The blockchain is a distributed technology which allows establishing trust among unreliable users who interact and perform transactions with each other. While blockchain technology has been mainly used for crypto-currency, it has emerged as an enabling technology for establishing trust in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, a naive usage of the blockchain for IoT leads to high delays and extensive computational power. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture dedicated to being used in a supply chain which comprises different distributed IoT entities. We propose a lightweight consensus for this architecture, called LC4IoT. The consensus is evaluated through extensive simulations. The results show that the proposed consensus uses low computational power, storage capability and latency.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has received extensive attention recently, but still a large of technical challenges such as scalability and security. This paper helps to find where recent studies have been focused on and offers a broad perspective relating blockchain applications and smart contracts, their main problems and corresponding solutions and will help to specify gaps and future research. The study extracted 292 articles from top Digital Libraries such as IEEE, ACM, Science Direct and Springer. After a detailed review process only 28 publications were considered based on defined inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Klitos Christodoulou, Elias Iosif, Soulla Louca, Marinos Themistocleous
Blockchain-based systems such as the one proposed to support the Bitcoin protocol are primarily used to enable the execution of financial transactions in a decentralized manner. The characteristics of blockchains have inspired the development of new types of applications that are shifting from its original purpose. Besides supporting the recording of crypto-currency transactions blockchains are also being exploited as mediums of recording arbitrary chunks of data. One technique for embedding such data on the public Bitcoin blockchain is using the OP_RETURN opcode creating an unspendable transaction.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Internet of things (IoT) is becoming increasingly important and ubiquitous in home and industries. It makes object a part of the Internet and fuses the digital and physical world together. However, if not properly secured, IoT device can be vulnerable to tampering that can change the content of the data stored in the network. Blockchain, a technology used in cryptocurrency, can be used for addressing the security and privacy challenges in IoT. Blockchain can be beneficial to IoT by adding more security layer and reducing dependency on a central authority. This paper proposed to develop a blockchain based platform for IoT application. Blockchain technology can be utilized to provide a decentralized network, creating a more secured IoT system. The proposed blockchain network will be based on Ethereum blockchain network allowing the use smart contract application for management of IoT devices. Experiment is conducted to show the feasibility of the blockchain based platform. The proposed blockchain based platform is capable of managing several IoT devices connected to the network.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
An exemplary paradigm of how an AI can be a disruptive technological paragon via the utilization of blockchain comes straight from the world of deep learning. Data scientists have long struggled to maintain the quality of a dataset for machine learning by an AI entity. Datasets can be very expensive to purchase, as, depending on both the proper selection of the elements and the homogeneity of the data contained within, constructing and maintaining the integrity of a dataset is difficult. Blockchain as a highly secure storage medium presents a technological quantum leap in maintaining data integrity. Furthermore, blockchain’s immutability constructs a fruitful environment for creating high quality, permanent and growing datasets for deep learning. The combination of AI and blockchain could impact fields like Internet of things (IoT), identity, financial markets, civil governance, smart cities, small communities, supply chains, personalized medicine and other fields, and thereby deliver benefits to many people.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Iago Sestrem Ochôa, Leonardo Calbusch, Karize Viecelli, Juan F. De Paz · 6 authors
Over the past decade, smart crime-fighting solutions have been adopted by the major cities around the world. In this context, license plate recognition (LPR) systems have been used by public safety forces to monitor vehicle movement. However, current systems store vehicle location data indistinctly, without differentiating vehicles that are under criminal investigation from those that are not. This monitoring may be used to infer personal data about the owner of the vehicle, resulting in a violation of privacy by disregarding data protection laws. This paper presents a study about the use of technologies to ensure privacy in the Internet of Things and proposes a model to protect data collected by LPR systems. Our solution uses private blockchains regulated by smart contracts to ensure that the storage of data complies with current data protection laws.
Vehicle License Plate Recognition
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aug 1, 2019·2019 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)
Rabeya Bosri, Abdur Razzak Uzzal, Abdullah Al Omar, A S M Touhidul Hasan · 5 authors
The voting system is the process to take the opinion of people to run the constitution properly. Fairness, independence, and unbiasedness should be present in the voting system. Hence, it must be a transparent and secured process so that everybody can express their own opinion freely. Worldwide vote manipulation is an intriguing problem in existing voting systems. Since people in different countries are using digital technology in the voting process (e.g., Optical Scan Voting system, Internet Voting system, Electronic Voting system) instead of traditional way (e.g., Ballot Box). Only digitization could not solve the issues completely. Because still there are numerous ways to manipulate or tamper digital technology and hamper the voting process. To build a secure electronic voting environment, we introduce an application of blockchain technology as a service for the distributed electronic voting system. With the use of blockchain, we achieve data integrity which is a necessary attribute of a voting environment. The anonymity of the voters, privacy, and security of the voting environment is the main goal of this work. Through the design of our system and with the help of blockchain we have solved all the security issues in the voting environment.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Most blockchain-based identity authentication systems focus on using blockchain to establish the public key infrastructure (PKI). It can solve the problem of single point of failure and certificate transparency faced by traditional PKI systems, but there are still some problems such as complex certificate management and complex certificate usage process. In this paper, we propose an identity authentication scheme based on blockchain and identity-based cryptography (IBC). The scheme implements a decentralized private key generator (PKG) by deploying the smart contract in Ethereum blockchain, and uses the IBC signature algorithm and challenge-response protocol during the authentication process. Compared with other blockchain-based identity authentication systems, the scheme not only prevents the single point of failure, but also avoids the complex certificate management, has lower system complexity, and resists impersonation attack, man-in-the-middle attack and replay attack.
Cryptography and Data Security
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
The decentralized and distributed nature of the Blockchain technology makes it a suitable solution to improve the device-to-device communication security challenges. This work explores the possible application of blockchain technology to address the IoT security problems under the 5G cellular system. We propose a multi-layer security network model for IoT network based on blockchain technology. The proposed model addresses the problems associated with the actual deployment of the blockchain technology by dividing the IoT network into a multi-layer decentralized system. In the proposed model, we divide the network into K-unknown clusters using Evolutionary Computation algorithms which are Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). A local authentication mechanism is chosen for authentication and authorization purpose within each cluster handed by each Cluster Head (CH). The high security and credibility assurance of the blockchain technology provides an authentication mechanism for CHs communication with each other and Base Stations (BS) through a local blockchain implementation without a central authority. We also propose a global blockchain implementation for BSs communications. Finally, our proposal implements an open source blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric to verify the proposed system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aug 1, 2019·2019 IEEE 21st International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 17th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 5th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS)
Bitcoin, as the spearhead of cryptocurrencies, is playing a more and more critical role in the world. With the increasing number of users in Bitcoin, the public has risen the demand for transaction throughput, and many hard forks are generating by the continuous throughput improvement. Meanwhile, the vulnerability of Bitcoin's incentive mechanism also makes it vulnerable to be attacked by generating soft forks. Without a robust throughput scheme, Bitcoin suffers from hard forks, soft forks and possible attacks like undercutting attack. In this work, we create a useful model to describe the throughput and the incentive mechanism of Nakamoto consensus protocol. Based on our model, We find that the throughput, which is far higher than user needs, will result in soft forks which reduce the consistency of Bitcoin in the future. We design a robust throughput scheme to reduce the soft forks and hard forks by automatically adjusting block size according to users' needs. In our experiments, we simulate attacks on Bitcoins and our scheme at different mining powers. We find that the soft fork block rate of Nakamoto consensus protocol without block reward is 6.0%, and our scheme can reduce the soft fork block rate to 0.6% under the attacker with the mining power of 0.25.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Malik Hamza Murtaza, Zahoor Ahmed Alizai, Zubair Iqbal
This paper presents a very simple approach for a fair electronic voting system that guarantees anonymity, coercion resistance, correctness, easy tallying, eligibility, fairness, high availability, integrity, robustness, voter authentication, voter confidentiality, vote verifiability and public verifiability of any electoral process. These properties are achieved using blockchain technology. A relatively new type of zero knowledge proof known as zkSNARKs has been used to provide voter unlinkability.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Data stored in different kinds of Database management systems is always prone to tampering through internal or external sources. To detect such malicious changes in the database we use various Database Tampering Detection methods. A major find in this area was to use one-way cryptographic hash functions as well as use of digital watermarking to detect any tamper in the data. But these techniques won't work on Distributed Database. In this paper, we have put forth the idea of using a Distributed Database to store data and we can easily detect any malicious transaction using Blockchain technology in it. It is simply a digital ledger bound using cryptographic principles.
Digital and Cyber Forensics
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Xiaoyu Li, Cheng Su, Yan Xiong, Wenchao Huang · 5 authors
Blockchain is a decentralized cryptocurrency framework which has gained considerable attention in research and many industries. Ethereum is an implementation based on blockchain technology. Ethereum blockchain offers smart contracts, a piece of program codes which can execute and record the transactions in blockchain. Users can use smart contracts to create their own tokens based on ERC-20 standard, and token smart contracts have been used to manage and transfer tokens, carrying millions dollars worth of virtual currencies. However, keeping token smart contracts secure can be difficult. When smart contracts are deployed on Ethereum successfully, they cannot be changed. Due to the openness of Ethereum, both users and attackers can invoke contracts. So errors in smart contracts have led and will lead to a loss. For example, the DAO bug led to a 60 million US dollar loss in June 2016. Therefore, the researches on security of smart contracts are urgently important. In this paper, we use a formal approach to verify smart contracts. We apply formal verification on a concrete smart contract example, BNB contract, which is one of the most popular token contracts. We analyze the contract and discover the two attributes in the contract, one is transfer attribute involving the functions of transferring tokens operations, and the other is owner attribute which involves the authority of contract owner. We verify these two attributes respectively. We model the contract using SAPIC, the applied pi calculus and then verify by Tamarin prover. We specify the processes of modeling and verifying. The results show we cannot find an attack path. The research method reduces the complexity of verifying smart contracts and can be used to analyze complex contracts.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Jiazhuo Lyu, Zoe L. Jiang, Xuan Wang, Zhenhao Nong · 6 authors
E-voting plays a significant role in social activities. The trust of the voting results and the privacy of each voter are always the most important concerns in designing secure e-voting system. In this paper, we design a decentralized trustless e-voting system based on the smart contract. To guarantee the correctness of the voting result, the smart contract on Blockchain is used to provide a trusted public bulletin board and trusted computing environment. To hide the identity of each voter as well as avoid multiple voting, linkable ring signature is used for each voter to group a signing ring. In addition, to make sure that all voters will see the voting result at the same time, or nobody can get it, threshold encryption without trusted third party is used to make secret-key secretly before tally stage. Moreover, the trust (power) of the voting system is separated to all voters. Even though some of them are malicious, the final result will not be influenced. The contract is deployed on the Ethereum private network. Some feasibility and cost analysis on money and time are also provided.
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Fengkie Junis, Faisal Malik Widya Prasetya, Farouq Ibrahim Lubay, Anny Kartika Sari
Blockchain-based smart contract has become a growing field in the blockchain technology. What was once a technology used to solve digital transaction issues turns out to have some wider usage, including smart contract. The development of smart contract can be traced from the numerous platforms facilitating it, however the issue on how well each platform works as oppose to each other has yet been fully explored. The usage of smart contract can be seen from the applications that are built on top of the smart contract platform, such as the tokenization of real world to virtual world assets. However smart contract contains several issues concerning security and codifying which could be solved by various tools that are proposed by existing research. This paper aims to revisit the blockchain-based smart contract technology in order to understand and discuss the research gaps gathered from existing research and to provide guidance for future research.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Ethereum blockchain is essentially a globally replicated public database.\nPrograms called smart contracts can access this database. Over 10 million smart\ncontracts have been deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Executing a method of\na smart contract generates a transaction that is also stored on the blockchain.\nThere are over 1 billion Ethereum transactions to date. Smart contracts that\nare transparent about their function are more successful than opaque contracts.\nWe have therefore developed a tool (ContractVis) to explore the transparency of\nsmart contracts. The tool generates a replay script for the historic\ntransactions of a smart contract. The script executes the transactions with the\nsame arguments as recorded on the blockchain, but in a minimal test\nenvironment. Running a replay script provides insights into the contract, and\ninsights into the blockchain explorer that was used to retrieve the contract\nand its history. We provide five concrete recommendations for blockchain\nexplorers like Etherscan to improve the transparency of smart contracts.\n
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Images are critical part of investigations, they are referred to and regarded, to gather information, document and create “memory” of a crime scene. Crime scene images are considered as vital criminal evidence in the court of law; hence, it is imperative that the authenticity of such images be maintained and that they be verifiable. The advancement in technology in this digitally proliferated era allows for easy doctoring of crime scene images. Digital watermarking, and blockchain have been used in other research works to authenticate and verify digital content or digital documents. In this paper we propose the use of watermarking and cryptographic blockchain to validate forensic crime scene images.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques