Introduction: The notion of electronic voting has evolved over a period of time replacing the traditional system which was based on paper ballots. Several types of electronic voting systems exist, still the implementation is partial and there is a scope for improvement for making it more secure and user-friendly.Method In this paper, a proof-of-concept is presented which aims to address the issues and challenges in the electoral system, by using the concept of Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts. Result: These electronic electoral processes propose a centralized solution that can be easily tampered, thus increasing the problem of distrust in the citizens. To overcome this blockchain technology can be used for implementing mobile based electronic voting system. Blockchain technology is aiding in the development of novel digital services that are more secure and reliable. Discussion: The main objective of this paper is to depict how a feasible, secure and reliable mobile voting system can be built by implementing the concept of blockchain and smart contracts. Conclusion: The issue of security and transparency in the voting system can be addressed using blockchain technology. The present study aims to fulfil these gaps partially by providing use-case for the voting process which is based on mobile and blockchain technology.
Christian Killer, Lucas Thorbecke, Bruno Rodrigues, Eder J. Scheid · 6 authors
Trust in electoral processes is fundamental for democracies. Further, the identity management of citizen data is crucial, because final tallies cannot be guaranteed without the assurance that every final vote was cast by an eligible voter. In order to establish a basis for a hybrid public verifiability of voting, this work (1) introduces Proverum, an approach combining a private environment based on private permissioned Distributed Ledgers with a public environment based on public Blockchains, (2) describes the application of the Proverum architecture to the Swiss Remote Postal Voting system, mitigating threats present in the current system, and (3) addresses successfully the decentralized identity management in a federalistic state.
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has revolutionized several industries (e.g., manufacturing, health, transport, education, among others) by allowing objects to connect to the Internet and, thus, enabling a variety of novel applications. In this sense, IoT devices have become an essential component of smart cities, allowing many novel and useful services, but, at the same time, bringing numerous cybersecurity threats. The paper at hand proposes BlockSIEM, a blockchain-based and distributed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution framework for the protection of the aforementioned smart city services. The proposed SIEM relies on blockchain technology to securely store and access security events. Such security events are generated by IoT sentinels that are in charge of shielding groups of IoT devices. The IoT sentinels may be deployed in smart city scenarios, such as smart hospitals, smart transport systems, smart airports, among others, ensuring a satisfactory level of protection. The blockchain guarantees the non-repudiation and traceability of the registry of security events due to its features. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, our proposal is implemented using Ethereum and validated through different use cases and experiments.
This work analyses blockchain-mediated decentralization based on a systematic review of the scholarly understanding of the term ‘decentralization’ across multiple disciplines from computer to political sciences, examining how its various meanings are reflected in popular discourse on blockchains and distributed ledgers. The paper aims to capture the rigorous cross-domain understanding of decentralization and its most important features, and to map the commonalities and differences between it and some closely related concepts such as distribution, disintermediation and peer-to-peer (P2P). Across all domains, decentralization appears to be used as a solution to problems requiring non-trivial coordination across heterogeneous stakeholders. Blockchain-mediated decentralization appears to have unique characteristics reflecting an idiosyncratic set of authority-related values prevalent in so-called ‘crypto’ online communities. Within blockchain space, the article argues against the binary positioning of ‘decentralization’ and ‘centralization’, proposing a dialectical approach and arguing that a system’s authority allocation is a quality positioned on a spectrum between purely decentralized and completely centralized, noting how a blockchain set-up could simultaneously both have facets that are significantly centralized and others that are not. The authors document their systematic review findings and propose a framework for understanding blockchain-mediated decentralization, suggesting a definition, and outlining new directions for further human-centric research into distributed ledger technologies and for designing decentralized ecosystems.
Lukas Mastilak, Marek Galinski, Pavol Helebrandt, Ivan Kotuliak · 5 authors
Communication on the Internet consisting of a massive number of Autonomous Systems (AS) depends on routing based on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Routers generally trust the veracity of information in BGP updates from their neighbors, as with many other routing protocols. However, this trust leaves the whole system vulnerable to multiple attacks, such as BGP hijacking. Several solutions have been proposed to increase the security of BGP routing protocol, most based on centralized Public Key Infrastructure, but their adoption has been relatively slow. Additionally, these solutions are open to attack on this centralized system. Decentralized alternatives utilizing blockchain to validate BGP updates have recently been proposed. The distributed nature of blockchain and its trustless environment increase the overall system security and conform to the distributed character of the BGP. All of the techniques based on blockchain concentrate on inspecting incoming BGP updates only. In this paper, we improve on these by modifying an existing architecture for the management of network devices. The original architecture adopted a private blockchain implementation of HyperLedger. On the other hand, we use the public blockchain Ethereum, more specifically the Ropsten testing environment. Our solution provides a module design for the management of AS border routers. It enables verification of the prefixes even before any router sends BGP updates announcing them. Thus, we eliminate fraudulent BGP origin announcements from the AS deploying our solution. Furthermore, blockchain provides storage options for configurations of edge routers and keeps the irrefutable history of all changes. We can analyze router settings history to detect whether the router advertised incorrect information, when and for how long.
The inter-domain routing with BGP is highly vulnerable to malicious attacks, due to the lack of a secure means of verifying authenticity and legitimacy of inter-domain routes. Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a new security infrastructure to prevent the most devastating prefix hijacks in BGP by maintaining a Route Origin Authorization (ROA) repository. However, RPKI is a centralized hierarchical architecture that may empower the centralized authorities to unilaterally revoke or compromise any IP prefixes under their control. To eliminate the risks of RPKI, we present ROAchain, a novel BGP security infrastructure based on blockchain. Different from RPKI, ROAchain is a decentralized architecture, in which each AS maintains a globally consistent and tamper-proof ROA repository, authenticating the legitimacy of route origin and preventing BGP prefix hijacks. To ensure the strong consistency, scalability, and security of ROAchain, a novel consensus algorithm is proposed, in which the credence value, collective signing, sharding, and a penalty mechanism are introduced. Moreover, a compatibility design is proposed without changing the current BGP protocol. Finally, ROAchain is implemented in Golang and validated on the Google Cloud.
A blockchain is a distributed, digitized and consensus-based secure information storage mechanism. The present article provides an overview of blockchain based e-voting systems. The primary purpose of this review is to study the up-to-date state of blockchain-based voting research along with associated possible challenges while aiming to forecast future directions. The methodology applied in the review is a systematic review approach. Following an introduction to the basic structure and features of the blockchain in relation to e-voting, we provide a conceptual description of the desired blockchain-based e-voting application. Symmetrical and asymmetrical cryptography improvements play a key role in developing blockchain systems. We have extracted and reviewed 63 research papers from scientific databases that have advised the adoption of the blockchain framework to voting systems. These articles indicate that blockchain-supported voting systems may provide different solutions than traditional e-voting. We classified the main prevailing issues into the five following categories: general, integrity, coin-based, privacy and consensus. As a result of this research, it was determined that blockchain systems can provide solutions to certain problems that prevail in current election systems. On the other hand, privacy protection and transaction speed are most frequently emphasized problems in blockchain applications. Security of remote participation and scalability should be improved for sustainable blockchain based e-voting. It was concluded that frameworks needed enhancements in order to be used in voting systems due to these reservations.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohammad Doost, Alireza Kavousi, Javad Mohajeri, Mahmoud Salmasizadeh
Voting is one of the important aspects of a democratic society in which people can express their opinions in a formal and legitimate way. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in electronic voting (e-voting) systems. E-voting is a modern method of vote casting which is based on cryptographic tools. In many proposed scheme, it is a need to have a trusted entity to manage to take the votes and properly counting them. Recently and in the light of pivotal features of blockchain technology including immutability, transparency, and decentralization, blockchain based schemes have received considerable attention. In 2017, J. P. Cruz and Y. Kaji presented a blockchain based e-voting scheme with the help of some cryptographic concepts like bit-commitment and blind signatures. The vital property of their scheme was that it did not use any kind of anonymous channel which is a common and of course hard to implement tool in many e-voting protocols. In this paper, we address some security issues in the mentioned scheme and propose an improved version that has the edge on the prior one in terms of preserving privacy of voters and efficiency when it comes to large scale elections. We show how to use private blockchain instead of a public blockchain to provide more efficiency and privacy. Also, by utilizing proper entities, some security breaches like double voting are nrevented.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Zahra Fathi, Amir Jahangard Rafsanjani, Fatemeh Habibi
In cyber threat information sharing, secure transfer and protecting privacy are very important. In this paper we solve these issues by suggesting a platform based on private permissioned Blockchain, which provides us with access control as well. The platform is called Anon-ISAC and is built on the Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) zero-knowledge proof scheme. It makes use of permissioned Blockchain as a way to keep identity anonymous. Organizations can share their information on incidents or other artifacts among trusted parties, while they keep their identity hidden. This will save them from unwanted consequences of exposure of sensitive security information.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the Internet era, electronic voting has replaced traditional paper voting forms with advantages of low cost, high work efficiency, and low errors. A blockchain as a trustworthy and secure decentralized and distributed network provides new ideas for electronic voting schemes. The paper proposes an electronic voting scheme based on a distributed SM2 encryption scheme with differential privacy mechanism, designing and implementing smart contracts based on the proposed secure voting scheme. The performance of the proposed voting scheme is tested on the Ethereum's private chain, and its test contents include the computing cost and network consumption of key methods. The test results show that the blockchain-based voting scheme designed in this paper has good performance, and it also proves the feasibility and correctness of the voting scheme.
Abstract Currently, attribute-based authentication provides a feasible solution for fine-grained access control in cloud environment. However, the existing schemes can not solve the following problems at the same time, that is, how to ensure that the computation cost of the client does not depend on the size of underlying access structure, and how to introduce distributed authorities to manage and maintain the attribute universe. To solve the above problems, an efficient multi-authority attribute-based authentication scheme is proposed. The new scheme uses the technique of distributed attribute-based encryption to realize the access control of anonymous users, and reduces users’ computation burden by optimizing the standard implementation zero-knowledge proof and outsourcing users’ computing tasks in the authentication stage. Under the new definition of security, it can be proved that the new scheme is secure and satisfies many attractive properties, such as introducing distributed authorities, supporting outsourcing computation, satisfying attribute anonymity.
Syada Tasmia Alvi, Mohammed Nasir Uddin, Linta Islam
The voting method is the mechanism for implementing the people's view to better administer the system. Throughout recent years, conventional votes have pleased neither people nor government authorities. They are not entirely safe since ballots are simple to strike. It also challenges voter safety and transparency. Additionally, counting the votes takes too long. Modification of voting worldwide is an intriguing issue in current voting system. To solve these problems Digital technology is used in the voting phase for citizens in many nations. Digitalisation alone can not fix the issues fully. There are also many ways of manipulating or modifying digital technology and hindering voting. There should be fairness, independence and impartiality in the voting method. By analyzing the aforementioned problems, this research work combines the digitalisation with the blockchain technology to provide a voting mechanism. The main goals of our voting mechanism are to provide integrity, anonymity, privacy, and security of voters. With the use of markle tree and fingerprint hash, the data integrity and anonymity, privacy, security of the voters has been achieved in our proposed digital voting systems.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The increasing of digital technology today has helped many people to fulfill their needs. But the election system, still conventionally using paper in its implementation. Elections in general still use a centralized system, where there is an organization that manages it. Some of the problems that may occur in traditional electoral systems are that there are organizations that have full control over the database and system, so the possibility of hacking the database is quite a big opportunity.Blockchain innovation is one arrangement that can be utilized in light of the fact that it has a decentralized framework and the whole database is duplicated by all clients. Blockchain itself has been used by Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptocurrency which is known as a decentralized system. By using the blockchain in database recording on an e-voting system can reduce one source of fraud that is database manipulation. This study discusses the recording of voting data using blockchain technology. The implementation of Smart Contracts contained in the Ethereum Blockchain will be implemented to create this voting system
India is the largest democracy in the world, and in spite of that, it faces various challenges on a daily basis that hinder its growth like corruption and human rights violations. One of the ugliest phases of corruption and political mayhem is visible during the election process where no stone is kept unturned in order to gain power. However, it is the common citizen who suffers most in terms of clarity as well as security when it comes to his/her vote. Blockchain can play a very important role in ensuring that the voters registering their votes are legit and the counting of votes is not manipulated in any way. It is also needed in today's times where the world is available to people in their smart phones to also give them the opportunity to register their votes hassle free via their smart phones without having to worry about the system getting hacked. Therefore, in this chapter, the proposed layout will be based on a smart contract, using Ethereum software to create an e-voting app. In this chapter, the authors have proposed a secure e-voting framework through blockchain mechanism.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated huge potential in a variety of real-world applications. However, some significant considerations like fairness, transparency and trustworthiness are still challenging when applying AI to trust-oriented applications such as E-voting. E-voting plays a significant role in democratic societies, which requires voters and initiators have strong mutual trust. In this paper, we aim to facilitate the consolidation of AI ecosystems by developing a blockchain-based traceable self-tallying e-voting system. We take advantage of an event-oriented linkable group signature and a homomorphic time-lock puzzle to balance the anonymity and accountability, and the voting scale and efficiency of an e-voting system. The proposed e-voting protocol supports additional functions like multi-choice and self-tallying. We prove that the proposed protocol satisfies anonymity, time-bounded privacy, linkability and full-traceability. We also evaluate the time cost of off-chain operations and the gas cost of on-chain operations, which show the proposed e-voting protocol is practical and can be adopted in real-world applications.
Alberto GarcÃa-MartÃnez, Stefano Angieri, Bingyang Liu, Fei Yang · 5 authors
The current mechanism to secure Border Gateway Protocol relies on the resource public key infrastructure (RPKI) for route origin authorization. The RPKI implements a hierarchical model that intrinsically makes lower layers in the hierarchy susceptible to errors and abuses from entities placed in higher layers. In this article, we present InBlock, a distributed autonomous organization that provides decentralized management of IP addresses based on blockchain, embedding an alternative trust model to the hierarchical one currently implemented by the RPKI. By leveraging on blockchain technology, InBlock requires consensus among the involved parties to change existent prefix allocation information. InBlock also fulfills the same objectives as the current IP address allocation system, i.e., uniqueness, fairness, conservation, aggregation, registration, and minimized overhead. InBlock is implemented as a set of blockchain smart contracts in Ethereum, performing all the functions needed for the management of a global pool of addresses without human intervention. Any entity may request an allocation of addresses to the InBlock registry by solely performing a (crypto) currency transfer to the InBlock. We describe our InBlock implementation and we perform several experiments to show that it enables fast address registering and incurs in very low management costs.
Ben Weintraub, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Stefanie Roos
Payment channel networks (PCN) enable scalable blockchain transactions without fundamentally changing the underlying distributed ledger algorithm. However, routing a payment via multiple channels in a PCN requires locking collateral for potentially long periods of time. Adversaries can abuse this mechanism to conduct denial-of-service attacks. Previous work on denial-of-service attacks focused on source routing, which is unlikely to remain a viable routing approach as these networks grow.
In this work we examine the effectiveness of attacks in PCNs that use routing algorithms based on local knowledge, where compromised intermediate nodes delay or drop transactions to create denial-of-service. We focus on SpeedyMurmurs as a representative of such protocols. Our attack simulations show that SpeedyMurmurs is resilient to attacks by randomly selected intermediate nodes because it dynamically adjusts using local knowledge. We further consider attackers that control a significant fractions of paths and we show that this ability to route around problematic regions becomes insufficient for such attackers. We propose methods to incentivize payment channel networks with less central nodes and more diverse paths and show through simulation that these methods effectively mitigate the identified denial-of-service attacks.
Cherukupalli Veda Vyasa Aditya, Rajesh Kannan Megalingam
Zero knowledge proof is a powerful cryptographic protocol that is utilized to establish data security whilst ensuring and maintaining user anonymity. ZKP has relatively less complex computational requirements as compared to the other protocols for authentication. Conventional authentication schemes are susceptible to attacks such as MiTM, IP spoofing, DoS, replay and other eavesdropping based attacks, when the data is shared across an untrusted network. This paper shows an approach to ensure authentication of a device over an untrusted network whilst maintaining and safeguarding user credentials, by using the concepts of ZKP protocol.
Perhaps the most advanced application of the distributed ledger technology (DLT), the Blockchain is a decentralized system that is known to store immutable metadata with the use of robust cryptographic hashes and consensus mechanisms. The very foundation of the Blockchain is the establishment of trust-less transactions in peer-to-peer networks. Having been deemed to set off a whirlwind in Industry 4.0 as we know it and starting out with the groundbreaking Bitcoin, this relatively new technology is on the way to prove that it can find applications in almost every imaginable sector. While most people focus only on cryptocurrencies; this disruptive technology, in fact, offers utilities to many administrative operations, fintech procedures, and everyday services which could earlier only be done offline and/or in person, that can now be safely moved to the Internet as Software as a Service (SaaS) models. What makes Blockchain a powerful tool for digitalizing everyday facilities is the introduction of smart contracts, as brought forward foremost by the Ethereum platform. Considering today"s technology, Blockchain may create one of the most prominent alternatives to traditional voting in terms of security, consistency and speed. The Blockchain technology, fortified by Smart Contracts, enables enhanced data verifiability and lowered costs while maintaining the openness and transparency of the voting process. The anonymity of voters, the security of ballot transmission and the veracity of votes during the billing phase are the most fundamental requirements for voting. In this paper, a potential use case of Blockchain, an E-Voting protocol, is proposed, that utilizes the Blockchain as a transparent ballot box to cast votes.
E-Voting using Blockchain Technology - written by Abhishek Subhash Yadav , Yash Vandesh Urade , Ashish Uttamrao Thombare published on 2020/07/14 download full article with reference data and citations
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We present a work in progress strategy for implementing privacy in Nano at the consensus level, that can be of independent interest. Nano is a cryptocurrency that uses an Open Representative Voting (ORV) as a consensus mechanism, a variant of Delegated Proof of Stake. Each transaction on the network is voted on by representatives and each vote has a weight equal to the percentage of their total delegated balance. Every account can delegate their stake to any other account (including itself) and change it anytime it wants. The fundamental goal of this paper is to construct a tool for the consensus algorithm to function without knowing the individual balances of each account. The tool is composed of three different schemes. The first is a weighted threshold secret sharing scheme based on Shamir's secret sharing scheme, used to generate a secret amongst a set of distributed parties, which will be a private key of an additive homomorphic ElGamal cryptosystem over elliptic curves. The second is a polynomials commitment scheme used to make the previous scheme verifiable, i.e., without the need for a trusted dealer. Finally, the third scheme is used to decrypt an ElGamal ciphertext without reconstructing the private key, which, because of this, can be used multiple times.