the paper reveals the prospects of using electronic trust services, in particular electronic signature services, for building electronic (remote) voting systems. The advantages of such systems are described, as well as problematic issues related to the implementation of remote voting systems in practice. The most well-known existing electronic voting protocols based on classical principles are analyzed. Their shortcomings and difficulties in implementation are highlighted. We offer a new principle for building an electronic voting system. Unlike the analyzed protocols, the new approach is based on a decentralized public key infrastructure. The paper shows how, with the help of DLT technology, it is possible to ensure the fulfillment of the necessary requirements for system security without introducing significant redundancy into the interaction process of all stakeholders. The electronic voting algorithm is a modification of the Nurmi-Salom-Santin protocol which avoids the need to organize special bodies for the formation of voter lists. It also allows maintaining the anonymity of voters without the use of blind signatures.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Although almost all information about Smart Contract addresses is shared via websites, emails, or other forms of digital communication, Blockchains and distributed ledger technology are unable to establish secure bindings between websites and corresponding Smart Contracts. For a user, it is impossible to differentiate whether a website links to a legitimate Smart Contract set up by owners of a business or to an illicit contract aiming to steal users' funds. Surprisingly, current attempts to solve this issue mostly comprise of information redundancy, e.g., displaying contract addresses multiple times in varying forms of images and texts. These processes are burdensome, as the user is responsible for verifying the correctness of an address. More importantly, they do not address the core issue, as the contract itself does not contain information about its authenticity. To solve current issues for these applications and increase security, we propose a solution that facilitates publicly issued SSL/TLS-certificates of Fully-Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) to ensure the authenticity of Smart Contracts and their owners. Our approach combines on-chain identity assertion utilizing signatures from the respective certificate and off-chain authentication of the Smart Contract stored on the Blockchain. This approach allows to tackle the aforementioned issue and further enables applications such as the identification of consortia members in permissioned networks. The system is open and transparent, as the only requirement for usage is ownership of an SSL/TLS-certificate. To enable privacy-preserving authenticated Smart Contracts, we allow one-way and two-way binding between website and contract. Further, low creation and maintenance costs, a widely accepted public key infrastructure and user empowerment will drive potential adaption of Ethereum Authenticated Smart Contracts (AuthSC).
Time-release cryptography is a special encryption technique that allows a message to be hidden for some time. The previous schemes have shortcomings in that the encryptor should predict the decryptor’s computing power precisely or the trusted agent should be always available. In this paper, we propose a new, practical time-release blockchain, and find the key to decrypt the content after a certain time. In order to verify the effectiveness of the blockchain system automatically, which uses the proof-of-work (PoW) and the consensus algorithm in the the proposed technique, we have implemented a prototype version of our blockchain system using Python. The proposed method has the following advantages. First, the decryption time is automatically adjusted, even if the miner’s computing power changes over time. Second, unlike previous time-lock puzzle schemes, our algorithm does not require additional computation work for solving the puzzle. Third, our scheme does not need any trusted agents (third parties). Fourth, the proposed method uses standard cryptographic algorithms.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Morampudi Mahesh Kumar, Munaga V. N. K. Prasad, U. S. N. Raju
Multi‐biometric systems have been widely accepted in various applications due to its capability to solve the limitations of unimodal systems. Directly storing the biometric templates into a centralised server leads to privacy concerns. In the past few years, many biometric authentication systems based on homomorphic encryption have been introduced to provide security for the templates. Most of the existing solutions rely on an implication of the assumption that the server is ‘honest‐but‐curious’. Therefore, the compromise of server results into the entire system vulnerability and fails to provide the integrity. To address this, we propose a novel multi‐instance iris authentication system, BMIAE to deal with malicious attacks over the transmission channel and at the untrusted server. BMIAE encrypt the iris templates using ElGamal encryption to guarantee confidentiality and Smart contract running on a Blockchain helps to achieve the integrity of templates and matching result. BMIAE also addresses the limitations of using Blockchain for biometrics like privacy and expensive storage. To check the effectiveness and robustness, BMIAE has experimented on CASIA‐V3‐Interval, IITD and SDUMLA‐HMT iris databases. Experimental results show that BMIAE provides improved accuracy, and eliminates the need to trust the centralised server when compared to the state‐of‐the‐art approaches.
