Distributed ledger technologies have become popular through the advent of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, bringing new applicabilities and new challenges. Even though privacy and anonymity are desirable attributes of their users, there is ample evidence that, in some cases, such attributes may be dispensable and digital wallet ownership could be known. In this paper, we introduce a wallet ownership resolution mechanism based on reliable self-declaration of wallet address holders, called Address Name System (ANS). The address-entity mapping public service proposed here relies on special certificates voluntarily populated and verifiable in an independent way. A prototype of this service was implemented as a proof of concept of the proposal and a functional validation of its operations was carried out.
Matteo Varvello, Iñigo Querejeta Azurmendi, Antonio Nappa, Panagiotis N. Papadopoulos · 6 authors
Distributed Virtual Private Networks (dVPNs) are new solutions aiming to solve the trust-privacy concern of a VPN's central authority by leveraging a distributed architecture. In this paper, we discuss the requirements of a successful dVPN system and we present VPN-Zero: a dVPN system with strong privacy guarantees that provides traffic accounting and has minimal performance impact on its users. VPN-Zero guarantees that a dVPN node only carries traffic it has “allowlisted”, without revealing its allowlist or knowing the traffic it tunnels. This is achieved via three main innovations: (a) an attestation mechanism which leverages TLS to certify a user visit to a specific domain, (b) a zero-knowledge proof to certify that some incoming traffic is authorized (e.g., falls in a node's allowlist, without disclosing the target domain), and (c) a dynamic chain of VPN tunnels to both increase privacy and guarantee service continuation while traffic certification is in place. The paper demonstrates VPN-Zero functioning when integrated with two production systems: BitTorrent's Distributed Hash Table and ProtonVPN. Early evaluation results show that the median setup time of VPN-Zero is about 10 seconds.
Piotr Pośpiech, Aleksander Mariański, Michał Kędziora
The paper presents decentralized voting scheme for verified users while maintaining their anonymity. A blockchain network was applied, which is a decentralized and distributed database based on the Peer-to-Peer architecture. During the implementation, the Ethereum network was used. Thanks to this, it is possible to code the terms of the contract required to perform the transaction. Ethereum and the use of smart contracts were also discussed in paper. The implementation uses the blind signature protocol by David Chaum and encryption with the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm. Presented in this paper scheme for blockchain decentralized voting for verified users with focus on anonymity is then fully implemented and identified potential issues are analysed and discussed.
Mohammad Malkawi, Muneer Bani Yassein, Asmaa Bataineh
Covid-19 pandemic has stressed more than any-time before the necessity for conducting election processes in an electronic manner, where voters can cast their votes remotely with complete security, privacy, and trust. The different voting schema in different countries makes it very difficult to utilize a one fits all system. This paper presents a blockchain based voting system (BBVS) applied to the Parliamentary elections system in the country of Jordan. The proposed system is a private and centralized blockchain implemented in a simulated environment. The proposed BBVS system implements a hierarchical voting process, where a voter casts votes at two levels, one for a group, and the second for distinct members within the group. This paper provides a novel blockchain based e-Voting system, which proves to be transparent and yet secure. This paper utilizes synthetic voter benchmarks to measure the performance, accuracy and integrity of the election process. This research introduced and implemented new algorithms and methods to maintain acceptable performance both at the time of creating the blockchain(s) for voters and candidates as well as at the time of casting votes by voters.
The emergence of blockchain technology has paved the way for innovative solutions in various domains, particularly in enhancing democratic processes. This research paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of a Web3 blockchain decentralized voting application (DAPP) built using React JS for frontend development and Solidity for smart contract implementation. The objective of this study is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of employing blockchain technology to create a secure, transparent, and decentralized voting system. The proposed DAPP leverages the immutability and transparency features of blockchain technology to ensure the integrity of the voting process. Smart contracts coded in Solidity are utilized to execute the voting mechanism, ensuring tamper-proof recording and tallying of votes. React JS, a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, is employed to develop an intuitive and user-friendly frontend interface, enhancing accessibility and usability for voters. Key aspects addressed in this research include the architecture of the DAPP, the design of smart contracts for voting logic, integration of React JS components for frontend development, and security considerations to prevent vulnerabilities and attacks. Additionally, the paper discusses the implications of decentralized voting systems on democracy, including increased trust, transparency, and participation.
