Tokens are often referred to as the killer application of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Some even believe that basically everything can be tokenized, meaning that it can be represented by a tradable digital token. With decentralized P2P networks that hold and distribute the tokens, one can build various decentralized applications around them. As a digital asset on top of a cryptocurrency, crypto tokens are managed by a smart contract, most commonly on Ethereum. A widespread high-level categorization of tokens distinguishes between payment tokens, security tokens, and utility tokens. The need for clarifying the differences lies in the fact that in most jurisdictions, security tokens are more heavily regulated than other tokens. In this work, we contribute to the detection and classification of crypto tokens from bytecode. First, we examine how ideas on regulation are currently incorporated into respective standards. Then, we discuss methods for identifying deployed token contracts from bytecode. Furthermore, we analyze deployed contracts regarding the standards to which they comply, and the type of token they may represent. Moreover, we investigate the actual usage of tokens. Our empirical analysis uses the transaction data from the Ethereum main chain up to block 8750000, mined on Oct 16, 2019.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This project aims to create a blockchain-based model that addresses key challenges in digital voting. The goal is to develop a secure and transparent system that eliminates common issues such as delays in result announcements, voter identity verification concerns, and security risks [1]. Voting is the backbone of any democracy, and ensuring its integrity is crucial. Traditional digital voting systems often face problems like fraud, manipulation, and lack of transparency. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and tamper-proof nature, offers a promising solution. It functions as a distributed ledger that records transactions securely in a peer-to-peer network, making it nearly impossible to alter past data [2]. This technology brings several benefits to voting, including decentralization, security, transparency, immutability, and voter anonymity [3]. A major highlight of this project is the integration of blockchain with smart contracts, which adds an extra layer of security and automation to the voting process [4]. The system is designed to work on the Ethereum blockchain, using smart contracts written in Solidity and accessed through blockchain wallets [5]. By eliminating the need for a central authority to oversee elections, this approach ensures a fair and transparent voting process where every vote is securely recorded and cannot be tampered with [6]. In essence, this project reimagines digital voting by leveraging blockchain’s strengths, making elections more secure, efficient, and trustworthy.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bithin Alangot, Daniël Reijsbergen, Sarad Venugopalan, Paweł Szałachowski
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an\nunderlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is\ncritical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise\nthe client can be convinced to accept a maliciously forked view of the\nblockchain. In such an eclipse attack, the client is unable to reliably\ndistinguish the canonical view of the blockchain from the view provided by the\nattacker. The consequences of this can be catastrophic if the client makes\nbusiness decisions based on a distorted view of the blockchain transactions. In\nthis paper, we investigate the design space and propose two approaches for\nBitcoin clients to detect whether an eclipse attack against them is ongoing.\nEach approach chooses a different trade-off between average attack detection\ntime and network load. The first scheme is based on the detection of suspicious\nblock timestamps. The second scheme allows blockchain clients to utilize their\nnatural connections to the Internet (i.e., standard web activity) to gossip\nabout their blockchain views with contacted servers and their other clients.\nOur proposals improve upon previously proposed eclipse attack countermeasures\nwithout introducing any dedicated infrastructure or changes to the Bitcoin\nprotocol and network, and we discuss an implementation. We demonstrate the\neffectiveness of the gossip-based schemes through rigorous analysis using\noriginal Internet traffic traces and real-world deployment. The results\nindicate that our protocol incurs a negligible overhead and detects eclipse\nattacks rapidly with high probability, and is well-suited for practical\ndeployment.\n
Wenfeng Liu, Yu Zhang, Lu Liu, Shuyan Liu · 6 authors
The domain name system (DNS) is the infrastructure of many services and applications, thus the availability and consistency of the domain name resolution process are crucial but have long troubled DNS. The availability problem is caused by a denial-of-service (DoS) attack or a single point of failure (SPOF). The consistency problem originates from the lack of a forced data synchronization mechanism between authoritative server replicas or between parent/child authoritative servers. We proposed a novel blockchain-based domain name resolution and management architecture named FI-DNS to solve the above problems fundamentally. FI-DNS solves availability and consistency problems in the name resolution process from the mechanism level and guarantees the authenticity and integrity of name resolution results by using public-key cryptography. FIDNS also supports root zone collaborative management based on smart contracts, which is compatible with the current governance model led by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). We implemented the prototype system to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the FI-DNS architecture. We built an experimental environment with real domain name data, evaluated the name resolution performance and stability of the FI-DNS prototype system, and compared the prototype system with DNS.
In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based solution for the recovery of an SDN controller back to a previously known state upon sudden failure. A lightweight minimal Blockchain ledger containing metadata details about each controller event is maintained by the switches. The set of all instructions given by the controller to the switches denotes the state of the controller at that instant. Whenever a new event occurs, the meta-information about it gets stored in the Blockchain which is updated in the switches after regular epochs. Upon sudden failure and subsequently coming back online again, the controller downloads all the tables and information from the respective switches. It checks and compares the metadata contained in the Blockchain with those data received from the switches. In addition to the existing security services provided by Blockchain, the proposed scheme can further solve the controller failure problem. The performance of the proposed solution is measured through simulation. The proposed scheme with the metadata-based solution saves about 75% of space and a controller can securely recover with a duration of 50 Sec.
Smart Cities enclose various industries, sectors, and components. A Smart City application benefits from the data collected using a tremendous number of sensors serving to establish an accurate corporative decision. However, the communication between different components and application of a Smart City exhort security measures as it faces critical security attacks and integrity issues. To medicate this dilemma, researches have used the assistant of Blockchain to secure Smart Cities and improve its decision’s accuracy. Yet, with the recent development of Quantum Computers, Quantum-based algorithms are certainly menacing the security of classical encryption together with Blockchain itself. Thus, threaten the insurance of Blockchain-based application including critical applications such as Smart Cities. In this paper, we demonstrate the Blockchain-based Smart Cities’ framework and we present an understanding overview that encloses the menaces of a Quantum computer on Blockchain and Blockchain-based applications essentially Smart City. We explain as well some Post-Quantum solutions concerning the security of Blockchain-based Smart City.
Durbadal Chattaraj, Sourav Saha, Basudeb Bera, Ashok Kumar Das
Software Defined Networking (SDN) becomes a de facto standard for the future Internet. SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane of a proprietary network asset to ensure better programmability and security for designing more innovative future network applications. Presently, the SDN framework does not have proper access control mechanism among different entities, namely SDN applications, SDN controllers and switches. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a blockchain-based access control scheme for the SDN framework. The proposed scheme has the capability to resist various well-known attacks and alleviate the existing single point of controller failure issue in SDN.
DDoS attacks are the most commonly performed cyber-attacks with a motive to suspend the target services and making them unavailable to users. A recent attack on Github, explains that the traffic was traced back to “over a thousand different autonomous systems across millions of unique endpoints”. Generally, there are various types of DDoS attacks and each attack uses a different protocol and attacker uses a botnet to execute such attacks. Hence, it will be very difficult for organizations to deal with these attacks and going for third parties to secure themselves from DDoS attacks. In order to eliminate the third parties. Our proposed system uses machine learning algorithms to identify the incoming packet is malicious or not and use Blockchain technology to store the Blacklist. The key benefit of Blockchain is that blacklisted IP addresses are effectively stored, and usage of such infrastructure provides an advantage of extra security mechanism over existing DDoS mitigation systems. This paper has evaluated three different algorithms, such as the KNN Classifier, the Decision Tree Classifier, Random Forest algorithm to find out the better classifying algorithm. Tree Based Classifier technique used for Feature Selection to boost the computational time. Out of the three algorithms, Random Forest provides an accuracy about 95 % in real-time traffic analysis.
Ying Gao, Yijian Chen, Hongliang Lin, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues
Software-defined networks offer lower latency service and massive intelligent devices connectivity for the Internet of Things(IoT). As one of the pivotal applications in the IoT, smart community provides smart services for residents through the SDN technique. However, the centralized SDN suffers from single point of attacks such as DDoS from IoT devices and has the issue of data leakage. In this paper, we use blockchain and proxy re-encryption(PRE) technologies to tackle these challenges. The blockchain authorizes all devices in the network to improve their credibility and authenticity. What's more, a blockchain-based data sharing framework that combines a PRE scheme is introduced for secure device-to-device communication in smart communities. A series of smart contracts are designed for flexible operations of searching and updating records on the blockchain. The experiments reveal that our design is highly efficient and has high performance.
S. Vivek, R.S. Yashank, Yashas Prashanth, N. Yashas · 5 authors
E-Voting or electronic voting is a means for the election process to be conducted without the use of traditional paper ballots. The e-voting process, to be implemented in a large-scale scenario, requires the addressing of concerns concerning the security and reliability of such a system. The Blockchain technology, introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto using the cryptographic currency Bitcoin in 2008, opens up possibilities of designing and developing a secure, transparent and decentralized system with the absence of a third party for access and control, in the election procedure of casting and counting of votes.
Abstract Cryptocurrencies play a major role in the global financial ecosystem. Their presence across different geopolitical corridors, including in repressive regimes, has been one of their striking features. In this work, we leverage this feature for bootstrapping Censorship Resistant communication. We conceptualize the notion of stego-bootstrapping scheme and its security in terms of rareness and security against chosencovertext attacks. We present MoneyMorph , a provably secure stego-bootstrapping scheme using cryptocurrencies. MoneyMorph allows a censored user to interact with a decoder entity outside the censored region, through blockchain transactions as rendezvous, to obtain bootstrapping information such as a censorshipresistant proxy and its public key. Unlike the usual bootstrapping approaches (e.g., emailing) with heuristic security, if any, MoneyMorph employs public-key steganography over blockchain transactions to ensure provable cryptographic security. We design rendezvous over Bitcoin, Zcash, Monero, and Ethereum, and analyze their effectiveness in terms of available bandwidth and transaction cost. With its highly cryptographic structure, we show that Zcash provides 1148 byte bandwidth per transaction costing less than 0.01 USD as fee.
The global daily data generation is estimated to be more than 2.5 quintillion bytes, and more than 90 percent of the total data produced is generated in the last two years. Most of this data is being generated and controlled by very few centralized agencies in the Web 2.0 internet architecture. This causes issues, including data manipulation, lack of privacy, and data leaks historically and is not just limited to the fields mentioned. This paper proposes a Web 3.0 based architecture which eliminates the centralized agencies and to promote a fully decentralized, secure, and transparent internet. It leverages IPFS, a peer to peer distributed hypermedia transfer protocol. Ethereum and smart contracts create a secure decentralized mechanism for initiating data-based payments. Furthermore, the proposed architecture uses zero-knowledge proofs and proxy re-encryption mechanisms to enhance the privacy of the nodes in the network.
Wenlei Qu, Lei Wu, Wei Wang, Zhaoman Liu · 5 authors
Summary Compared with traditional voting methods, electronic voting can effectively avoid the phenomenon of fraud for personal gains in various links, it is faster and more accurate in the tallying stage. However, many electronic voting systems have many problems such as inability to verify ballots, easy to be forged, and low computing efficiency. We propose an electronic voting protocol based on homomorphic signcryption and blockchain. The protocol makes the voting process public through blockchain and replaces the traditional trusted third party with the smart contract. It uses the homomorphic encryption algorithm and the homomorphic signcryption algorithm to encrypt and sign the ballot and uses their aggregation properties to perform homomorphic tally on the encrypted votes. This not only reduces the excessive burden on the voters but also improves the voting efficiency. At the same time, it can satisfy the security of electronic voting, and the amount of calculation is small, so it is more convenient and flexible to use in large‐scale voting.
Learning from data owned by several parties, as in federated learning, raises challenges regarding the privacy guarantees provided to participants and the correctness of the computation in the presence of malicious parties. We tackle these challenges in the context of distributed averaging, an essential building block of federated learning algorithms. Our first contribution is a scalable protocol in which participants exchange correlated Gaussian noise along the edges of a network graph, complemented by independent noise added by each party. We analyze the differential privacy guarantees of our protocol and the impact of the graph topology under colluding malicious parties, showing that we can nearly match the utility of the trusted curator model even when each honest party communicates with only a logarithmic number of other parties chosen at random. This is in contrast with protocols in the local model of privacy (with lower utility) or based on secure aggregation (where all pairs of users need to exchange messages). Our second contribution enables users to prove the correctness of their computations without compromising the efficiency and privacy guarantees of the protocol. Our verification protocol relies on standard cryptographic primitives like commitment schemes and zero knowledge proofs.
In this note, we remark that the aggregation property of the BLS signature scheme yields an efficient Content Extraction Signature (CES). This construction can be used to build digital credentials that support selective disclosure in various settings. Interestingly, this construction is efficient and well suited to build credential issuance schemes with various applications in the client-server or in the distributed ledger models. Finally, we sketch a protocol that combines the CES with the use of a NIZK which allows to prove predicate satisfaction on claims extracted from a credential, while keeping the data secret.
Çalışmanın amacı, günümüz dijital çağında geleneksel muhasebe süreçlerinden teknolojik süreçlere geçişte blockchain (blok zinciri) teknolojisini muhasebe ve mali kontroller açısından incelemektir. Bu bağlamda çalışma, blok zinciri uygulamalarına, yol haritasına, kurumsal uygulamalarda blok zinciri etkinliğine ve blok zinciri temelli muhasebe sistemine odaklanmaktadır. Blok zinciri temelli üç taraflı muhasebe sistemi ile birlikte, Kurumsal Kaynak Planlama (ERP) sistemlerinin blok zinciri ile entegrasyonu ve teknolojinin bir diğer yönü olan kod ile yazılmış, belirli bir blok zinciri katmanına gömülü akıllı sözleşmeler detaylı olarak ele alınmıştır. Blok zinciri temelli üç taraflı muhasebe sistemi; çift girişli sistemin üzerine kurulacak, içine gömülü üçüncü bir blok zinciri katmanı olacak hem kurum içinde hem de dış taraflarla yapılan işlemleri kaydedecek bir sistem önermektedir.
Voting is a formal expression of one's choice.Though the process is simple, it has far-reaching and deep-lying impacts.Through a vote, people get a channel to voice their opinion anonymously.There are issues with the orthodox traditional voting system, which is used across the world today.Studies, presented throughout the paper, would highlight how millions of people have missed out on voicing their opinion, or get proper representation, due to the many short-comings of the dated traditional voting systems.Blockchain is a comparatively new technology.There have been advances and research made to make use of blockchains in the world of finance and ledger management.But precious little has been done to tackle simpler but widerreaching problems of voting.The novel approach suggested here would give the voters a chance to vote from the comfort of their homes, or, without adjusting their busy everyday schedules, and make sure everyone gets a proper representation as well.A combination of blockchain technology and fuzzy logic has been used here, to achieve a solution, that we think would help modernize the voting system and ensure greater satisfaction among the voters that their views have been represented in one way or the other.Using this novel approach, we believe that more people would be encouraged to vote and a greater number of voices would get proper representation.
EOSIO has become one of the most popular blockchain platforms since its mainnet launch in June 2018. In contrast to the traditional PoW-based systems (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), which are limited by low throughput, EOSIO is the first high throughput Delegated Proof of Stake system that has been widely adopted by many decentralized applications. Although EOSIO has millions of accounts and billions of transactions, little is known about its ecosystem, especially related to security and fraud. In this paper, we perform a large-scale measurement study of the EOSIO blockchain and its associated DApps. We gather a large-scale dataset of EOSIO and characterize activities including money transfers, account creation and contract invocation. Using our insights, we then develop techniques to automatically detect bots and fraudulent activity. We discover thousands of bot accounts (over 30% of the accounts in the platform) and a number of real-world attacks (301 attack accounts). By the time of our study, 80 attack accounts we identified have been confirmed by DApp teams, causing 828,824 EOS tokens losses (roughly \$2.6 million) in total.
E-voting reduced the cost of election and provided convenience to some extent as compared to the traditional approach of pen and paper but it was considered to be unreliable as anyone having access to the machine physically can obstruct the machine and alter the votes. Also in order to control the e
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques