demonstrating that blockchains can be exploited to surreptitiously distribute arbitrary content. More specifically, all major blockchain systems use randomized cryptographic primitives, such as digital signatures and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs; we illustrate how the uncontrolled randomness in such primitives can be maliciously manipulated to enable covert communication and hidden persistent storage. To clarify the potential risk, we design, implement and evaluate our technique against the widely-used ECDSA signature scheme, the CryptoNote's ring signature scheme, and Monero's ring confidential transactions. Importantly, the significance of the demonstrated attacks stems from their undetectability, their adverse effect on the future of decentralized blockchains, and their serious repercussions on users' privacy and crypto funds. Finally, we present a generic framework to immunize blockchains against these attacks.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Miao Du, Kun Wang, Yinqiu Liu, Kai Qian · 7 authors
Deploying blockchain in IoT is an effective way to address traditional security issues. However, existing approaches have two major limitations: since the blockchain itself is subject to attacks, including selfish mining, double spending, and distributed denial of service attacks, IoT smart devices are also vulnerable once hackers successfully invade blockchain systems; due to the heterogeneity and resource limitations of IoT devices, the deployment of the existing blockchain systems in the IoT scenario cannot reflect strong adaptability and meet IoT service requirements. In this article, we introduce Spacechain, a secure and high-performance blockchain system with three-dimensional ledger architecture, to enable blockchain open in IoT. Specifically, we first design a three-dimensional architecture with novel data structures to deal with the heterogeneity and scalability of IoT networks. Then, we propose the Three-Dimensional Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (3D-GHOST) consensus mechanism for Spacechain to improve security and network performance. Additionally, we conduct detailed security analysis and extensive experimental verification to demonstrate the performance of Spacechain.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abhishek Kaudare, Milan Kumar Hazra, Anurag Shelar, Manoj K. Sabnis
Elections and voting are the basic mechanisms of a democratic system. There have been various attempts to make modern elections more flexible by using digital technologies. Basic characteristics of free and fair elections are intractability, immutable, transparency and the privacy of the involved actors. This corresponds to a few of the many features of blockchain-like decentralized ownership, the immutability of chain, anonymity and distributed ledger. This work-in-progress paper attempts to do a comparative analysis of various blockchain technologies under development and propose a `Blockchain based Electronic Voting System' solution by weighing these technologies based on the need for the proposed solution. The main aim of this paper is to present a robust blockchain-based election mechanism that not only will be reliable but also flexible according to present needs.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Tharaka Hewa, An Bracken, Mika Ylianttila, Madhusanka Liyanage
Internet of Things (IoT) is a key topic of interest in modern communication context with the evolution of 5G and beyond ecosystems. 5G will interconnects billions of IoT devices wirelessly. The wireless communication exposes the devices to massive security risks in different dimensions. The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is one of the promising solutions to eliminate security risks. It ensures the authentication and communication integrity by using public key certificates. However, the overhead of certificate storage is a significant problem for the resource constrained IoT devices. We propose an application of Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) certificates, which are lightweight in size for the resource restricted IoT devices. Furthermore, we incorporate the blockchain based smart contracts to handle the certificate related operations. We utilize the smart contracts in the certificate issuance and developed a smart contract based threat scoring mechanism to automatically revoke the certificates. The lightweight nature of ECQV certificates enables the distributed ledger to store, update, and revoke the certificates. We evaluated the proposed solution in Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
On top of distributed computing, Bitcoin was implemented as cryptocurrency. Bitcoin originally came with blockchain technology to protect coins from misuse. Blockchain provided a distributed ledger of cryptocurrency transactions in an immutable form to protect data from malicious attacks. Thus blockchain complemented the security aspect of Bitcoin. In the later stages, blockchain evolved as a distributed ledger technology that is used in different domains like healthcare. There are different issues associated with different domains. For instance, in the insurance domain, there are issues related to false claims and the claims that are manipulated by competent authority illegally. This problem addressed in this paper by implementing an insurance application with blockchain technology. The consensus is used to ensure that the claim process of the insurance company will be carried out with integrity, accountability, and non-repudiation. Especially, every transaction is cryptographically signed and stored as a collection of blocks in the blockchain. This approach safeguards claim transactions and prevent any fraudulent attempts. A prototype application is built using the IBM blockchain platform and its underlying components. Experimental results showed that the proposed implementation prevents fraud claims in the insurance industry.