Open access
3 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This paper presents iBatch, a middleware system running on top of an operational Ethereum network to enable secure batching of smart-contract invocations against an untrusted relay server off-chain. iBatch does so at a low overhead by validating the server's batched invocations in smart contracts without additional states. The iBatch mechanism supports a variety of policies, ranging from conservative to aggressive batching, and can be configured adaptively to the current workloads. iBatch automatically rewrites smart contracts to integrate with legacy applications and support large-scale deployment. For cost evaluation, we develop a platform with fast and cost-accurate transaction replaying, build real transaction benchmarks on popular Ethereum applications, and build a functional prototype of iBatch on Ethereum. The evaluation results show that iBatch saves 14.6%-59.1% Gas cost per invocation with a moderate 2-minute delay and 19.06%-31.52% Ether cost per invocation with a delay of 0.26-1.66 blocks.
With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities have become the mainstream of urbanization. IoT networks allow distributed smart devices to collect and process data within smart city infrastructure using an open channel, the Internet. Thus, challenges such as centralization, security, privacy (e.g., performing data poisoning and inference attacks), transparency, scalability, and verifiability limits faster adaptations of smart cities. Motivated by the aforementioned discussions, we present a Privacy-Preserving and Secure Framework (PPSF) for IoT-driven smart cities. The proposed PPSF is based on two key mechanisms: a two-level privacy scheme and an intrusion detection scheme. First, in a two-level privacy scheme, a blockchain module is designed to securely transmit the IoT data and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique is applied to transform raw IoT information into a new shape. In the intrusion detection scheme, a Gradient Boosting Anomaly Detector (GBAD) is applied for training and evaluating the proposed two-level privacy scheme based on two IoT network datasets, namely ToN-IoT and BoT-IoT. We also suggest a blockchain-InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) integrated Fog-Cloud architecture to deploy the proposed PPSF framework. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the PPSF framework over some recent approaches in blockchain and non-blockchain systems.
Durbadal Chattaraj, Basudeb Bera, Ashok Kumar Das, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues · 5 authors
Emerging next-generation Internet yields proper administration of a wide-ranging dynamic network to assist rapid ubiquitous resource accessibility, whilst providing higher channel bandwidth. Since its inception, the traditional static network infrastructure-based solutions involve manual configuration and proprietary controls of networked devices. It then leads to improper utilization of the overall resources, and hence experiences various security threats. Although transport layer security (TLS)-based solution is presently advocated in the said framework, it is vulnerable to many security threats like man-in-the-middle, replay, spoofing, privileged insider, impersonation, and denial-of-service attacks. Moreover, the current settings of the said tool do not facilitate any secure and reliable mechanisms for data forwarding, application flow routing, new configuration deployment, and network event management. Also, it suffers from the single point of controller failure issue. In this article, we propose a new private blockchain-enabled fine-grained access control mechanism for the SDN environment. In this regard, attribute-based encryption (ABE) and certificate-based access control protocol are incorporated. This proposed solution can resist several well-known security threats, and alleviate different system-level inconveniences. The formal and informal security inspections and performancewise comparative study of the proposed scheme endorse better qualifying scores as compared to the other existing competing state-of-the-art schemes. Besides, the experimental testbed implementation and blockchain simulation show the implementation feasibility of the proposed mechanism.
Safa Otoum, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Hussein T. Mouftah
Network trustworthiness is considered a very crucial element in network security and is developed through positive experiences, guarantees, clarity, and responsibility. Trustworthiness becomes even more compelling with the ever-expanding set of Internet of Things (IoT) smart city services and applications. Most of today’s network trustworthy solutions are considered inadequate, notably for critical applications where IoT devices may be exposed and easily compromised. In this article, we propose an adaptive framework that integrates both federated learning and blockchain to achieve both network trustworthiness and security. The solution is capable of dealing with individuals’ trust as a probability and estimates the end devices’ trust values belonging to different networks subject to achieving security criteria. We evaluate and verify the proposed model through simulation to showcase the effectiveness of the framework in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and trust using multiple factors. Results show that the proposed model maintains high accuracy and detection rates with values of$\approx 0.93$and$\approx 0.96$, respectively.
We considered scalable anonymous voting on the Ethereum blockchain. We identified three major bottlenecks in implementation: (1) division overflow in encryption of voting values for anonymity; (2) large time complexity in tallying, which limited scalability in the number of candidates and voters; and (3) tallying failure due to "no votes" from registered voters. Previous schemes failed at tallying if one (or more) registered voters did not send encrypted voting values. Algorithmic solutions and implementation details are provided. An experiment using Truffle and Remix running on a desktop PC was performed for evaluation. Our scheme shows great reduction in gas, which measures the computational burden of smart contracts to be executed on Ethereum. For instance, our scheme consumed 1/53 of the gas compared to a state-of-the-art solution for 60 voters. Time complexity analysis shows that our scheme is asymptotically superior to known solutions. In addition, we propose a solution to the tallying failure due to the "no vote" from registered voters.
Demand side management (DSM) presents an effective tool to regulate customers’ energy consumption. However, DSM requires customer-utility interaction based on fine-grained data, which jeopardizes the privacy of the customers. To overcome such a threat, several proposals are made based on noise addition, encryption techniques, or extra hardware. Unfortunately, these solutions either impact the integrity of the data, incur additional computational complexity, or add extra cost. Recently, blockchain has been adopted to support smart grid applications while promoting customer’s anonymity. However, special measures are yet to be taken to support both customer’s anonymity and data unlinkability, hence preserving the customer’s privacy. This paper achieves this goal by proposing a novel networking strategy based on a private blockchain. The proposed strategy employs a group signature to ensure the customer’s anonymity and data unlinkability. Further, a novel decentralized random number generation scheme is proposed to support customer-utility interaction for DSM, billing, and auditing while ensuring data unlinkability. We present an implementation of the proposed blockchain-based strategy, investigate its scalability, and provide low-bound empirical expressions on computational time and storage overhead.
DDoS attacks have plagued the Internet for more than 20 years, and it is becoming even violent with the development of IoT. Therefore, it is an essential defense method to trace back DDoS sources. Traditional IP traceback methods have different limitations in a large storage space, increasing marking cost, and low credibility. To solve these problems, a lightweight DDoS attack blockchain-based tracing scheme (LDBT) is proposed, which can deny malicious traffic access to the LAN. First, to avoid secondary DDoS attacks caused by excessive recording information, a digest method is presented and installed on all routers in the LAN. It is used to transfer a huge number of packets to a fixed format, which can keep the scheme lightweight regardless of whether DDoS occurs or not. Second, we present a trusted fuzzy tracing method that searches for DDoS sources efficiently. Under the proposed scheme, the digest data are reliable owing to the decentralization and immutability of the blockchain platform. It also overcomes the problem that edge routers cannot provide precise detection information because the digest is only used to track. Experimental results show that the scheme searches the sources of malicious traffic with high accuracy, and the communication overhead constantly remains at a low level of 80 KB/s. Furthermore, the tracing time of our scheme increases linearly instead of an exponential growth by the hop count.
Jun 1, 2021·2021 8th IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing (CSCloud)/2021 7th IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing and Scalable Cloud (EdgeCom)
In this paper, we study the existing blockchain consensus mechanisms that can be applied to access control scenarios and analyze advantages and disadvantages for each category. Besides, we divide access control procedures into policy formulation, storage, and request processing. For each procedure, we summarize existing methods and analyze possible problems. Finally, we give the potential future research directions. This paper provides a clear framework for access control, on which researchers can explore new types of blockchain-based access control solutions to solve the existing security and performance problems.
Abstract Voting refers to the submission of an election or an opinion on a specific matter by expressing an intention on the ballot to a certain place. The existing voting method has the burden of counting time and cost. For this reason, research has been conducted to introduce an e-voting system. However, despite the advantages of e-voting, it is not widely used due to the risk of manipulation of voting results and various requirements. Recently, in order to reduce the risk of data manipulation, research is being conducted to apply the blockchain, a technology that guarantees data integrity, to e-voting. Blockchain guarantees the integrity of data, but has a weakness in secrecy. This paper applies the critical encryption technique to the blockchain and satisfies the requirements for voting such as verifiability, anonymity, fairness, non-reusability, competence, safety, transparency, and non-ticketing. We propose a system design and implementation method. The proposed blockchain-based e-voting system provides voter anonymity by issuing a voter certificate based on a blockchain address. The e-voting election monitoring committee generates a threshold group encryption key, and the proposed blockchain-based e-voting system guarantees confidentiality by a threshold group encryption algorithm during the voting process. The voting result is encrypted through a homomorphic encryption algorithm and stored in the blockchain. Thus, the released voting results ensure safety, confidentiality, transparency, and non-vote ticketing. In addition, the proposed blockchain-based e-voting system guarantees the unity and competence of voting through the blockchain’s smart contract.
Madhumitha Harishankar, Jinhang Zuo, Sriram V. Iyer, Patrick Tague · 5 authors
Relying on dedicated contracts with specific network operators for Internet access significantly limits connectivity options for devices. As new usecases for internet access emerge, e.g., with the Internet of Things in smart-cities, managing such individual contracts for each deployed device with varying data needs is prohibitively cumbersome and highly expensive. In this work, we enable contract-less connectivity between end-devices and access points/networks that have no a-priori trust relationship. Our core insight is that exchange of services and payments can be trustlessly enforced by distributed ledger technologies; the credentials that blockchains use for account management can also be used for TLS-based authentication in networks. However, the blockchain's ability to enforce transaction rules is limited by the extent to which the underlying exchange of services is digitally trackable, which is susceptible to manipulation in this case. Requiring blockchain-integrated trusted hardware at the access points for bandwidth metering significantly hinders adoption; even software modifications required at the access points to process blockchain-based auth and payments incur practical deployment and scalability challenges. In designing Datanet, we address these challenges and enable seamless and incentivized connectivity between unknown end-devices and APs, using existing standards that allow for interoperability with current and future networks, and without significant overhead for client devices.
K. S. Sagar Bharadwaj, Tejas Kalburgi, Chandra Mouli, Dr.Vikram Palodia
We are investigating the troubles within-side the election balloting structures and seeking to suggest the e-voting version with the usage of blockchain which could solve the issues. Also, our attempts aim to assess the software of blockchain as provider to enforce dispensed digital voting structures. The phase of paper will spotlight a number of famous blockchain structures that provide blockchain as a provider and related digital e-balloting machine, that’s primarily based totally on decentralised system that addresses all obstacles respectively, it additionally preserves participant’s anonymity whilst nonetheless being open to public inspection.
Electronic voting can greatly reduce the cost of voting activities and solve many problems of voting information leakage caused by traditional paper voting. As the development and extension of blockchain technology, Ethereum technology can well solve the centralization problem of traditional electronic voting. This solution proposes an electronic voting system based on Ethereum technology to meet the security requirements of electronic voting, and uses Ethereum smart contract technology to replace the traditional trusted third party, which solves the possible drawbacks of the centralized voting system and improves Security and voters' trust in the voting system reduce voting costs. Finally, the electronic voting function is realized, and the normal operation of the system is guaranteed through the test.
We propose an ideal functionalityFCDand a construction ΠCDfor oblivious and updatable committed databases.FCDallows a proverPto read, write, and update values in a database and to prove to a verifierVin zero-knowledge (ZK) that a value is read from or written into a certain position. The following properties must hold: (1) values stored in the database remain hidden fromV; (2) a value read from a certain position is equal to the value previously written into that position; (3) (obliviousness) both the value read or written and its position remain hidden fromV.ΠCDis based on vector commitments. After the initialization phase, the cost of read and write operations is independent of the database size, outperforming other techniques that achieve cost sublinear in the dataset size for prover and/or verifier. Therefore, our construction is especially appealing for large datasets. In existing “commit-and-prove” two-party protocols, the task of maintaining a committed database betweenPandVand reading and writing values into it is not separated from the task of proving statements about the values read or written.FCDallows us to improve modularity in protocol design by separating those tasks. In comparison to simply using a commitment scheme to maintain a committed database,FCDallowsPto hide efficiently the positions read or written fromV. Thanks to this property, we design protocols for e.g. privacy-preserving e-commerce and location-based services whereVgathers aggregate statistics about the statements thatPproves in ZK.
One of the most important discoveries and creative developments that is playing a vital role in the professional world today is blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed, digitized and consensus-based secure information storage mechanism. Blockchain technology moves in the direction of persistent revolution and change. In the last couple of years, the upsurge in blockchain technology has obliged scholars and specialists to scrutinize new ways to apply blockchain technology with a wide range of domains. The dramatic increase in blockchain technology has provided many new application opportunities, including e-voting application. The present article provides a systematic review of emerging blockchain-based e-voting systems. In this paper, we call attention to the open research matters in this fast-growing field, explaining them in some details. It was concluded that frameworks needed enhancements in order to be used in voting systems due to these reservations. KEYWORDS: blockchain, e-voting, cloud computing, ethereum; ballot
Xavier Boyen, Udyani Herath, Matthew McKague, Douglas Stebila
The conventional public key infrastructure (PKI) model, which powers most of the Internet, suffers from an excess of trust into certificate authorities (CAs), compounded by a lack of transparency which makes it vulnerable to hard-to-detect targeted stealth impersonation attacks. Existing approaches to make certificate issuance more transparent, including ones based on blockchains, are still somewhat centralized. We present decentralized PKI transparency (DPKIT): a decentralized client-based approach to enforcing transparency in certificate issuance and revocation while eliminating single points of failure. DPKIT efficiently leverages an existing blockchain to realize an append-only, distributed associative array, which allows anyone (or their browser) to audit and update the history of all publicly issued certificates and revocations for any domain. Our technical contributions include definitions for append-only associative ledgers, a security model for certificate transparency, and a formal analysis of our DPKIT construction with respect to the same. Intended as a client-side browser extension, DPKIT will be effective at fraud detection and prosecution, even under fledgling user adoption, and with better coverage and privacy than federated observatories, such as Google’s or the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s.