Blockchain as a distributed system that confirms security and reliability have started a new era of a solid and consensus system.Blockchains focus on cryptocurrency is encouraging many other processes to follow the same reliable approach of security.Almost all procedures and operations are now invited to be electronically performed in the digital Ethereum network that has been presented. Moreover, this study proposed the use of an Ethereum network on a blockchain platform in the study when it was moved to a blockchain network to confirm transparency.An E-voting system sample has been tested by using an Ethereum network smart contracts inwhich solidity language and wallets were used. In the voting test, the Ethereum blockchain will be able to collect records in which voters can use their Ethereum wallets or android devices to submit their votes in a consensus node.The researchers studied the voting system taking Jordan as a case study.This study recommended the adaptation of e-voting to support transparency and voters trust to reduce corruption and unreliability in the voting processes. Moreover, the use of this system will allow a voter to vote from home in the time of the pandemic.\n\n
José Eduardo de Azevedo Sousa, Vinícius Cunha Oliveira, Júlia Almeida Valadares, Alex Borges Vieira · 7 authors
O crescimento do interesse em Ethereum leva a preocupações relacionadas à sua segurança, dado que já houveram ataques que exploraram o seu mecanismo de tarifação ou Penny Attack. Esses ataques afetaram a rede ocasionando lentidão nas transações e há indícios que Ethereum continua susceptível a esse tipo de ataque. Analisamos o comportamento da rede Ethereum durante um Penny Attack, buscando técnicas de aprendizado de máquina para detectá-lo previamente, utilizando atributos das transações. Nossas técnicas tiveram AUC, Fb e recall superior a 94%, 82% e 98% respectivamente.
Pedro Ivo de Castro Oyama, Jó Ueyama, Paulo Matias
Social media has become part of our daily lives. It brought significant developments in the way we communicate, but it also raised some concerns, including privacy and censorship. In this context, this work presents a social media platform -- EtherYou -- that makes use of cryptographic primitives and an Ethereum smart contract to overcome these issues. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the operating costs involved. The results showed considerable values for senders, zero for receivers, and zero maintenance costs, indicating its potential in scenarios with a reduced number of content producers and a large number of consumers. The proposal offers users privacy over their data, transparency on the system behaviour and censorship resistance.
The criminal activities in India are increasing at a rapid rate. Many of these activities go unreported. Even after having an online portal for the police for storing FIRs and NCRs, most of the FIRs are handwritten as a traditional practice. In most of the cases, the complainant has to be present in the police station to file a cognizable offense. An effective system for e-governance was started in 2009 named Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) for the entire country. However, it is a centralized system for a particular state. Thus there is a need for a completely decentralized system for assuring that there is no central point of failure in the system and complaints are managed securely protected from unauthorized access. Our aim is to propose a blockchain-based solution to manage complaints against both cognizable and non-cognizable offenses. The FIR filed by the police will be encrypted, stored in the IPFS and hash is added to the blockchain network. If the police decide not to file the FIR under pressure or deny receiving any complaint, then the complainant will have strong proof against him/her as the complaint along with its timestamp was stored on the blockchain network. Having all the records stored in an immutable database would remove any chances of the FIR/NCR being tampered and going unnoticed.
S. Sowmiyasree Dr.L.Aruna, M. Maheswari, A. Saranya
Abstract Over the course of time, electronic voting has evolved as a substitute for paper ballot voting to decrease redundancies and inconsistencies. Due to the many security and privacy vulnerabilities experienced over time, the past results of e-voting in the last three decades indicate that it has not been very successful. All cryptocurrencies are actually based on block chain. Block chain is based on the principle of distribution and decentralization. It is a continuous and continuously growing ledger that holds, in a secure, chronological and immutable way, a permanent record of all the transactions that have taken place. Value in a block chain can be anything. In the case of cryptocurrencies, it takes the meaning of money or currency. While in a game it takes the form of points or score. The value can take the form of a vote or a ballot while e-voting. The blockchain can be used in this article to pass votes between two parties. In our case, the electorate is one party and the candidate who earns the vote is the other. Without having a controlling central authority body, the block chain can be implemented in a more stable manner in mass electoral voting practise. A voting system that uses a more stable, tamper-proof block chain (immutable to voting modifications either by other voters or by any third party) and is cost-effective.
With the approach of 5G Society, more and more devices have been connected to the Internet, where information is stored, analyzed, and shared. Federated learning allows participants to train a machine learning model through sharing the parameters of it based on local training, instead of raw private data at local. In this research, we propose the implementation of the blockchain in federated learning for local parameters evaluation and global parameter aggregation, thus alleviating the influence of end-point adversarial training data. Besides, all updates of local parameters are encrypted and stored in a block of the blockchain after the consensus by the committee. We evaluate the performance of the scheme when adopting various types of corruption to the adversary's dataset, including noise with various degrees and circle occlusion with various diameters. At last, it shows robust and resilient performance compared with the traditional federated learning, achieving a validation accuracy rate of 0.957 when adding noise with a degree of 1.0, and one of 0.944 when adopting circle occlusion with a diameter of 28 pixels for the classification.
Dec 1, 2020·2020 IEEE 22nd International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 18th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 6th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS)
Abba Garba, Qinwen Hu, Zhong Chen, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar
Recently, real-world attacks against the web Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) have arisen more frequently. The current PKI that use Registration Authorities/Certificate Authorities (RAs/CAs) model suffer from notorious security vulnerabilities. Most of these vulnerabilities are due to compromises of RAs, which lead to impersonation attacks resulting in CAs misbehaving to issue bogus certificates. To counter this problem, many approaches, such as Certificate Transparency (CT), ARPKI, and PoliCert, have been proposed. Nonetheless, no solution has yet gained widespread acceptance as a result of complexity and deployability issues. Moreover, existing approaches still require to satisfy complicated interactions and synchronisation among the entities that are involved during certificate issuance, updates, and revocations. In this paper, we propose a new Blockchain-Based PKI (BB-PKI) to address these vulnerabilities of CA misbehaviour caused by impersonation attacks against RAs. Certificate Issuance Request (CIR) should be vouched by manifold RAs. Multiple CAs shall sign and issue the certificate using an out-of-band secure communication channel. Any RA that contributes to the verification process of a user's request can publish the certificate in the blockchain by creating a smart contract certificate transaction. BB-PKI offers strong security guarantees, compromising $n - 1$ of the RAs or CAs is not enough to launch impersonation attacks, meaning that attackers cannot compromise more than the threshold of the latter signatures to launch an attack.
Everyone should have the right to expression and opinion without interference. Nevertheless, Internet censorship is often misused to block freedom of speech. The distributed ledger technology provides a globally shared database that is geographically distributed and that cannot be controlled by a central authority. Blockchain is an emerging technology that enabled distributed ledgers and has recently been employed for building various types of applications. This paper demonstrates a unique application of blockchain technologies to create a platform that supports the freedom of expression. The paper adapts permissionless and public blockchains in order to leverage their advantages of providing an immutable and tamper-proof digital ledger. The study shows the blockchain potential for providing censorship-resistant publication platform. The paper presents and evaluates possible methods for building such system using the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain networks. Our results demonstrate that the Ethereum blockchain is much more beneficial for our system as it requires much lower cost than Bitcoin. to use as a platform to allow freedom of speech.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Amit Dua, Siddharth Sekhar Barpanda, Neeraj Kumar, Sudeep Tanwar
Modern Internet TCP uses Secure Sockets Layers (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) for secure communication, which relies on Public Key Infrastructure (PKIs) to authenticate public keys. Conventional PKI is done by Certification Authorities (CAs), issuing and storing Digital Certificates, which are public keys of users with the users identity. This leads to centralization of authority with the CAs and the storage of CAs being vulnerable and imposes a security concern. There have been instances in the past where CAs have issued rogue certificates or the CAs have been hacked to issue malicious certificates. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we propose a method (named as Trustful), which aims to build a decentralized PKI using blockchain. Blockchains provide immutable storage in a decentralized manner and allows us to write smart contracts. Ethereum blockchain can be used to build a web of trust model where users can publish attributes, validate attributes about other users by signing them and creating a trust store of users that they trust. Trustful works on the Web-of-Trust (WoT) model and allows for any entity on the network to verify attributes about any other entity through a trusted network. This provides an alternative to the conventional CA-based identity verification model. The proposed model has been implemented and tested for efficacy and known major security attacks.
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is an important technology for cyber security, as it can mitigate both inner and outer threats in networks. However, a critical problem in IDSs is that the detection capacity is gradually decaying with the emergence of unknown attacks. To constantly retrain IDSs with a more extensive database is critical to make IDSs adaptive with the ever-changing network environment, but the security institutes usually lack the motivation to persistently update and maintain the database for public. Thus, in this paper, a blockchain-based database (bc-DB) is proposed, which is multilaterally maintained by the security institutes and universities using Data Coins (DCoins) as the incentives. In addition, a Lifetime Learning IDS (LL-IDS) is further designed as the supplement of the bc-DB for common IDS users. After being retrained by the latest bc-DB, the LL-IDS can detect the newly discovered attacks while uploading the suspect network packets to the database. Simulation experiments show that the proposed LL-IDS with the bc-DB are secure and effectiveness in attacks detection.
Yousif Abuidris, Rajesh Kumar, Ting Yang, Joseph Ochieng Onginjo
The evolution of blockchain-based systems has enabled researchers to develop next-generation e-voting systems. However, the classical consensus method of blockchain, that is, Proof-of-Work, as implemented in Bitcoin, has a significant impact on energy consumption and compromises the scalability, efficiency, and latency of the system. In this paper, we propose a hybrid consensus model (PSC-Bchain) composed of Proof of Credibility and Proof of Stake that work mutually to address the aforementioned problems to secure e-voting systems. Smart contracts are used to provide a trustworthy public bulletin board and a secure computing environment to ensure the accuracy of the ballot outcome. We combine a sharding mechanism with the PSC-Bchain hybrid approach to emphasize security, thus enhancing the scalability and performance of the blockchain-based e-voting system. Furthermore, we compare and discuss the execution of attacks on the classical blockchain and our proposed hybrid blockchain, and analyze the security. Our experiments yielded new observations on the overall security, performance, and scalability of blockchain-based e-voting systems.
This paper presents Adamastor, a new low latency and scalable decentralized anonymous payment system, which is an extension of Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) that is compatible with consensus algorithms that use Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) as a defense mechanism against Sybil attacks. Adamastor also includes a new Decoy Selection Algorithm (DSA) that can be of independent interest, called SimpleDSA, a crucial aspect of protocols that use ring signatures to anonymize the sender. SimpleDSA offers security against homogeneity attacks and chain analysis. Moreover, it enables the pruning of spent outputs, addressing the issue of perpetual output growth commonly associated with such schemes. Adamastor is implemented and evaluated using the Narwhal consensus algorithm, demonstrating significantly lower latency compared to Proof of Work based cryptocurrencies. Adamastor also exhibits ample scalability, making it suitable for a decentralized and anonymous payment network.
Xiaoyu Ma, Jiting Zhou, Xiumei Yang, Guangyuan Liu
A blockchain voting system based on the feedback mechanism and Wilson score is proposed to solve the problem of the malicious votes behavior. Firstly, the relatively accurate supporting rate and ranking for candidates are obtained using the Wilson score. Secondly, different feedback coefficients are calculated according to the above parameters. Finally, the account points are adjusted according to the feedback coefficients. The feedback mechanism is designed in the voting smart contract, and the smart contract is deployed on the blockchain to ensure the enforcement of the feedback mechanism. A fully functional smart contract is designed and briefly verified in this paper. The experiment is conducted under the K-out-of-L type of weighted voting. Experimental results show that the Wilson score can accurately modify the candidates’ supporting rates, and the feedback mechanism can effectively suppress malicious votes.
The quality of covert communications is determined by the choice of communication channels and the design of data embedding schemes. Recently, the Bitcoin system is prevalent as a covert communication channel. The consensus mechanism requires participants to spread their found valid blocks under an adjustable difficulty, which provides a stable periodic broadcast channel. Moreover, senders and receivers are difficult to be traced, because the Bitcoin system is pseudonymous. However, since the historical data in the ledger cannot be removed from the Bitcoin system, the openness and the persistent storage of the ledger in the Bitcoin system post new challenges when designing data embedding schemes. More concreteness, most traditional data embedding schemes either design by heuristic or empirical algorithms or use a fixed field to embed data in the transactions. Therefore, the covert data can be recognized once the algorithm is leaked or the pattern is explored. In this article, we first propose a hash chain-based covert data embedding (HC-CDE) scheme. The embedded transactions are difficult to be discovered. We further propose an elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman chain-based covert data embedding (ECDHC-CDE) scheme to enhance the security of the HC-CDE scheme. Experimental analysis on the Bitcoin Testnet verifies the security and the efficiency of the proposed schemes.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Geoffrey Saunois, Frédérique Robin, Emmanuelle Anceaume, Bruno Séricola
We propose a consensus algorithm whose objective is to decide on the same union of proposed values, such that with high probability all the values proposed by the honest nodes belong to the decision. Our algorithm has been designed to cope with an asynchronous and permissionless system. By relying on a proof-of-eligibility, our algorithm is tolerant to an adversary capable of instantaneously corrupting entities. A straightforward application of our algorithm is the design of permissionless distributed ledgers.
Data privacy and sharing has always been a critical issue when trying to\nbuild complex deep learning-based systems to model data. Facilitation of a\ndecentralized approach that could take benefit from data across multiple nodes\nwhile not needing to merge their data contents physically has been an area of\nactive research. In this paper, we present a solution to benefit from a\ndistributed data setup in the case of training deep learning architectures by\nmaking use of a smart contract system. Specifically, we propose a mechanism\nthat aggregates together the intermediate representations obtained from local\nANN models over a blockchain. Training of local models takes place on their\nrespective data. The intermediate representations derived from them, when\ncombined and trained together on the host node, helps to get a more accurate\nsystem. While federated learning primarily deals with the same features of data\nwhere the number of samples being distributed on multiple nodes, here we are\ndealing with the same number of samples but with their features being\ndistributed on multiple nodes. We consider the task of bank loan prediction\nwherein the personal details of an individual and their bank-specific details\nmay not be available at the same place. Our aggregation mechanism helps to\ntrain a model on such existing distributed data without having to share and\nconcatenate together the actual data values. The obtained performance, which is\nbetter than that of individual nodes, and is at par with that of a centralized\ndata setup makes a strong case for extending our technique across other\narchitectures and tasks. The solution finds its application in organizations\nthat want to train deep learning models on vertically partitioned data.\n
The implementation of an electronic voting (e-voting) system which has begun to be widely applied in place of traditional electoral systems, still has a major problem in the level of trust results. E-voting systems are very vulnerable to manipulation issues, such as changes in election results due to hacking or by the electoral system maker. Centralized systems in a network result in data sources coming from one party having the right to store and to manage data sources. The issue of trust caused by a centralized data distribution system can be overcome by spreading data in a system network. Blockchain is a distributed ledger, where every party in the network has the same data source, and it has a powerful characteristic known as immutability which is very suitable for e-voting system. This research proposed a blockchain based e-voting system with Ethereum and metamask. We show that the proposed e-voting system fulfills six basic principles of an election system, namely secret ballot, one-man one-vote, voter eligibility, transparency, votes accurately, recorded and counted, and reliability. Furthermore, the performance evaluation of the e-voting system shows that the slow gas price option gives the lowest gas price per second result, i.e. the best trade-off.
Christian Killer, Bruno Rodrigues, Eder J. Scheid, Muriel Figueredo Franco · 8 authors
While the existence of Public Bulletin Boards (PBB) is often formulated as an assumption in related work on Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems, this work here on Provotum focuses on the practical design and architecture of such a PBB, including its distributed execution. Further, Provotum leverages a public permissioned Blockchain (BC) as a PBB, where only authorized entities can sign blocks, while the general public can verify all BC data. Therefore, Provotum defines a new and fully decentralized BC-based REV system, which deploys a permissioned BC as a PBB and allows for the explicit distribution of trust across different permissioned BC nodes. Provotum is operated in a fully distributed fashion by using Smart Contracts (SC), Distributed Key Generation (DKG), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Cooperative Decryption (CD), as well as employing client-side encryption, which enables ballot secrecy, while the BC forms an audit trail, enabling public and End-to-end Verifiability (E2E-V).
The traditional covert communication that relies on a central node is vulnerable to detection and attack. Applying blockchain to covert communication can improve the channel's anti-interference and antitampering. Whisper is the communication protocol of Ethereum, which mainly relies on payload to store information and padding to expand. These two fields can store a large amount of information, creating conditions for the realization of covert communication. In this paper, we propose a covert communication method based on the whisper protocol to covertly transfer information in the blockchain. To implement this method, we use payload to store the carrier information, matching it with the secret message. The generated index is recorded in the padding field. To improve the concealment of communication, we simulate the default filling rules of the protocol to maintain the message size. A new topic–key pair interaction method is also proposed to improve the security of the model. Moreover, the anti-interference, antitampering and antidetection of the newly proposed model are verified through theoretical analysis and experiment. The experimental findings show that the amount of information in the proposed method is 4.7 times that of the traditional time-based covert communication. The time consumption of information transmission is reduced to 52.25% under the same settings and even less in actual use. The cost of the new topic–key pair interaction is reduced by nearly 50% compared with the original method.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the continuous development of the Internet era, people's demand for network security is increasingly high, information is an essential component of the network, which implies numerous privacy, secrets, but also contains a large number of value, thus generating a multiparty trust issues of data security. Blockchain technology itself is still in the early stages of rapid development, the existing blockchain system in the design and implementation of the use of distributed systems, cryptography, game theory, network protocols and many other disciplines, for learning the principles and practical applications have brought considerable challenges. The blockchain, with its decentralized quality, quickly captures the attention of the public and solves many security problems derived from data security, thus attracting wide attention from people. In recent years, along with the increasing maturity of homomorphic encryption technology and push new, it is more and more people's favour and attention.
With the transformation in smart grids, power grid companies are becoming increasingly dependent on data networks. Data networks are used to transport information and commands for optimizing power grid operations: Planning, generation, transportation, and distribution. Performing periodic security audits is one of the required tasks for securing networks, and we proposed in a previous work autoauditor, a system to achieve automatic auditing. It was designed according to the specific requirements of power grid companies, such as scaling with the huge number of heterogeneous equipment in power grid companies. Though pentesting and security audits are required for continuous monitoring, collaboration is of utmost importance to fight cyber threats. In this paper we work on the accountability of audit results and explore how the list of audit result records can be included in a blockchain, since blockchains are by design resistant to data modification. Moreover, blockchains endowed with smart contracts functionality boost the automation of both digital evidence gathering, audit, and controlled information exchange. To our knowledge, no such system exists. We perform throughput evaluation to assess the feasibility of the system and show that the system is viable for adaptation to the inventory systems of electrical companies.
Amit Kumar Tyagi, Terrance Frederick Fernandez, S Aswathy
The frequency of election has been increased in multiple parts of the country. Being the largest democracy, India takes several months for accomplishing elections. Additionally, the elections demand government works, development, cost, tenure, etc. Since 1999, Electronic Voting Machine [EVM]have deployed widely to ensure that the voting can also be made tamper-proof. India has introduced Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) way back in 2004 for its parliamentary election with 380 million networked voters. EVM, being an electronic system was used to record votes. Only Bharat Electronics Limited and Electronics Corporation of India Limited conduct EVM and VVPATs (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail) checks. The sole solution to the issue is introduction of Aadhaar; a unique identification number. The proposed research work introduces a novel concept that provides tamperless and paperless election in India. In summary, this work provides a simple, reliable concept using Blockchain technology and Aadhaar for deploying paperless electronic voting in India.
With an emergence of distributed ledger technology, decentralization and integrity in information storage offer an opportunity to preserve data in electronic voting systems. An inevitable challenge in e-voting system implementation is the tradeoff between system security and generality in design. Leveraging container technology along with blockchain technology, this paper proposes a system design architecture to deliver data security and agility in system integration. The design was further analyzed and assessed by measuring the utilization of computing resources and conducting performance test as to validate that the aforementioned requirements were met.