Open access
Biometric Identification and Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract Blockchain is a hash chain with chain structure formed by data blocks in chronological order. With the promotion of bitcoin, the research and application of blockchain, the underlying core technology of bitcoin, is growing rapidly, which is considered to be the fifth generation of Internet disruptive technology after mobile Internet. At present, there are various identity management applications and platforms based on blockchain, but while blockchain has gradually become the cornerstone of the value Internet, it also brings great challenges to the privacy protection needs of users. This article analyzes the privacy protection mechanism of blockchain network layer, transaction layer and application layer, including malicious node detection and access restriction technology in network layer, mixed currency technology and encryption technology in blockchain transaction layer. In this article, distributed communicable network technology and multimedia data security technology are used to build a blockchain security system. We designed the efficient system to accurately analyze the data and the information protection. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better data security guarantee ability.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Jiazhi Xia, Yuhong Zhang, Hui Ye, Ying Wang · 10 authors
Cryptocurrencies represented by Bitcoin have fully demonstrated their advantages and great potential in payment and monetary systems during the last decade. The mining pool, which is considered the source of Bitcoin, is the cornerstone of market stability. The surveillance of the mining pool can help regulators effectively assess the overall health of Bitcoin and issues. However, the anonymity of mining-pool miners and the difficulty of analyzing large numbers of transactions limit in-depth analysis. It is also a challenge to achieve intuitive and comprehensive monitoring of multi-source heterogeneous data. In this study, we present SuPoolVisor, an interactive visual analytics system that supports surveillance of the mining pool and de-anonymization by visual reasoning. SuPoolVisor is divided into pool level and address level. At the pool level, we use a sorted stream graph to illustrate the evolution of computing power of pools over time, and glyphs are designed in two other views to demonstrate the influence scope of the mining pool and the migration of pool members. At the address level, we use a force-directed graph and a massive sequence view to present the dynamic address network in the mining pool. Particularly, these two views, together with the Radviz view, support an iterative visual reasoning process for de-anonymization of pool members and provide interactions for cross-view analysis and identity marking. Effectiveness and usability of SuPoolVisor are demonstrated using three cases, in which we cooperate closely with experts in this field.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Gökay Saldamlı, Kavitha Karunakaran, Vidya K. Vijaykumar, Weiyang Pan · 6 authors
Automakers in collaboration with technology industries are swiftly innovating and transforming the automobile industry. The current trend of connected cars relies on retrieving various kinds of vehicular data since there is a huge demand from associated entities included insurance companies, vehicle buyers/sellers and government authorities. Currently, the data collection is done either manual or unsupervised that poses trust, legitimacy and accuracy issues such as duplicated or falsified vehicular data records, tampered safety checks and meddled driving history, etc. Hence, a strong tool that can protect the vehicular data; log the changes for audit purposes and eventually build the trust in the system is necessary. We propose the use of blockchain technology for these needs. The proposed solution involves connecting an IoT module to a car data port to collect rich telemetric data; analyze the driving behaviors on various fronts and storing the outcomes to a blockchain. For various good reasons we use the Ethereum blockchain in this study. However, other blockchain deployments can also be utilized. If adopted by the stakeholders, the proposed solution can provide a trusted, transparent and easily accessible platform to auto buyers/sellers, insurance agencies, vehicle dealers, law enforcements and vehicle history providers.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Currency Recognition and Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Frederik Temmermans, Deepayan Bhowmik, Fernando Pereira, Touradj Ebrahimi · 5 authors
Privacy and security, copyright violations and fake news are emerging challenges in digital media. Social media and data leaks increase risk of user privacy. Creative media particularly images are often susceptible to copyright violations which poses a serious problem to the industry. On the other hand, doctored images using photo editing tools and computer generated images may give a false impression of reality and add to the problem of fake news. These problems demand solutions to protect images and associated metadata as well as methods that can proof the integrity of digital media. For these reasons, the JPEG standardization committee has been working on a new Privacy and Security standard that provides solutions to support privacy and security focused workflows. The standard defines tools to support protection and integrity across the wide range of JPEG image standards. Related to image integrity, blockchain technology provides a solution for creating tamper proof distributed ledgers. However, adopting blockchain technology for digital image integrity poses several challenges at the technology level as well as at the level of privacy legislation. In addition, if blockchain technology is adopted to support media applications, it needs to be closely integrated with a widely adopted standard to ensure broad interoperability. Therefore, the JPEG committee initiated an activity to explore standardization needs related to media blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). This paper explains the scope and implementation of the JPEG Privacy and Security standard and presents the current state of the exploration on standardization needs related to media blockchain applications.