Nowadays, more and more sensors, devices and applications are connected in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), producing massive real-time flows which need to be scheduled for Quality-of-Service provision. To realize application-aware and adaptive flow scheduling, the problem of traffic classification must be addressed at first. When edge computing paradigm is introduced into IIoT, the traffic classification service can be deployed on edge node in the near-end. Recently, deep-learning-based IIoT traffic classification methods show better performance, but the computational cost of deep learning model is too high to be deployed on edge node. Moreover, increasingly unknown flows generated by new devices and emerging industrial APPs lead to frequent training of traffic classifiers. It is difficult to migrate the complex process of classifier training from cloud server to edge nodes with limited resources. To address these issues, we take the benefits of hash mechanism and consensus mechanism in blockchain to design a lightweight IIoT traffic classification service, which is more applicable for edge computing paradigm. First, inspired by the hash mechanism in blockchain and the learning to hash for big data, we propose a new learning-to-hash method named extension hashing. By this method, we can build the set of binary coding tress (BCT set), then generating hash table for more efficient k-nearest neighbor-based classification without complex classifier training. Then, we design a new voting-based consensus algorithm to synchronize the BCT sets and the hash tables across edge nodes, thereby providing the traffic classification service. Finally, we conduct data-driven simulations to evaluate the proposed service. By comparing traffic classification results on public data set, we can see that the proposed service achieves the highest classification accuracy with the minimal time cost and memory usage.
Digital watermarking can be used to implement mechanisms aimed at protecting the copyright of digital content distributed on the Internet. Such mechanisms support copyright identification and content tracking by enabling content providers to embed perceptually invisible watermarks into the distributed copies of content. They are employed in conjunction with watermarking protocols, which define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can securely purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers. In this regard, the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” watermarking protocols can ensure both a correct content protection and an easy participation of buyers in the transactions by which to purchase the distributed content. They represent a valid alternative to the classic “buyer and seller” watermarking protocols documented in the literature. However, their protection schemes could be further improved and simplified. This paper presents a new watermarking protocol able to combine the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” design approach with the blockchain technology. The result is a secure protocol that can support a limited and balanced participation of both buyers and content providers in the purchase transactions of protected digital content. Moreover, the protocol can avoid the direct involvement of trusted third parties in the purchase transactions. This can reduce the actual risk that buyers or sellers can violate the protocol by illicitly interacting with trusted third parties. In fact, such peculiarities make the proposed protocol suited for the current web context.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Trust of user address (i.e., wallet address) in Bitcoin is dependent on not who user is but the amount of Bitcoin currency in user's wallet address. So we cannot necessarily trust a Bitcoin user with wallet address. Actually, there is no method for assigning trust to user addresses in Bitcoin. Although we can provide trust to user address by inserting certificate into Bitcoin transaction using OP_RETURN, it still has some problems about wastefulness. In this paper, we propose a new method that efficiently assigns trust to user address using Bitcoin transfer only, which does not need to use OP_RETURN. Our proposed method can realize a trust providing mechanism for “Blockchain 1.0” without adding any new function. Main idea of our method is that “token coin” (Bitcoin transfer itself) can be used as a trust providing mechanism. For feasibility study, we experimentally show the trust assigning in the Bitcoin testnet. Furthermore, our method can be easily adopted into other cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Voting is a central component of a country's political life cycle. Privacy, authentication and integrity of citizens' votes and their data are considered to be essential to any e-voting program. In order to resolve these concerns, we propose a stable e-voting system based on the principles of blockchain and machine learning. We use blockchain to ensure the integrity and security of votes, machine learning model to detect intrusion in voting data centers and e-voting stations. In the proposed model, we use the concepts of personal and public blockchain. The personal blockchain is used for the purposes of voter registration and voting. The public blockchain is used to maintain the integrity of the personal data of the voters by storing the root hash derived from the Merkle hash tree and revealing the results of the voting stations as soon as the voting process is completed. The proposed blockchain-based e-voting system offers transparency, treasury, confidence and prevents intrusion into the information exchange network.
Nov 1, 2020·2020 International Conferences on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) and IEEE Congress on Cybermatics (Cybermatics)
Social interaction is the foundation of the Internet. Nevertheless, contract drafting is a tedious task and often too complex for normal social interactions between individuals or small service providers, which has led to the rise of centralized services to manage contracts, purchases or other arrangements. In order to give regular users more privacy and a place for self-organization, this paper describes the definition of a novel protocol that allows the creation of generic smart contracts which can be processed by machines or create social interaction between humans while maintaining a high level of privacy and anonymity.
Smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain are notoriously known as vulnerable to external attacks. Many of their issues led to a considerably large financial loss as they resulted from broken payments by digital assets, e.g., cryptocurrency. Existing research focused on specific patterns to find such problems, e.g., reentrancy bug, nondeterministic recipient etc., yet may lead to false alarms or miss important issues. To mitigate these limitations, we designed the SafePay analysis framework to find unfair payments in Ethereum smart contracts. Compared to existing analyzers, SafePay can detect potential blockchain transactions with feasible exploits thus effectively avoid false reports. Specifically, the detection is driven by a systematic search for violations on fair value exchange (FVE), i.e., a new security invariant introduced in SafePay to indicate that each party “fairly” pays to others. The preliminary evaluation validated the efficacy of SafePay by reporting previously unknown issues and decreasing the number of false alarms.
Muntadher Sallal, Steve Schneider, Matthew Casey, François Dupressoir · 8 authors
This paper discusses an approach for incremental change to an online voting system, introducing a verifiability layer based on the Selene protocol to a trusted-third-party-based system, resulting in a fully verifiable and transparent e-voting system. The paper also describes how to use Distributed Ledger Technology as a component of the implementation of Selene to manage the verifiability data in a distributed way for resilience and trust.
Electronic voting (e-voting) systems have emerged as a convenient alternative to traditional paper-based voting, but they also pose significant security and integrity challenges. Cryptographic techniques provide solutions to ensure confidentiality, verifiability, and integrity in voting systems. This paper explores various cryptographic approaches used in secure voting systems, including homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain-based voting. We analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability in different voting environments. Furthermore, we discuss emerging challenges, threats, and future research directions in securing e-voting systems.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Lei Wu, Yufeng Hu, Yajin Zhou, Haoyu Wang · 8 authors
One reason for the popularity of Bitcoin is due to its anonymity. Although several heuristics have been used to break the anonymity, new approaches are proposed to enhance its anonymity at the same time. One of them is the mixing service. Unfortunately, mixing services have been abused to facilitate criminal activities, e.g., money laundering. As such, there is an urgent need to systematically understand Bitcoin mixing services. In this paper, we take the first step to understand state-of-the-art Bitcoin mixing services. Specifically, we propose a generic abstraction model for mixing services and observe that there are two mixing mechanisms in the wild, i.e. {swapping} and {obfuscating}. Based on this model, we conduct a transaction-based analysis and successfully reveal the mixing mechanisms of four representative services. Besides, we propose a method to identify mixing transactions that leverage the obfuscating mechanism. The proposed approach is able to identify over $92$\% of the mixing transactions. Based on identified transactions, we then estimate the profit of mixing services and provide a case study of tracing the money flow of stolen Bitcoins.
Ali Mansour Al-madani, Ashok T. Gaikwad, Vivek Mahale, Zeyad A. T. Ahmed
Nowadays the use of the Internet is growing; E-voting system has been used by different countries because it reduces the cost and the time which used to consumed by using traditional voting. When the voter wants to access the E-voting system through the web application, there are requirements such as a web browser and a server. The voter uses the web browser to reach to a centralized database. The use of a centralized database for the voting system has some security issues such as Data modification through the third party in the network due to the use of the central database system as well as the result of the voting is not shown in real-time. However, this paper aims to provide an E-voting system with high security by using blockchain. Blockchain provides a decentralized model that makes the network Reliable, safe, flexible, and able to support real-time services.
5G communications proposed significant improvements over 4G in terms of efficiency and security. Among these novelties, the 5G Network Slicing seems to have a prominent role: deploy multiple virtual network slices, each providing a different service with different needs and features. Like this, a Slice Operator (SO) ruling a specific slice may want to offer a service for users meeting some requirements. It is of paramount importance to provide a robust authentication protocol, able to ensure that users meet the requirements, but providing at the same time a privacy-by-design architecture. This makes even more sense having a growing density of Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchanging private information over the network. In this paper, we improve the 5G network slicing authentication using a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) scheme: granting users full control over their data. We introduce an approach to allow a user to prove his right to access a specific service without leaking any information about him. Such an approach is SANS, a protocol that provides non-linkable protection for any issued information, preventing an SO or an eavesdropper from tracking users' activity and relating it with their real identities. Furthermore, our protocol is scalable and can be taken as a framework for improving related technologies in similar scenarios, like authentication in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) or other wireless networks and services. Such features can be achieved using cryptographic primitives called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). Upon implementing our solution using a state-of-the-art ZKP library and performing several experiments, we provide benchmarks demonstrating that our approach is affordable in speed and memory consumption.
The Bitcoin P2P network is at the core of all communications between clients.\nThe reachable part of this network has been explored and analyzed by numerous\nstudies. Unreachable nodes, however, are, in most part, overlooked.\nNonetheless, they are a relevant part of the network and play an essential role\nin the propagation of messages. In this paper, we focus on transaction\npropagation and show that increasing the participation of unreachable nodes can\npotentially improve the robustness and efficiency of the network. In order to\ndo that, we propose a few changes to the network protocol. Additionally, we\ndesign a novel transaction propagation protocol that explicitly involves\nunreachable nodes to provide better protection against deanonymization attacks.\nOur solutions are simple to implement and can effectively bring immediate\nbenefits to the Bitcoin network.\n
Stanisław Barański, Julian Szymański, Andrzej Sobecki, David Gil · 5 authors
In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving i-voting system based on the public Stellar Blockchain network. We argue that the proposed system satisfies all requirements stated for a robust i-voting system including transparency, verifiability, and voter anonymity. The practical architecture of the system abstracts a voter from blockchain technology used underneath. To keep user privacy, we propose a privacy-first protocol that protects voter anonymity. Additionally, high throughput and low transaction fees allow handling large scale voting at low costs. As a result we built an open-source, cheap, and secure system for i-voting that uses public blockchain, where everyone can participate and verify the election process without the need to trust a central authority. The main contribution to the field is a method based on a blind signature used to construct reliable voting protocol. The proposed method fulfills all requirements defined for i-voting systems, which is challenging to achieve altogether.
In agreements among anonymous users, smart contracts eliminate the need for a trusted intermediary and enforce its terms when the conditions set by the parties are met. Although smart contracts are mostly used for positive purposes, they have also been used for illegal activities due to their appealing characteristics in the criminal context. More specifically, a smart contract stimulates new forms of trustless collaboration among cybercriminals and the trend toward criminal use of smart contract can be more dangerous in collaborative attacks in terms of attacks' destructive power and sophistication.
In this paper, we present an architecture for real-world collaborative attacks based on criminal smart contracts (CSCs). We propose a CSC for the case of a collaborative distributed denial of service attack. In order to explore the feasibility and capture the characteristic of the attack-result, we formulate the attackers' interaction as an incomplete information game and prove that it has a unique dominant strategy equilibrium. We also model the proposed CSC as an incentive mechanism and prove that it is a strategy-proof and budget-balanced mechanism. Our numerical simulations show that the proposed incentive mechanism provides individual rationality and fairness to the collaborating attackers in its equilibrium.
In this era of disruption, voting methods in elections have been carried out using the system. But in the process, there are still some obstacles, such as the calculation of election results can still be manipulated. In the 2019 election between candidates A and B, according to the fast-counting technology, media candidate A gets the highest votes, but in electronic media states candidate, B gets the highest votes. This raises the possibility of manipulation of the vote. This study addresses the issues involved in delivering valid results and also authenticates the validity of voting data. The method in developing this research uses blockchain technology that can verify data from voting with a decentralized system. Decentralization on the blockchain allows each server to connect and have the same role and form a peer-to-peer network. Data tracking is easier, and when one server is in trouble, backups are easily performed by other servers, and the problematic server is temporarily removed from the blockchain network. The application of blockchain technology in electronic voting can produce data that cannot be manipulated and will be maintained authenticity.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices facilitate intelligent service delivery in a broad range of settings, such as smart offices, homes and cities. However, the existing IoT access control solutions are mainly based on conventional identity management schemes and use centralized architectures. There are known security and privacy limitations with such schemes and architectures, such as the single-point failure or surveillance (e.g., device tracking). Hence, in this paper, we present an architecture for capability-based IoT access control utilizing the blockchain and decentralized identifiers to manage the identity and access control for IoT devices. Then, we propose a protocol to provide a systematic view of system interactions, to improve security. We also implement a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed approach and evaluate the prototype using a real-world use case. Our evaluation results show that the proposed solution is feasible, secure, and scalable.
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless blockchain systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not yet fully understood. This paper identifies and analyzes a novel type of Denial-of-Service attack which is based on attracting routes, i.e., which exploits the way transactions are routed and executed along the channels of the network in order to attract nodes to route through the attacker. This attack is conceptually interesting as it highlights a fundamental design tradeoff for the defender (who determines its own routes): to become less susceptible to hijacking, a rational node has to pay higher fees to nodes that forward its payments.
Dan Boneh, Saba Eskandarian, Lucjan Hanzlik, Nicola Greco
In a Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE), a group of participants aim to randomly choose exactly one leader from the group with the restriction that the identity of the leader will be known to the chosen leader and nobody else. At a later time, the elected leader should be able to publicly reveal her identity and prove that she has won the election. The election process itself should work properly even if many registered users are passive and do not send any messages. Among the many applications of SSLEs, their potential for enabling more efficient proof-of-stake based cryptocurrencies have recently received increased attention.
In recent decades, several countries have faced political tensions due to citizens' perceptions that their elections are fraudulent; some electors have even chosen not to vote because they believe that the results may be falsified. Thus, electoral fraud is a major issue. E-governance and e-voting are now being used in many countries, some of which are investigating blockchain solutions. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential contributions of blockchain technology to peace on a worldwide level by securing voting systems. Unfortunately, this technology is complex and could potentially generate conflict between actors in elections. Taking an exploratory approach, the authors chose a qualitative method to address this specific topic. Election observers and blockchain experts were interviewed to identify the technology's strengths and weaknesses. Our results emphasize the importance of trust and human factors in the voting process.
E-voting is an application of in the election process. E-voting was developed to make the election process easier, safer and more practical. Blockchain technology is explained as a safe technology because of its distributed nature. Tso et al's e-voting is one of the e-voting mechanism that uses the ethereum smart contract blockchain. Tso et al e-voting application use asymmetric cryptography for the safety of its users in the form of Paillier's algorithm. This study proposed use of the AES-256 algorithm to secure key data on smart cards for e-voting process, SHA-256 for authentication, and secure communication protocols to secure the key in sending process. The key is stored in a ciphertext format with AES-256 encryption and SHA-256 as authentication algorithm. The results of implementing smart card prototypes as key storage in the Tso et al e-voting application shows that the proposed e-voting scheme has a key storage time of 0.774 seconds, a memory capacity of 572 bytes, with 0.472 seconds generation speed.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Miquel Ferriol-Galmés, Roger Coll Aumatell, Albert Cabellos‐Aparicio, Shoushou Ren · 6 authors
In the inter-domain routing infrastructure, a route leak is defined as a violation of the routing policy agreed between two Autonomous Systems (AS). Route leaks have resulted in large-scale outages on the Internet, taking down several services. Although route leaks seem a simple problem, the solution is complex because: (i) ASes consider -partially- routing policy private, (ii) lack of a formal and standard language to express routing policy and (iii) BGP lacks adequate cryptographic-based security. In this paper, we present an experimental analysis of a distributed ledger-based architecture that provides a solution to route leaks. Specifically, the routing policy is unambiguously expressed using a formal language, that is then stored in a blockchain. This decentralized architecture allows private policies and interfaces seamlessly with the current BGP infrastructure, requiring no changes to routers. We build a prototype to evaluate our proposed architecture using Hyperledger, we analyze its performance using a real-world BGP dataset. Our results show that our architecture scales linearly with relevant metrics. Additionally, we validate the architecture preventing an artificially introduced route leak in a realistic 10 AS topology.