Blockchain Papers

Kashif Mehboob Khan, Junaid Arshad, Muhammad Mubashir Khan

No abstract is available for this record.

Authors unavailable

On considering the integrity of electronic evidence, in particular,we can see that such evidence needs to be protected from a number of undesirable outcomes namely, alteration or destruction. We need to guard against these events and others when trying to maintain system integrity and preserve the purity of evidence so that it could be acceptable in the court. Chain of Custody is nothing but the consecutive documentation of records. The Chain of Custody has all the necessary steps that a crime investigator must follow to make sure whether the information is honest. The Chain of Custody is significant because it cannot be proven that evidence was not altered during the time between collection and its usage in court. Then the collected evidence is not credible. Blockchain technology,a decentralized network currently used by Bitcoins and other Cryptocurrency networks, helps provide a secure database with the help of hashing the data and storing it in blocks.We propose to implement blockchain technology for the process of Chain of Custody, which helps in tracking the people whoaccess the data and assist in assuring the credibility of the data provided during the time of submission in court.

Nedaa Baker Al Barghuthi, Issam Hamdan, Saleh Al Suwaidi, Ahmed Lootah · 7 authors

Voting is a pillar of modern society, but the traditional paper voting system is prone to fraud and failure. Votes can sometimes be miscounted or might be lost in transit. Besides, the electronic voting system has been active subject research for decades. However, the old traditional voting system lacks security and privacy features, which has been a challenge for a long time. As a solution, this paper is proposing a prototype blockchain-based electronic voting system for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) political election process. A blockchain system is a distributed decentralized, immutable database; that allows the data to be distributed and shared among all the participants in a network. Also, it has many advantages that can be applied in many use cases, such as electronic voting systems. Implementing the blockchain-based electronic voting system will minimize the costs of running an election while ensuring integrity. It has the potential to limit voter fraud while making the votes traceable and verifiable, preventing unauthorized activity, and fake votes by authenticating each voter in the system. The UAE has a blockchain initiative that seeks to have 50 percent paperless transactions in all its governmental processes by the end of 2021. This paper studied the effectiveness of adopting blockchain in the UAE political election.

Oğuzhan Kızılbey, Binboğa Sıddık Yarman

In this study, we will explain what settings the RX580 4GB AMD graphics card should be operated for in order to be able to perform Ethereum and Monero mining at high speed and with less energy consumption. Core and memory undervolting, core underclocking, memory overclocking and tightening memory timings are the techniques which are applied to the card. With the adjustments made, approximately 30 percent savings were achieved in electrical energy spent in Ethereum and Monero mining. Also, the mining speed increased by approximately 20 percent. It was measured that the temperature of the graphics card decreased by 10 degrees due to the decrease of the power drawn.

Yuditha Ichsani, Resisca Audia Deyani, Rizal Broer Bahaweres

On each cryptocurrency transaction, a high-level security is needed to protect user data as well as data on the transaction. At this stage, it takes the appropriate algorithm in securing transactions with more efficient processing time. The Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one of the cryptography algorithms which has high-level security, and ECC is often compared with the Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA) algorithm because it has a security level that is almost the same but has some differences that make ECC is superior compared to the RSA algorithm, so that the ECC algorithm can optimize cryptocurrency security in the transaction process. The purpose of this study is to simulate the bitcoin transactions using cryptography algorithms. This study uses the ECC algorithm as the algorithm ECDH and ECDSA key exchange as the algorithm for signing and verifying. The comparison results of ECC and RSA processing time is 1:25, so the ECC is more efficient. The total processing time of ECC is 0,006 seconds and RSA is 0,152 seconds. The researcher succeeded to implement the ECC algorithm as securing algorithms in mining process of 3 scenarios, normal, failed, and fake bitcoin transactions.

Amna Qureshi, David Megías

Due to the popularization of low-cost broadband Internet access, the amount of the digital data that is illegally redistributed is growing, making content creators and owners lose their income. Fingerprinting, a watermarking-based technology for embedding buyer identifications in legally distributed contents, has emerged as a promising approach to fight illegal redistribution. On the other hand, the blockchain technology is also shaping up to handle the challenge of digital copyright protection. With blockchain, media producers can authorize and manage their copyrights on a public ledger. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based distribution system which blends different technologies (collusion-resistant fingerprinting, perceptual hash functions, and a peer-to-peer file distribution network) to provide copyright protection, collusion resistance, atomic payment, piracy tracing, transparency, proof-of-delivery, revocable privacy (to a buyer), and dispute resolution. The paper also analyzes several security and privacy compromising attacks and countermeasures.

Shengmin Xu, Jiaming Yuan, Yingjiu Li, Ximeng Liu · 5 authors

Payment channel with penalizing double-spending has been widely applied in cryptocurrencies for achieving fast payment. However, current payment channel solutions suffer at least one of the following problems: 1) large overheads and communication costs are incurred to thwart double-spending; 2) payees must be defined before building payment channels; 3) a single payment channel does not support multiple payees; 4) no formally theoretical proofs are provided for the security of payment channels (as an open problem mentioned in CCS'15). In this paper, we fill these gaps by introducing a new fast payment protocol named super payment channel. We provide detailed construction based on digital signatures and accountable assertions with formal security proofs. We also implement our proposed protocol in different circumstances and demonstrate that our proposed protocol incurs a small overhead compared to ordinary Bitcoin transactions.

Rana M. Nadir

Digital world is shifting towards distributed systems due to scalability and reliability issues of centralized systems. Blockchain is one of rapidly growing technology of distributed nature. Most of people have information about public blockchain due to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but there is another face of blockchain which is private or permissioned blockchain. Permissioned blockchain is a distribute ledger for consortium enterprises network. The escalation in popularity of permissioned blockchain platforms in recent era is remarkable. There are multiple solutions available for permissioned blockchain, but there are three leading houses which deals enterprise blockchain, Fabric, Corda and Quorum. All developing communities have their contribution in market and claim their solution is best but blockchain just stepin permissioned era there are multiple plus and negative point in these frameworks. In this paper, I have discussed permissioned blockchain frameworks and analyze them comparatively on the bases of consensus range, modularity, language support, privacy, transaction rate, currency, and accumulate the adoption rate from these filters.

Jiasheng Li, Zijian Zhang, Meng Li

Lottery is a game with many people's dreams. But corruptions of lottery centers make the lottery unfair. To address this unfair issue, fair lottery schemes have been studied for several years. In these schemes, delay functions or aggregation protocols can be used to generate the winning numbers fairly. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing schemes can achieve the winning number generated randomly, while the randomness can be verified fairly. In this article, we first propose a [B]lockchain based sm[a]rt co[n]tract for [F]air and [E]fficient [L]ottery (BanFEL) scheme. We further present a winning number random generation smart contract, by which players submit the purchased numbers and the non-tampering property is protected. Security analysis and experiments show that the fairness of BanFEL is protected better than the existing works. Meanwhile, the verification cost of this scheme are at least 0.03s lower than the traditional Grumbach's scheme between 1000 and 10000 players.

Weiqi Dai, Chenlong Wang, Changze Cui, Hai Jin · 5 authors

Research has shown that smart contracts have become a significant and promising technology. However, the lack of mature and stable security mechanism, such as access control, makes smart contracts quite vulnerable. To mitigate this problem, we present an attributed-based access control system based on blockchain by building a hierarchical management mechanism of contract administrator and contract owner. After combining blockchain inherent synchronization function with our designed system-level smart contract, all peers can easily get access control rules timely. Moreover, we modify the original smart contract finite state machine to prevent malicious modification on the rules through system contract. In our evaluation, the system only introduces 2%-5% additional cost with assured security on Hyperledger.

Nasser Alsalami, Bingsheng Zhang

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been widely deployed and used in our daily life. Although there are numerous works in the literature surveying technical challenges and security issues in blockchains, very few works focused on the anonymity guarantees provided in cryptocurrencies. In this work, we conduct a systematic survey on anonymity in cryptocurrencies with a clear categorization for the different tiers of anonymity offered in the various cryptocurrencies as well as their known weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We also study the techniques that have been used to achieve each tier of anonymity. Finally, we asses the current techniques, and present a forecast for the technological trends in this field.

Noor Abdalkarem Mohammedali, Ali Al-Sherbaz

There is no uncertainty that the chroma currency is very popular for the transaction information stored in the block of blocks. To initiate the importance of blocking, there is only one distributed ledger in which data is stored, since many of the centers in the blockchain network limit enough records for these records. This document proposes a decision-making framework based on innovation to create a secure, unjustifiable, accurate and transparent framework for voter privacy. In addition, it is voted and declared in this context that the race has a short period of time, since it is automatically registered in the table. This framework also gives society confidence in its legislation when applying this technique. In this framework, an administrator can add a candidate and a voter to the block. In different hands, a voter can log into the framework and then decide in favor of a candidate that the details of the vote should be stored in the block. In addition, each square in the blockchain innovation that relates to the previous square contains the hash of the previous square, and each square contains explicit data based on the square footage. The hub is connected by a peer network in this framework, with all the hubs in the block site network that have a complete duplicate block.

Angelica Lo Duca, Clara Bacciu, Andrea Marchetti

Negli ultimi anni la tecnologia blockchain si sta diffondendo sempre più su larga scala in diversi settori di ricerca, inclusi i Beni Culturali. Esistono diverse tipologie di blockchain, che possono essere classificate sia in base al tipo di utenti che possono accedervi, sia in base alle funzionalità che offrono. Questo articolo descrive uno studio teorico in cui si confrontano due blockchain molto diverse tra di loro: Ethereum e Hyperledger, al fine di definire quale delle due è maggiormente indicata per la memorizzazione di beni culturali tangibili contenuti in archivi digitali. Dopo una breve descrizione delle due tecnologie, verrà descritto un possibile scenario di applicazione abbastanza generico per poter capire quale delle due tecnologie meglio soddisfa i requisiti. Verrà quindi effettuato il confronto tra le due blockchain sulla base di problematiche generali, requisiti architetturali e considerazioni varie. Come risultato del confronto, emergerà che Hyperledger Fabric è più adatta nel contesto degli archivi digitali.

Kazi Sadia, Md Masuduzzaman, Rajib Kumar Paul, Anik Islam

Voting is a very important issue which can be beneficial in term of choosing the right leader in an election. A good leader can bring prosperity to a country and also can lead the country in the right direction every time. However, elections are surrounds with ballot forgery, coercion and multiple voting issues. Moreover, while giving votes, a person has to wait in a long queue and it is a very time consuming process. Blockchain is a distributed database in which data are shared with the participant of the node and each participant holds the same copy of the data. Blockchain has properties like distributed, pseudonymous, data integrity etc. In the paper, a fully decentralized evoting system based on blockchain technology is proposed. This protocol utilizes smart contract into the evoting system to deal with security issues, accuracy and voters privacy during the vote. The protocol results in a transparent, non editable and independently verifiable procedure that discards all the intended fraudulent activities occurring during the election process by removing the least participation of the third party and enabling voters right during the election. Both transparency and coercion are obtained at the same time.

Dipti Pawade, Avani Sakhapara, Aishwarya Badgujar, Divya Adepu · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Majid Khabbazian, Tejaswi Nadahalli, Roger Wattenhofer

In the context of second layer payments in Bitcoin, and specifically the Lightning Network, we propose a design for a lightweight watchtower that does not need to store signed justice transactions. We alter the structure of the opening and commitment transactions in Lightning channels to encode justice transactions as part of the commitment transactions. With that, a watchtower just needs to watch for specific cheating commitment transaction IDs on the blockchain and can extract signed justice transactions directly from these commitment transactions that appear on the blockchain. Our construction saves an order of magnitude in storage over existing watchtower designs. In addition, we let the watchtower prove to each channel that it has access to all the data required to do its job, and can therefore be paid-per-update.

Michael Kerr

This research explores Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) applications for digital watermarking performed on the camera in real time, combining this with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to suggest workable systems for data cataloguing and image integrity. Reference implementations of both technologies are developed and evaluated for their effectiveness and suitability for these purposes.

Gaurav Deep, Rajni Mohana, Anand Nayyar, Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban · 5 authors

Cloud computing has made the software development process fast and flexible but on the other hand it has contributed to increasing security attacks. Employees who manage the data in cloud companies may face insider attack, affecting their reputation. They have the advantage of accessing the user data by interacting with the authentication mechanism. The primary aim of this research paper is to provide a novel secure authentication mechanism by using Blockchain technology for cloud databases. Blockchain makes it difficult to change user login credentials details in the user authentication process by an insider. The insider is not able to access the user authentication data due to the distributed ledger-based authentication scheme. Activity of insider can be traced and cannot be changed. Both insider and outsider user's are authenticated using individual IDs and signatures. Furthermore, the user access control on the cloud database is also authenticated. The algorithm and theorem of the proposed mechanism have been given to demonstrate the applicability and correctness.The proposed mechanism is tested on the Scyther formal system tool against denial of service, impersonation, offline guessing, and no replay attacks. Scyther results show that the proposed methodology is secure cum robust.

Tatsuro Ishida, Hiroki Watanabe, Shigenori Ohashi, Shigeru Fujimura · 7 authors

This paper proposes a method for managing digital content on blockchains in which content copyrights are distributed in the form of tokens. Our implementation of the proposed method resulted in fast retrieval of the history on the blockchain without relying on an external database.

Saif Kazakzeh, Eyad Ayoubi, Baraa K. Muslmani, Malik Qasaimeh · 5 authors

Blockchain is an emerging technology that lacks sophisticated guidelines and frameworks for deployment purposes. This paper proposes a framework that helps in making suitable decisions concerning blockchain model adoption. In addition, the authors classified the major categories of blockchain metrics. Furthermore, the authors evaluated the proposed framework with two well-known educational blockchain-based models.

Kervins Nicolas, Yi Wang

A blockchain database containing files regarding transactions of cryptocurrency is sometime vulnerable to double spending attack. This type of attack pertains to a coin being spent more in more that one transaction in the network. This paper is motivated by a goal to create a blockchain that can withstand double spending attacks. This way, honest miners will be able to safely and securely exchange cryptocurrency. There currently lack valuable prevention methods in the network therefore we designed a novel countermeasure to combat double spending attacks on the blockchain system. We proposed the MSP (Multistage Secure Pool) framework in order to address the vulnerabilities on the blockchain. This was designed to handle both discrete and general issues that affect the overall security of the blockchain. Our evaluation using this application shows that there was a decrease in the amount of attacks propagating through the system based on our system's robustness and capabilities. We also present machine learning capabilities of the system in our study in order to enable a progressive aspect to the design. Providing our application with the ability to analyze data in order to recognize and classify distinct actions will enable for greater comprehension. An application that learns, updates and configures to meet specified defensive standards present key design features which enables for greater understanding and future analysis of the overall blockchain network.

Stanislav Kruglik, Kamilla Nazirkhanova, Yury Yanovich

The blockchain technology is one of the most actively investigated areas in applied cryptography, but its widespread adoption is being held back by some technical drawbacks. In this paper, we make a review of the most significant issues and possible approaches to handle them.

Tanishq Varshney, Nikhil Sharma, Ila Kaushik, Bharat Bhushan

Without any involvement of third party, block chain has shown tremendous potential in establishing secure links with IoT.This technology can be widely used without using any centralized authority. By combining both the technologies throughput of the system can be enhanced. Due to its various applications it is being widely used in almost every field which makes it vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, blockchain architecture along with its key properties has been discussed. Later part of paper comprises of various security principles such as confidentiality, integrity and availability, various attacks on network along with its countermeasures.

B Sudharsan, R. Tharun, Nidhish Krishna M P, Boopathi Raj J · 6 authors

Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are replacing paper ballots because of (i) the errors involved in the manual counting process and (ii) the large time period required to count the votes. Even though these digital recording electronic systems are advancements, they are prone to tampering and electoral frauds. The suspected vulnerabilities in EVMs are (i) the possibilities of tampering with the EVM's memory chip or switching it with a fake one, (ii) their simplicity, which enables them to be tampered without requiring much skill and (iii) the chances of double voting. This paper attempts to solve the above problems by storing the vote data in a decentralized network and securing the data using a security mechanism derived from the blockchain framework (which is currently used for securing cryptocurrencies). The vote data is shared among all the devices in the network and peer to peer verification is done to verify the authenticity of the vote data. In order to successfully tamper with the system, the data stored in all the nodes must be changed. This makes the proposed system more efficient and reliable. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, which is based on the concepts of blockchain, to secure the votes stored in an EVM. A fingerprint authentication system is also added as an extra layer of security to prevent double voting. The proposed EVM will be tamperproof, and any attempt to manipulate the registered votes, will be detected and the tampered data will be replaced with the correct data.