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the dawn of crypto-currencies the most talked currency is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is widely flourished digital currency and an exchange trading commodity implementing peer-to-peer payment network. No central athourity exists in Bitcoin. The users in network or pool of bitcoin need not to use real names, rather they use pseudo names for managing and verifying transactions. Due to the use of pseudo names bitcoin is apprehended to provide anonymity. However, the most transparent payment network is what bitcoin is. Here all the transactions are publicly open. To furnish wholeness and put a stop to double-spending, Blockchain is used, which actually works as a ledger for management of Bitcoins. Blockchain can be misused to monitor flow of bitcoins among multiple transactions. When data from external sources is amalgamated with insinuation acquired from the Blockchain, it may result to reveal user's identity and profile. In this way the activity of user may be traced to an extent to fraud that user. Along with the popularity of Bitcoins the number of adversarial attacks has also gain pace. All these activities are meant to exploit anonymity and privacy in Bitcoin. These acivities result in loss of bitcoins and unlawful profit to attackers. Here in this paper we tried to present analysis of major attacks such as malicious attack, greater than 52% attacks and block withholding attack. Also this paper aims to present analysis and improvements in Bitcoin's anonymity and privacy.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Currency Recognition and Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have increasingly been gaining interest over the last few years. The promise of a completely secure environment for data to be stored has caught the attention of everyone, including individuals and institutions, who, in their turn, have started to invest generously in related research and development of such systems, especially those concerned with finance and crypto-currency. In this research, we focus on the applications beyond these topics, aiming to solve the problem of tampering with vote counting in elections around the world. By designing and constructing a system of a distributed ledger with a permissioned consensus algorithm, we are composing a tamper-proof method to provide a secure environment for voting.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mengting Liu, Yinglei Teng, F. Richard Yu, Victor C. M. Leung · 5 authors
Blockchain technology is reshaping the video streaming industry by changing how humans create, distribute and consume videos. Leveraging blockchain technology, some emerging video streaming platforms aim to eliminate the centralized video streaming servers by building peer-to-peer content distribution architectures and cryptocurrency-based payment systems. On these blockchain-based platforms, the source video streams are required to be transcoded into multiple versions to meet heterogeneous user demands, which is a computationally intensive and energy consuming process. Meanwhile, the block size of the blockchain has significant impacts on the performance of blockchain-based video streaming systems. In this article, we propose a novel MEC-enabled transcoding framework for blockchain-based video streaming while an adaptive block size scheme is designed for the underlying blockchains. The system architecture of the proposed framework is presented to enable coordination of different aspects. Then we address the video transcoding and block size issues by using the ADMM method, and smart contract is used to facilitate distributed optimization among non-trusting entities. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Image and Video Quality Assessment
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Recently, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc, have rapidly been recognized as an asset, often called a digital asset. Comparing to the real assets, it would be handled carefully due to its own characteristics that are completely different. The disadvantage of such digital assets, on the one hand, is that whoever knows the private key of the wallet, they can easily take over that digital asset. On the other hand, if the wallet’s owners are dead without passing credential information to others, that asset will be lost forever. We thus propose the novel secure testament methodology for a digital asset such as Bitcoin to solve the mentioned problems. The mechanism is based on managing the mnemonic seed of the wallet so that an inheritor will obtain the mnemonic seed in a secure way. Two mechanisms of the proposed methodology are implemented. The first is to save the mnemonic seed in a secure repository. Therefore, no one can access to the cryptocurrency wallet while the owner still being alive and does not wish anybody to access. The second is to deliver the mnemonic seed securely to legitimate inheritor when the owner is suspected to be dead or disappeared. Finally, based on our experiment, the results show that the aforementioned problems can be solved. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism can help the owner of the asset to managing the confidentiality of their assets.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The video created by a surveillance cameras plays a crucial role in crime prevention and examinations in smart cities. The closed-circuit television camera (CCTV) is essential for a range of public uses in a smart city; combined with Internet of Things (IoT) technologies they can turn into smart sensors that help to ensure safety and security. However, the authenticity of the camera itself raises issues of building up integrity and suitability of data. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based system to guarantee the trustworthiness of the stored recordings, allowing authorities to validate whether or not a video has been altered. It helps to discriminate fake videos from original ones and to make sure that surveillance cameras are authentic. Since the distributed ledger of the blockchain records the metadata of the CCTV video as well, it is obstructing the chance of forgery of the data. This immutable ledger diminishes the risk of copyright encroachment for law enforcement agencies and clients users by securing possession and identity.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Since its inception a decade ago, Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology have been garnering interest from a large spectrum of financial institutions. Although it encompasses a currency, a payment method, and a ledger, Bitcoin as it currently stands does not support bitcoins lending. In this paper, we present a platform called ZeroLender for peer-to-peer lending in Bitcoin. Our protocol utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to achieve unlinkability between lenders and borrowers while securing payments in both directions against potential malicious behaviour of the ZeroLender as well as the lenders, and prove by simulation that our protocol is privacy-preserving. Based on our experiments, we show that the runtime and transcript size of our protocol scale linearly with respect to the number of lenders and repayments.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the traditional Proof of Stake (PoS), the share of the currency owned by the node, that is, the share of the equity, determines the probability that the node is selected as the representative node. In each round of the block generation, a node is selected as the creator of the next block by the verification, and the selected creator will pack appropriate transactions into the block and publish it on the blockchain. However, in the network with poor synchronization, the traditional PoS produces multiple verified representative nodes in each round, which generates multiple blocks. Then the blockchain is easy to produce the bifurcation. Aiming at the bifurcation problem of PoS, we propose an improved voting method based on credit rewards and punishments to vote on multiple blocks. The block is selected by considering the credibility of the creator, the count of the obtained comprehensive votes and the transaction value of the block. Thereby it can ensure the consistency and the fairness of the blockchain network. In the same time, the malicious node is found and voted to be removed in time by counting the number of invalid blocks generated by the nodes. It can ensure the security of the blockchain network.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
K. Deepak, Aditya Nagaraj Badiger, J. Akshay, Kika A. Awomi · 6 authors
In this survey, we go through all the papers that lead up to our idea of a smart video surveillance system and make a comparative study of available technologies. The increase in efficiency by using hyper ledger for blockchain is analyzed along with the study of modern data sharing techniques like CDN and IPFS.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Saifull ah Khan, Akanksha Jadhav, Indraje et Bharadwaj, Mayukh Rooj · 5 authors
Using the blockchain technology to store the privatedocuments of individuals will help make data more reliable and secure, preventing the loss of data and unauthorized access. The Consensus algorithm along with the hash algorithms maintains the integrity of data simultaneously providing authentication and authorization. The paper incorporates the block chain and the Identity Based Encryption management concept. The Identity based Management system allows the encryption of the user's data as well as their identity and thus preventing them from Identity theft and fraud. These two technologies combined will result in a more secure way of storing the data and protecting the privacy of the user.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Fadyah A. AlShlawi, Nourah K. AlSa'awi, Waad Y. Bin Saleem, Anees Ara
Bitcoin Cryptocurrency is an advanced decentralized electronic payment system which stores all the transaction records in a public ledger connected to the blockchain. Many cyber-attacks including Double-Spending, Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS), Sybil attack and Dust attack, have been targeting Blockchain-based application Cryptocurrency, mainly Bitcoin cryptocurrency. In this paper, the proposed DUST-MASK, a secure Bitcoin system against dust attack, protects Bitcoin's availability and pseudo-anonymity from attackers sending dust transactions in order to analyze the data and link the transactions to a specific user. The proposed system will inform the user of those kinds of malicious transactions and guarantee the user a choice whether to accept or reject them.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The e-voting system is one of the frameworks which decreases the percentage of abstention and to ensure the security against tampering of the votes, Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger that is used to record the transactions in an efficient and verifiable manner. Blockchain plays an important role in the e-voting system which ensures the security of votes by preventing modification of data stored in blocks using the cryptographic technique. Aadhar integration to the e-voting system overcomes the duplication or tampering of votes. The proposed scheme provides the secured e-voting system by using biometric details and VID(Virtual ID) of voters obtained from the Aadhar database to cast the Vote and also using the digital signature as the key for the encryption of the votes inside the block.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
While blockchain technology is best-known for cryptocurrencies, some chains also tout their ability to implement so-called "smart contracts." Ethereum, which bills itself as a "blockchain app platform," defines smart contracts as applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference (http://www.ethereum.org).
Digital Rights Management and Security
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques