Steganography is a solution for covert communication and blockchain is a p2p network for data transmission, so the benefits of blockchain can be used in steganography. In this paper, we discuss the advantages of blockchain in steganography, which include the ability to embed hidden data without manual change in the original data, as well as the readiness of the blockchain platform for data transmission and storage, which eliminates the need for the Steganographer to design and implement a new platform for data transmission and storage. We have proposed two algorithms for steganography in blockchain, the first one is a high-capacity algorithm for the key and the steganography algorithm exchange and switching, and the second one is a medium-capacity algorithm for embedding hidden data. Also, by reviewing the previous three steganography schemes in blockchain, we have examined their drawback and have showed that none of them are practical schemes for steganography in blockchain. Then, we have explained the challenges of steganography in blockchain from the steganographers and steganalyzers point of view.
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cs.CR
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin provides pseudo-anonymity to its users, leading to many transactions related to illicit activities. The advent of mixing services like OnionBC, Bitcoin Fog, and Blockchain.info has allowed users to increase their anonymity further. This paper tackles the pseudo-anonymity of the Bitcoin blockchain by developing a scalable spark based framework to find patterns in the transaction data. The efficacy of the framework is demonstrated by performing exploratory analysis. Furthermore, the paper shows the capabilities of bitcoin-based graph representations and addresses the issue of user profiling based on unsupervised learning approaches for analysing Bitcoin transactions and users. The authors convert the transaction graph of the Bitcoin data to contain only Wallet-IDs and generate graph embeddings using Variational Graph Autoencoder [1]. Additionally, the authors use explainable-AI techniques and Kohonen self organizing maps to visualize and understand the results obtained from the unsupervised learning methods.
Today, developing technology is one of the most effective tools to make our lives easier. One of these developing technologies is blockchain that enables securely transferring digital assets between peers without requiring a trusted third party. In particular, blockchain poses new opportunities to effectively satisfy transparency, verifiability and anonymity for e-voting schemes. Based on recent proposals, it can be easily seen that applicability of blockchain technology for e-voting systems is actively researched. In this paper, we first summarized the set of e-voting requirements based on studies by Popoveniuc et al., Fujioka et al., Cranor et al., Benaloh et al., Juels et al. and etinkaya et al. In the light of these studies and requirement set, we analyzed recently proposed blockchain-based e-voting systems. As a result of these analyzes, one can determine that a mature blockchain based e-voting system that can meet all criteria has not been proposed yet. Particularly, we show that either the proposed schemes misses the basic requirements or does not fulfill these while claiming otherwise. Additionally, by simulating a large-scale election, we show that time complexity of e-voting schemes utilizing cryptocurrency blockchain such Bitcoin or Ethereum is impractical. Besides, we also emphasize new risks of utilizing public cryptocurrency blockchains for e-voting schemes. Accordingly, the readiness of blockchain-based e-voting has been discussed, from which it can be deduced that it would be more advantageous to research for e-voting specific blockchain technologies instead of utilizing existing cryptocurrency blockchains.
Mohammad Hossin shafiabadi, Mohammad Hossin shafiabadi
The purpose of the present research was to introduce a blockchain-based voting system so that any state, including totalitarian states, can show interest in using it. In this method, a hybrid voting system with two centralized and distributed systems was used. Its centralized system is one of the most common voter identification and polling models, and its distributed system, which is designed with Ethereum public blockchain, is voting for voters. Totalitarian states are not interested in announcing the results online. Also, the lack of trust in E-voting systems by both states and voters has led to E-voting in important political elections in most states as support for manual or paper voting. Based on the results of field research with this voting system, it was possible to create a 7 min break between the end of the voting process and the announcement of the results for political considerations. This break can be increased by agreement. The results of the votes cannot be manipulated in any way. Survey results should also be communicated to voters before the voting process. This voting system can improve the level of democracy and maximum participation. It is hoped that the spread of distributed technologies, especially the blockchain, will pave the way for the spread of justice and democracy around the world.
Covert channels are designed to protect the communication relationship of the sender and receiver. Traditional covert channels have become insecure due to the continuous improvement of traffic analysis techniques. In this context, there is an urgent need to identify new approaches for covert channels. Blockchain is an emerging technique with characteristics of user anonymity, a flooding propagation mechanism, and tamper resistance, which make it a compelling platform for covert channels. Previous approaches applied Bitcoin as the underlying blockchain, and its pseudoanonymity may expose the communication relationship. Moreover, the reliance of these approaches on prenegotiated labels to identify transactions containing covert messages further reduced their concealment. In this work, we present a practical and secure covert channel over Monero. Compared to Bitcoin, Monero's full anonymity efficiently protects the relationship between the sender and receiver. Moreover, no labels are employed to identify special transactions. The receiver filters and extracts the covert message using his private key. In this study, we make a complete assessment of the robustness, reliability, and anti-traceability of our protocol, as these properties are regarded as desirable for a covert channel. We also formalize the definition of security for covert channels through a transaction distinguishing experiment. A rigorous proof shows that our protocol meets this definition and is secure to use. Finally, we make a detailed comparison between our protocol and the existing blockchain-based covert channels.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Antonio M. Larriba, Aleix Cerdà i Cucó, José M. Sempere, Damián López
Voting systems are as useful as people are willing to use them. Although many electronic election schemes have been proposed through the years, and some real case scenarios have been tested, people still do not trust electronic voting. Voting is not only about technological challenges but also about credibility, therefore, we propose a voting system focused on trust. We introduce political parties as active partners in the elections as a mechanism to encourage more traditional electors to participate. The system we propose here preserves elector’s privacy, it operates publicly through a blockchain and it is auditable by third parties.
Cellular networks connect nearly every human on the planet; they consequently have visibility into location data and voice, SMS, and data contacts and communications. Such near-universal visibility represents a significant threat to the privacy of mobile subscribers. In 5G networks, end-user mobile device manufacturers assign a Permanent Equipment Identifier (PEI) to every new device. Mobile operators legitimately use the PEI to blocklist stolen devices from the network to discourage device theft, but the static PEI also provides a mechanism to uniquely identify and track subscribers. Advertisers and data brokers have also historically abused the PEI for data fusion of location and analytics data, including private data sold by cellular providers. In this paper, we present a protocol that allows mobile devices to prove that they are not in the blocklist without revealing their PEI to any entity on the network. Thus, we maintain the primary purpose of the PEI while preventing potential privacy violations. We describe a provably-secure anonymous proof of blocklist non-membership for cellular network, based on the RSA accumulators and zero-knowledge proofs introduced by Camenisch and Lysyanskaya (Crypto'02) and expanded upon by Li, Li and Xue (ACNS'07). We show experimentally that this approach is viable for cellular networks: a phone can create a blocklist non-membership proof in only 3432 milliseconds of online computation, and the network can verify the proof in less than one second on average. In total this adds fewer than 4.5 seconds to the rare network attach process. This work shows that PEIs can be attested anonymously in 5G and future network generations, and it paves the way for additional advances toward a cellular network with guaranteed privacy.
In order to overcome the disadvantages of poor security and lack of trust in the traditional electronic voting system and improve the reliability of the election system, this paper proposes an electronic voting system based on blockchain. This system is divided into voting module and blockchain management module, which mainly aims at the credibility of voting data and the protection of voters' privacy. The voting module begins with the verification of voter's identity, uses Zero Knowledge Proof algorithm to prove that the entrant is the legitimate owner of part of the rights and interests, uses ECDSA to encrypt the data, and uses Digital Signature to verify the security and integrity of the data. The main purpose of the blockchain management module is to update the data in real time, make the newly added nodes complete data synchronization, check the consistency of the data, and provide the user with historical records.
F. Richard Yu, Jeremy J. James, Zhu Li, Zhaowei Ma
Surveillance is being pervasively used, and its recording is extensively applied in practice. Thereby, protection of surveillance recordings, which is related to multimedia security, increasingly attracts research interests. Traditional techniques, such as watermarking, cryptography and steganography, focus on analysing multimedia content, resulting in high complexity and long latency, which makes them not suitable for protecting real-time surveillance applications. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-assisted framework to protect the recordings in real-time surveillance applications. In the proposed framework, we design an algorithm that generates frame fingerprints, which involves real-time extraction of packets from surveillance multimedia streams, SHA3-512 functions, and the verification of frame consistency. We use a blockchain for preserving the frame fingerprints generated by our proposed algorithm. Different from existing works that use simulations to show the performance, we develop a real system using a service-oriented blockchain, virtualisation for distributed ledger technology (vDLT), and the effectiveness of this system is demonstrated.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Notarial Office(NO), working on providing various essential certificates, still relies on manual handling and requires paper materials from other government departments. That brings lots of inconvenience. The Notarial Office rejects non-local paper materials for their lower credibility in the local place and then cannot provide cross-borders services. It also easily cause sensitive information leakage as copies of paper materials have been stored. In this case, a blockchain-based system is suitable to address challenges in this scenario because of its advantages (e.g, decentralized, immutability, transparency, auditability). We implemented this system on top of the Hyperledger Fabric. Moreover, we replace manual operations with smart contracts, set extra ledgers to off-load different types of transactions and provide encryption for private information when needed. In the end, we get an expected result. That is, the modification outperformed the unmodified network in experiments.