A design work not only has a complex functional composition, but also has special trading needs. These all result in the difficulties in content protection, copyright protection and the trading of works. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a scheme for digital rights management of design works using blockchain. Unlike existing digital rights management methods, this scheme binds the off-chain design work and its copyright record in the blockchain. The display of design effects, the confidentiality of design details and the compatibility with relevant laws are all taken into account. A new proof-of-delivery method is also proposed to ensure the fairness of the trade. By using smart contracts and public key cryptography, it has no need for active operation from participants in the trade. The scheme is evaluated, analyzed, and compared with other methods from multiple respects to demonstrate its rationality and effectiveness. Finally, a proof-of-concept experiment is described by taking digital garment design as an example.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Since 2004, different research was handling the challenges in the centralized voting systems, e-voting protocols and recently the decentralized voting. Electronic voting puts forward some difficulties regarding the voter anonymity, the secure casting of the votes and to prevent the voting process from fraud. The decentralized property of the blockchain technology will bring new solutions for many of the challenges in the voting research area and it will bring a new security mechanism of safe and transparent voting. In this paper, a broad comparison between ongoing voting systems has studied by analyzing their structure and the drawbacks that should consider in future to improve the whole election process from keeping the privacy of the voter, casting a vote with the possibility to check if it was counted correctly to publishing the results. The result of the paper will give a new approach to extend the target of the election from small scale to large scale despite the fact of Ethereum limitation which can cast five votes per minute on an average. The primary challenge is to find an answer for this question: “how to balance between voter privacy and transparency without breaking the important rule where the voter can proof for a specific candidate that he voted for him in a bribe situation?”.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Dev Arora, Siddharth Gautham, Harshit Gupta, Bharat Bhushan
The emerging blockchain technology helps in the decentralization of transactions, where every participant network verifies and validates the transaction making it immutable. With the rapid expansion of the technology, transactional data which is stored and validated is also increasing. The blockchain technology came into prominence largely due to the bitcoin and the security aspects of the technology. This technology is comparatively fast, secure and efficient. This paper discusses the generalized overview, different algorithms to reach consensus, system workflows and various security aspects of handling, transacting and storing data. This paper also throws light Smart Contracts and their applications.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Retinal Imaging and Analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has developed rapidly and has been applied in various areas. Blockchain technology has the features of decentralization, transparency, autonomy and tamper resistance etc. The blockchain, with its unique features, can address some problems in traditional areas. In traditional games area, especially the gambling game, we learn that there is a strong requirement for fairness and random numbers. But traditional games are centralized and cannot meet this requirement. Hence, we propose a blockchain-based random number generation algorithm that can provide a “true random number”. This algorithm allows all the participants to take part in the generation of a random number, which ensures that the random number will not be manipulated by anyone. We as well design a blockchain game platform adopting this random number generation algorithm. Traditional games can be deployed on this platform with a simple adaptation. Finally, we deploy a poker game on the platform to verify the algorithm and performance. The experimental results show that the algorithm is effective and the platform has good performance.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In 2008, the blockchain technology was invented to create a modern electronic cash transaction protected through cryptographic mechanisms in peer to peer or decentralized network. The first success cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology is Bitcoin, which core processes are based on public key cryptography. While the public key is transformed and used as an address for payment, the private key is used to claim ownership to access the funds stored in the correspondent address. The processes of generating addresses, signing transactions, and checking the balance are parts of the cryptocurrency core processes. With these activities, the wallet application was created to assist and handle the execution of those processes.The private key plays the most important component to interact with assets inside cryptocurrency blockchain database. Without the private key, the asset in blockchain will not be managed or controlled, thus all cryptocurrency coins in correspondent wallet will be lost. This paper provides a solution to recovery cryptocurrency coin that lost according to inability to login to wallet application. The main component used to recover coins in this paper is the unspent transaction output.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Countries around the world are nowadays actively promoting development in intelligent agriculture. Each of them must develop a specific plan tailored to environmental farming indices of each individual farm, and such information would be both important and sensitive. This is why information in intelligent agriculture requires protection from network security to ensure data privacy and integrity. This study proposes applying dark web technology to ensure the privacy of blockchains and servers. The study will monitor packet transmission frequency in intelligent agriculture to prevent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. The main features of system include: (1) An identity authentication mechanism, (2) secure transmission of information, (3) establishment of private blockchains, (4) a faster, improved authentication system for blockchain information, and (5) resistance against DDOS attacks. The proposed scheme can safeguard network security for the IoT as well as the servers by way of applying dark web technology, which can avoid exposure of blockchains and server ID addresses and thus in turn lower the risks of DDOS attack damages. Experiment results indicate that the application of lightweight encryption of proposed scheme does indeed improve the authentication speed while also satisfying requirements of network security.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Smart Contract (SC) is distributed, trustless, programmable, and tamper-resistant, which can realize secure and efficient information exchange, value transfer and asset management. However, SCs can only access data on their own blockchains (BCs), and can't get external information by themselves. Data feed service is a third-party data source provider that supports a broad range of data requests will thus be critical to SC ecosystems. In this paper, we propose a novel scalable data feed service for SCs, SDFS, that not only ensures that the data acquisition process is reasonable, but also guarantees that the system service is scalable. In addition, we also designed a reputation evaluation strategy for nodes to determine whether each node is a malicious node. After each feedback, the reputation value of each node will be updated. Besides that, SDFS keeps content providers auditable by using BC to preserve evidence of data processing processes. As a data feed service for SCs, it can provide the data of off-chain into the BC truly and accurately, so as to ensure the authenticity of the data on the BC and realize the SC to interact with the outside world.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The blockchain provides an immutable, transparent, and decentralized method for data storage. However, as the volume of data gradually increases, the public blockchain system requires significant storage space. Also the synchronization of blank nodes needs much transmission bandwidth. This paper introduces a method to compress the size of transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain by replacing hash pointers with index pointers. Simulations show that the proposed method can reduce the storage space of the Bitcoin blockchain by up to 12.71%.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We explore the existence of covert communication channels in the Bitcoin system. Our attention is paid to the channels whose usage is hard or impossible to detect. Seven covert channels are considered. Some of them have already been known: there are two low-rate channels obtained by manipulation with parameters of cryptographic primitives used to construct a transaction, a channel created by the use of unspendable outputs, and digital signature algorithm (DSA) channel that hides a message in the cofactor used in the signature creation. The new channels that, to the best of our knowledge, have not been considered in the literature, are based on permutations of transaction inputs and outputs, and on distribution of payments. We describe the construction of all channels and characterize their capacity to transmit hidden data. Almost all channels can be used simultaneously and independently and provide wide opportunities for undetectable covert communications over the Bitcoin blockchain.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain platforms and is the second most valuable cryptocurrency. It allows developers to create smart contracts - small computer programs that sit on the blockchain. These programs can be written in programming languages like solidity and are executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Since Ethereum is a public blockchain, all the data of the blockchain is available publicly. However, getting smart contract data is a tedious process and public data-sets for smart contracts are not available for further analysis. Therefore, in this work, we collect a total of 1.9M smart contracts till the block height of 7.1M, and provide a first of its kind analysis across different parameters like duplicity, ether balance, ether moved, etc. We observe that across all these different parameters, only a small fraction of the smart contracts are dominant. We label such 2900 dominant contracts as the `Contracts of Importance' and use it for further analysis using the various tools available to give us an insight into the vulnerability trends and patterns in smart contracts.
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Block chain being a foundational technology impacting and attracting a wide range of applications has become predominant in solving the problem of privacy preserving and security in multitude sectors that is under the control of the government and the private. The paper also presents the security and the privacy mechanism using the block chain to prevent the misuse and the corruption in the sharing of huge set of data generated from the judiciary, security, legislature, commercial code registries etc. The proposed system enables reliability and the trust in the data sharing in the communication channels utilizing the block chain with the RSA digital signature. The proposed system is simulated as a java programming version to evince the enhancement in the latency in the sharing of the information's along with the privacy and the security
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Scott Ruoti, Benjamin Kaiser, Arkady Yerukhimovich, Jeremy Clark · 5 authors
Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly Blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines Blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding Blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is Blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for Blockchain technology, and (4) how does it relate to other approache distributed technologies (e.g., distributed databases). We accomplish this goal by using grounded theory (a structured approach to gathering and analyzing qualitative data) to thoroughly analyze a large corpus of literature on Blockchain technology. This method enables us to answer the above questions while limiting researcher bias, separating thought leadership from peddled hype and identifying open research questions related to Blockchain technology. The audience for this paper is broad as it aims to help researchers in a variety of areas come to a better understanding of Blockchain technology and identify whether it may be of use in their own research.
Blockchain technology is currently one of the most popular topics in the field of information technology. Blockchain is often associated with cryptocurrency or electronic cash, but it can also be extended to any interconnected information blocks. Now blockchain finds application in areas such as financial transactions, user identification, or the creation of cybersecurity technologies. So, in this framework we shall talk about that despite the fact that blockchain technology is reliable and supportive, the security issues and challenges of this technology cannot be left out especially when it comes to building personal privacy protection.
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The global popularity of digital cryptocurrencies and research in a decentralized system have led to the foundation of blockchain, which is fundamentally a public digital ledger to share information in a trustworthy and secure way. The concept and applications of blockchain have now spread from cryptocurrencies to various other domains, including business process management, smart contracts, IoT, and so on. Cryptocurrency is a mechanism designed to work for the online secure payments system using cryptography. Cryptography maintains confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. Cryptocurrency has come as a novel way of making payments that keep all the transactions secure and safe, which avoids any type of intermediaries such as a bank. This chapter will shed light on the concept of blockchain technology, security, and its applications in various domains.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchains are distributed ledgers that use a tamper-sensitive, append-only data structure in conjunction with a consensus protocol to enable mutually distrusting parties to maintain a global set of states. A primary barrier to adoption of blockchain technology by industry is the current performance and scalability limitations of these systems, which lag far behind incumbent database systems. Of particular interest are “lottery-style” consensus algorithms, which are relatively scalable to many participants but suffer from low throughput (performance). Proof-of-Elapsed-Time (PoET) is one such algorithm with great promise for use in industry, though the parameters that govern its performance have not been well studied. This thesis explores, through simulation, key performance outcomes in PoET blockchain networks implemented with the Hyperledger Sawtooth framework. A better quantitative understanding of the interactions among these system parameters will be crucial for efficiently optimizing real world blockchain networks and facilitating adoption by industry.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the current rise in the demand and usage of the blockchain technology for a variety of purposes, ranging from finance, medical, identification amongst others, major focus has been dedicated towards its legal implications rather than leveraging on the practical applications in administration. In this paper, we discuss the concepts of blockchain and how it can be implemented as an efficient solution towards public voting while aiming to destroy the disadvantages of the current voting system in India, at the same time providing a better, more reliable, secure and transparent means of public governance. We also aim to provide an exemplified voting solution for India with the integration of the current Aadhaar identification system as implemented by UIDAI.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Zhimin Gao, Lei Xu, Keshav Kasichainula, Lin Chen · 6 authors
Bitcoin brings a new type of digital currency that does not rely on a central\nsystem to maintain transactions. By benefiting from the concept of\ndecentralized ledger, users who do not know or trust each other can still\nconduct transactions in a peer-to-peer manner. Inspired by Bitcoin, other\ncryptocurrencies were invented in recent years such as Ethereum, Dash, Zcash,\nMonero, Grin, etc. Some of these focus on enhancing privacy for instance crypto\nnote or systems that apply the similar concept of encrypted notes used for\ntransactions to enhance privacy (e.g., Zcash, Monero). However, there are few\nmechanisms to support the exchange of privacy-enhanced notes or assets on the\nchain, and at the same time preserving the privacy of the exchange operations.\nExisting approaches for fair exchanges of assets with privacy mostly rely on\noff-chain/side-chain, escrow or centralized services. Thus, we propose a\nsolution that supports oblivious and privacy-protected fair exchange of crypto\nnotes or privacy enhanced crypto assets. The technology is demonstrated by\nextending zero-knowledge based crypto notes. To address "privacy" and\n"multi-currency", we build a new zero-knowledge proving system and extend note\nformat with new property to represent various types of tokenized assets or\ncryptocurrencies. By extending the payment protocol, exchange operations are\nrealized through privacy enhanced transactions (e.g., shielded transactions).\nBased on the possible scenarios during the exchange operation, we add new\nconstraints and conditions to the zero-knowledge proving system used for\nvalidating transactions publicly.\n
Ming Li, Jian Weng, Anjia Yang, Jia-Nan Liu · 5 authors
Commercial advertisement (ad) dissemination has been proliferating on connected vehicles, allowing users to promote their products via vehicle-to-vehicle/-infrastructure communications. Despite the prospect of ad dissemination in vehicular networks, it faces challenges upon deployment especially on security and privacy. Particularly, vehicles may collude to defraud the advertiser to obtain rewards without disseminating ads, which may cause unfair “free-riding” issue in these activities. Furthermore, concerns on possible privacy leakage may discourage vehicles to participate in the process of ad dissemination. In addition, external DDoS attacks and internal single point of failure may also affect service availability. To address these issues, we explore the potential of blockchain technology to construct a fair and anonymous scheme for advertising in vehicular networks. We first present the overview of the blockchain-based ad dissemination framework. Then, under the framework, we design a concrete, fair and anonymous scheme. To ensure fairness, we utilize the Merkle hash tree together with smart contracts to achieve the “proof-of-ad-receiving” property (i.e., check whether a vehicle indeed receives an ad without deception or introducing significant storage cost) to mitigate the “free-riding” attack. On the other hand, any ad receiver who acquires a dissemination reward per ad more than once can be effectively detected and will be punished which is achieved by using smart contracts. Additionally, the proposed scheme can protect vehicles' privacy in terms of anonymity and conditional linkability based on zero-knowledge proof techniques. Lastly, extensive security analysis and implementations demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the scheme.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are viewed as one of the most promising scalability solutions for cryptocurrencies today. Roughly, PCNs are networks where each node represents a user and each directed, weighted edge represents funds escrowed on a blockchain; these funds can be transacted only between the endpoints of the edge. Users efficiently transmit funds from node A to B by relaying them over a path connecting A to B, as long as each edge in the path contains enough balance (escrowed funds) to support the transaction. Whenever a transaction succeeds, the edge weights are updated accordingly. In deployed PCNs, channel balances (i.e., edge weights) are not revealed to users for privacy reasons; users know only the initial weights at time 0. Hence, when routing transactions, users typically first guess a path, then check if it supports the transaction. This guess-and-check process dramatically reduces the success rate of transactions. At the other extreme, knowing full channel balances can give substantial improvements in transaction success rate at the expense of privacy. In this work, we ask whether a network can reveal noisy channel balances to trade off privacy for utility. We show fundamental limits on such a tradeoff, and propose noise mechanisms that achieve the fundamental limit for a general class of graph topologies. Our results suggest that in practice, PCNs should operate either in the low-privacy or low-utility regime; it is not possible to get large gains in utility by giving up a little privacy, or large gains in privacy by sacrificing a little utility.
The online cryptocurrency bitcoin, created based in blockchain technology, is attracting the attention of individuals, businesses and the government as well. As interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency has steadily increased over the past few years, trading volume and market size of cryptocurrency have increased at an astonishing speed. As a result, analysis and monitoring measures for blockchain networks, blocks, and transactions have become an important issue. In this paper, the method of clustering applied dimension reduction as a method of bitcoin network analysis is proposed. The proposed method applies the analysis way using K-means algorithm with PCA to block data in bitcoin collected by this research team.
Data Stream Mining Techniques
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the advent of medical IoT devices, the types and volumes of medical images have significantly increased. Retrieving of medical images is of great importance to facilitate disease diagnosis and improve treatment efficiency. However, it may raise privacy concerns from individuals, since medical images contain patients' sensitive and private information. Existing studies on retrieval of medical data either fail to protect sensitive information of medical images or are limited to a single image data provider. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based system for medical image retrieval with privacy protection. We first describe the typical scenarios of medical image retrieval and summarize the corresponding requirements in system design. Using the emerging blockchain techniques, we present the layered architecture and threat model of the proposed system. In order to accommodate large-size images with storage-constrained blocks, we capture a carefully selected feature vector from each medical image and design a customized transaction structure, which protects the privacy of medical images and image features. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities of future research.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Brain Tumor Detection and Classification
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques