The security of secret keys for blockchain-based applications is increasingly important, partly because the theft of secret keys will render a significant financial loss. To guarantee the security of secret keys, many multi-party signature protocols have been proposed. However, few of them are designed for EdDSA-based blockchain that is developing in growth. The folklore and the NIST document for standardizing threshold schemes believe that a distributed hash evaluation is required to design multi-party EdDSA protocols, which leads to a relatively large overhead. In this paper, we present two practical multi-party EdDSA protocols for semi-honest and malicious settings. Our protocols eliminate the distributed hashing by securely maintaining a global state, which is feasible for EdDSA-based blockchain. Furthermore, we extend the malicious protocol to resist DoS attacks by identifying corrupted parties in case of execution aborts. We implemented our EdDSA protocols for different parties using Alibaba cloud servers with all instances of type ecs.t5-c1m2.large. Our protocol in the malicious setting takes 1.51-15.3 ms between 2 parties and 5 parties, and are two orders of magnitude faster than the recent threshold EdDSA protocol. These properties (efficient, identifiable abort, high compatibility) make the two protocols ideal for threshold wallets for EdDSA-based cryptocurrency.
Blockchain technology, especially Bitcoin, has revolutionizedhow we think about and manage financial transactions.However, with the increasing demand and usage of blockchaintechnology, the security of cryptocurrency wallets has become acritical concern. Threshold signatures offer a promising solutionto this problem, allowing multiple parties to sign a transactionwithout revealing their private keys. This article presents an Androidmobile Bitcoin wallet application that uses Schnorr-basedthreshold signatures. The application also deploys smartwatchintegration for enhanced security and usability. This integrationprovides an additional layer of security by requiring physicalconfirmation from the user before approving any transaction.Our implementation provides a secure and efficient platform formanaging Bitcoin assets using threshold signatures while alsoproviding an intuitive and easy-to-use interface for interactingwith the application.
Aditya Pathak, Irfan Al‐Anbagi, Howard J. Hamilton
Recent research has focused on applying blockchain technology to solve security-related problems in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, implementing blockchain technology directly on IoT networks is prone to high overheads and energy-expensive operations. Therefore, in this paper, we use edge computing technology to avoid these problems. We also propose a novel Trust-based Access Control Mechanism for Edge-IoT Networks using Blockchain technology (named TABI) to implement end-to-end security in resource-constrained IoT networks. The TABI mechanism utilizes both access control and trust evaluation mechanisms to mitigate the impact of malicious IoT users and devices. Additionally, it incorporates permissioned Hyperledger blockchain technology to provide an added layer of security through authentication. The trust evaluation mechanism is implemented as a trust calculation contract (TCC) on the edge devices using Hyperledger Composer. The access control mechanism employs an Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) mechanism, which is implemented on the Hyperledger blockchain using two smart contracts: the attribute contract (AC) and the access control contract (ACC). We implement a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation using Hyperledger Caliper (a benchmark testing tool) and Docker images. Our evaluation includes five analyses: Trust Evaluation Mechanism, Access Control Mechanism, Security, Blockchain, and IoT Applications. Through this evaluation, we highlight the effectiveness of TABI in terms of throughput, latency, detection of malicious IoT devices, and resource consumption of the IoT devices. Our analyses demonstrate that TABI is particularly useful in IoT applications that require low latency and resource efficiency.
Senay A. Gebreab, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Mohamed Jamal Zemerly
Medical devices play a crucial role in the global healthcare system, but their high cost has led to the increasing adoption of refurbished medical devices as a sustainable alternative for hospitals and patients around the world. The repositioning of refurbished devices into the market, however, is accompanied by a number of challenges, including concerns about quality and safety, as well as the risk of fraudulent activities such as counterfeiting. To address these challenges, we propose an NFT-based solution for managing refurbished medical devices that creates a secure, transparent, and verifiable record of the refurbishment process to ensure the safety and quality of these devices. The proposed solution utilizes dynamic composable NFTs as digital representations of medical devices, with replacement parts and certificate documents embedded in a parent-child NFT hierarchy, and reprocessing steps captured and reflected through the evolution of the dynamic tokens. This serves to authenticate and track the movement of refurbished devices while also providing a trustworthy means of managing individual devices and their ownership. Furthermore, the integration of non-transferable NFTs as certificates of refurbishment acts as an effective mechanism for detecting suspect medical devices and instances of fraudulent labeling, thereby increasing buyer confidence and promoting user safety. We leverage the Interplanetary File System to store and keep track of the metadata of the tokenized components of the system. We present the system architecture and implementation details with tested algorithms. We develop a front-end decentralized application (DApp) to interact with the designed smart contracts and showcase their functionalities. We also conduct security analysis to demonstrate our system is resistant to common vulnerabilities and exploits. The smart contract code is made available on GitHub.
Cloud storage is an essential method for data storage. Verifying the integrity of data in the cloud is critical for the client. Traditional cloud storage approaches rely on third-party auditors (TPAs) to accomplish auditing tasks. However, third-party auditors are often not trusted. To eliminate over-reliance on third-party auditors, this paper designs a blockchain-based auditing scheme that uses blockchain instead of third-party auditors to ensure the reliability of data auditing. Meanwhile, our scheme is based on the audit method of the quad Merkle hash tree, using the root of the quad Merkle hash tree to verify the integrity of data, which significantly improves computing and storage efficiency. Automated verification of auditing activities by deploying smart contracts on the blockchain allows us to have a more up-to-date picture of data integrity. The performance of the scheme is evaluated through security analysis and experiments, which prove that the proposed scheme is secure and effective.
Scholarship management is a crucial aspect of higher education systems, aimed at supporting deserving students and reducing financial barriers. However, traditional scholarship management processes often suffer from challenges such as a lack of transparency, inefficient communication, and difficulty tracking and verifying scholarship applications. Recently, Blockchain technology has emerged as a potential solution to address these issues, offering a decentralized, transparent, and secure framework for scholarship management. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to address the challenges faced in scholarship management. However, existing literature lacks comprehensive solutions in critical areas such as scholarship management, storage facilities, payment systems, monitoring and auditing, and experimental validation. This research introduces an innovative smart scholarship management system leveraging Blockchain technology to overcome these limitations. The research presents an Ethereum-based implementation utilizing Solidity for backend smart contracts and ReactJS for the front end. Experimental evaluation validates the transaction execution gas costs and deployment cost.
Raaj Anand Mishra, Anshuman Kalla, An Braeken, Madhusanka Liyanage
Internet of Things (IoT) has proved its applicability in numerous domains such as healthcare, agriculture, automobile, industrial production, logistics and supply chain management. Looking at the current trend, we expect massive proliferation of such IoT devices all around us. However, one of the issues with the widespread use of IoT is the increasing complexity of the underlying architecture, which lead to difficulty in ensuring security compliance. One of the critical security processes is key refreshment, which needs to be regularly executed in order to guarantee strong security management. However, in most of the cases, keys are not updated and if they are updated, the update-logs are not available for all the entities to verify and build trust. Furthermore, the rules for key refreshment are also not defined in a transparent way. In this paper, we propose secure, decentralized, and automatic key refreshment mechanism for an IoT system. The proposed mechanism enables users to verify the freshness of the security keys (being used) thereby relying on the data from IoT devices and establishing trust in an IoT system. The proposed mechanism is driven by blockchain technology and smart contract. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed solution we have implemented it using both Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric blockchains.
Leonardo da Costa, Billy Pinheiro, Weverton Cordeiro, Roberto Araújo · 5 authors
Storing and sharing health records through electronic systems pose security risks. To address them, several countries’ regulations have established that healthcare information systems must fulfill security properties (confidentiality, access control, integrity, revocation and anonymity) and complementary ones (emergency access and interoperability). Upon tackling these issues, several proposals present security limitations and/or address specific properties only. We propose Sec-Health, a blockchain-based protocol that secures health records, addressing all of the main security and complementary properties defined in current regulations. We show that Sec-Health is a suitable solution by analyzing it under several attack scenarios and describing how it overcomes the problems of existing solutions. Furthermore, we evaluate a Sec-Health Proof of Concept, showing that it can reduce from 26% up to 90% the time to access health records, and reduce up to 50% client-side memory overhead, compared to related work.