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We propose a blockchain-based IoT devices anonymous access system using zero-knowledge proof in cloud-based radio over optical fiber networks (C-RoFN) to prevent device sensitive information from being exposed to massive IoT devices.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Traditional paper certificates and electronic certificates have difficulties in preservation and management, not to mention other problems concerning inconvenient verification, poor reliability, anti-counterfeiting and anti-tampering. This paper proposes a scheme designed to build a decentralized certificate system that is based on blockchain technology and smart contract, in which a set of blockchain certificate system aiming at providing blockchain certificate services for college students' innovation and entrepreneurship competition is developed. In this system, certain functions of the certificate about management, issuing, verification and revocation are realized via smart contract. Signer information, certificate template and certificate information are stored in a smart contract that adopts structured data, thereby realizing more convenient callings in querying and validating certificate.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The topic of performing safe and secure elections is a long-standing debate. Regardless, of the various attempts for electronic or Internet-based voting, the majority of countries still use paper ballots. Nevertheless, with major advancements occurring over the last years in both cryptography and distributed ledgers we believe that there is space now for re-investigating this area. In this paper, we propose ethVote an Internet voting system that makes use of the Ethereum blockchain, state of the art cryptographic mechanisms and a P2P-based front-end to ensure a secure voting process. In addition, we provide an open-source proof of concept implementation that features the majority of the needed components for securely using ethVote. Our proposal is tested both in terms of unit testing, requirement verification, and with regard to the feasibility to perform such an operation in a public distributed ledger.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Tianlong Fei, Yuan Chang, Jiaqi Wang, Ning Lu · 5 authors
As Bitcoin users grow, the protection of the Bitcoin privacy protection becomes an important issue. Bitcoin mixing technology can cut off the connection between buyers and sellers. Now, a more effective method is used to carry out a coin mixing operation. The existing flat structure and two-layer structure have their own deficiencies. Therefore, anonymous Bitcoin mixing scheme is proposed. In order to increase the anonymity of coin mixing, group blind signature technology is used to expand the anonymous set of users. Moreover, a Supervisor for supervising Mixes is introduced to ensure the security of the system and the threshold signature is also used to ensure the security of the Mix's Bitcoin to prevent the Supervisor from stealing Bitcoin. Finally, the security analysis and experiment are given to conclude that our scheme is secure and efficient.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies enable decentralization in transaction systems. The transaction details of traditional cryptocurrencies, e.g. Bitcoin, are public to everyone, which can be a problem in confidential scenarios. To deal with the confidential problem, some current cryptocurrencies adopt confidential transactions to hide the details in proofs. Among all confidential transaction implementations, Bulletproof is the most efficient approach without a trusted setup. In this paper, we analyze Bulletproof's design and show that the computation cost can be further reduced. Based on our analysis, we propose Shellproof, which is only half of the computation cost of Bulletproof. Experimental results show Shellproof can preserve the advantages of Bulletproof and is much more efficient than Bulletproof.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Nasir D. Khan, Chrysostomos Chrysostomou, Babar Nazir
Electronic First Information Report (e-FIR) is a basic document filed to the police stations by a victim or someone on his/her behalf when a cognizable offense such as murder, kidnapping, rape, theft, etc. is committed. In the e-FIR database, the offense's record can be compromised due to its centralized nature, and further the intentional registration of false e-FIR can occur. Thus, data integrity and transparency are key concerns in e-FIR database. In this paper, e-FIR data integrity and false registration appended with police stations in a centralized database are addressed via a consensus-based distributed blockchain solution, as an integral part of a smart city environment. Specifically, a smart contract based intelligent framework has been utilized to explore the potential of Ethereum blockchain in providing integrity to e-FIR data stored in a police station's database. Local database is interfaced with Ethereum blockchain using Web3 Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol. Multiple simulations have been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. Our results show a trade-off between different hashing algorithm security level for the offenses data and number of transactions stored in a single block on blockchain ledger.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques