Léo Besançon, Catarina Ferreira da Silva, Parisa Ghodous
Current solutions for designing and building decentralized blockchain applications lack interoperability. Consequently, blockchains and existing technologies do not integrate well in a unified framework. This integration is necessary to work around some of the blockchains constraints, such as scalability of transactions and ergonomics. Indeed, blockchains are not suitable for huge data storage, but there are distributed data storage solutions that can be used in a decentralized blockchain application. Regarding ergonomics, the use of blockchain technology should be in the background and transparent for users that may not know how to set up and secure a blockchain-based application.We propose an architecture aiming to easily link existing decentralized technologies and blockchains. We then discuss the impact of this architecture for the video game industry. As a result, we propose an original data representation of blockchain gaming assets in order to improve data exchanges in this industry.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Z. Zinonos, Panayiotis Christodoulou, Andreas S. Andreou, Savvas A. Chatzichristofis
The IoT ecosystem is evolving quickly, developing several applications in different sectors. The majority of these applications use centralized infrastructures something that poses several challenges especially related to trust and data security. Recently, blockchain has been introduced as an effective solution to IoT applications trying to provide solutions to these challenges. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized IoT application using blockchain technology, namely, ParkChain. The ParkChain application operates in a way that no one can delete, revert, hack or question the time a registered vehicle securely entered a parking area. In order to evaluate ParkChain, we have implemented the smart contract on top of Ethereum Blockchain along with a traditional Image Processing / Computer Vision approach for License Plate Recognition, and using a Raspberry Pi we control the access on a parking place. We report on several experiments that assess the performance of ParkChain application.
Open access
Vehicle License Plate Recognition
Smart Parking Systems Research
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Chaehyeon Lee, Heegon Kim, Sajan Maharjan, Kyungchan Ko · 5 authors
Blockchain technology provides the advantage of maintaining a network without third party intervention, providing transparency because all participants have distributed ledgers with the same data. Using these characteristics, blockchain technology is being used in various fields, but the anonymity of blockchain can be exploited for illegal trades in the Darknet market. Therefore, a monitoring system for transactions occurring on the blockchain is needed. This paper proposes a monitoring system and an explorer to show the results collected from the system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Currency Recognition and Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Wesley Dingman, Aviel Cohen, Nick Ferrara, Adam Lynch · 7 authors
Blockchain technology has recently emerged as the primary platform for the transfer of digital currency. This technology, which has been heralded as a revolutionary tool to facilitate the transfer of funds between participating parties, is still in its infancy and should be subjected to thorough scrutiny. In recent years, researchers have attempted to uncover a litany of bugs embedded within these distributed systems; however, there does not yet exist a formal and standardized method for their classification. In this paper, we present the first formal classifications of known bugs in smart contract systems using NIST's Bugs Framework and propose two new classes: Distributed System Protocol (DSP) and Distributed System Resource Management (DRM).
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Tu Bui, Daniel Cooper, John Collomosse, Mark Bell · 11 authors
We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we describe a novel deep network architecture for computing compact temporal content hashes (TCHs) from audio-visual streams with durations of minutes or hours. Our TCHs are sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering) but invariant to the codec used to encode the video. This is necessary due to the curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across multiple independent archives. We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of the United Kingdom, Estonia and Norway participated.
Ehab Zaghloul, Tongtong Li, Matt W. Mutka, Jian Ren
Blockchain is a technology that was proposed to enable the decentralized digital currency, Bitcoin. Since its inception, blockchain has been widely used in many other areas, including tracing sensor data and mitigating its duplication in IoT applications, the healthcare industry, and e-voting. In this article, we provide a comprehensive review and analysis of the major security and privacy issues of Bitcoin and blockchain, the major challenges, and opportunities in utilizing the technology. First, we present a comprehensive background of Bitcoin and the preliminary on security. Second, the major security threats and countermeasures of Bitcoin are investigated. We analyze the risk of double-spending attacks, evaluate the probability of success in performing the attacks, and derive the profitability for the attacker to perform such attacks. Third, we analyze the underlying Bitcoin peer-to-peer network security risks and Bitcoin storage security. We compare three types of Bitcoin wallets in terms of security, types of services, and their tradeoffs. Finally, we discuss the security and privacy features of alternative cryptocurrencies and present an overview of emerging technologies today. Our results can help Bitcoin users to determine a tradeoff between the risk of double-spending attempts and the transaction time delay or confidence before accepting transactions. These results can also assist miners to develop suitable strategies to get involved in the mining process and maximize their profits.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Searching for available parking spaces is a major problem for drivers especially in big crowded cities, causing traffic congestion and air pollution, and wasting drivers' time. Smart parking systems are a novel solution to enable drivers to have real-time parking information for pre-booking. However, current smart parking requires drivers to disclose their private information, such as desired destinations. Moreover, the existing schemes are centralized and vulnerable to the bottleneck of the single point of failure and data breaches. In this paper, we propose a distributed privacy-preserving smart parking system using blockchain. A consortium blockchain created by different parking lot owners to ensure security, transparency, and availability is proposed to store their parking offers on the blockchain. To preserve drivers' location privacy, we adopt a private information retrieval (PIR) technique to enable drivers to retrieve parking offers from blockchain nodes privately, without revealing which parking offers are retrieved. Furthermore, a short randomizable signature is used to enable drivers to reserve available parking slots in an anonymous manner. Besides, we introduce an anonymous payment system that cannot link drivers' to specific parking locations. Finally, our performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can preserve drivers' privacy with low communication and computation overhead.
Blockchain has emerged as a transformative technology, from its beginning as the basis of cryptocurrencies to widerapplications in areas such as property registration and insurance due to its characteristic as a distributed ledger which canremove
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is a disruptive technique that finds many applications in FinTech, IoT, and token economy. Because of the asynchrony of network, the competition of mining, and the nondeterministic block propagation delay, forks in the blockchain occur frequently which not only waste a lot of computing resources but also result in potential security issues. This paper introduces PvScheme, a probabilistic verification scheme that can effectively reduce the block propagation delay and hence reduce the occurrence of blockchain forks. We further enhance the security of PvScheme to provide reliable block delivery. We also analyze the resistance of PvScheme to fake blocks and double spending attacks. The results of several comparative experiments show that our scheme can indeed reduce forks and improve the blockchain performance.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Measurement of energy especially electricity consumption becomes an issue in big cities. Electricity usage monitoring is becoming more crucial and there is a need for the instant view of active energy usage. Solutions like smart grids are possible. Smart grids give a view in macro-level, there is also a need of a micro-level view. We mean a small region's or customer's usage when we mean micro-level view. The privacy of the personal data and the user's trust in the system should also be considered in these scenarios. This study aims to propose such an alternative system which uses blockchain technology and Internet of Things (IoT) devices for the metering and billing of the customer for the electric network. The trust and privacy issues are aimed to be solved. Blockchain can provide safer and more transparent solutions with its decentralized structure. Raspberry Pi is used to simulate metering, Hyperledger Fabric is selected as a blockchain system. A scalable and energy efficient energy tracking system with blockchain and IoT devices is proposed. A prototype system is formed and the possible usage scenario is simulated on the prototype.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The emergence of Internet-of-Things (IoT) has attracted a massive response from different stakeholders including industry, academia and research community due to the wide range of applications it provides. IoT enables devices with storage, computation and communication capabilities to connect to the Internet, thus providing various applications such as smart transportation, smart healthcare, smart industry, logistics and smart homes, to name a few. Since, IoT devices generates sensitive information, therefore, security is an important issue in IoT networks. Recently, Blockchain (BC) is proposed as a revolutionary technology which can be integrated within IoT to provide desired level of security and privacy. However, the integration of BC within IoT networks is extremely challenging. The major contribution of this study is three-fold. (1) Firstly, we proposed a tier-based architecture “Blockchain in Internet-of-ThingS (BITS)” which can support BC within IoT networks. (2) Secondly, we highlighted various applications of BC in IoT networks, and (3) Lastly, we provided various challenges and future research directions in the realization of BC in IoT networks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In a democratic country like India (which is the largest democracy in the world), Voting plays a major role in the selection of government officials as well as showing our opinion how the governing body to be formed. Time to time, researches are conducted in order to tackle the difficulties in the centralized voting system to make it more anonymous, reliable and secure while preventing any kind of frauding. Even though the use of e-voting through the electronic medium, we have to face well-known problems of maintenance and fraud. Currently, various researches are conducting in-order to make secure and reliable voting system while tackling issues of anonymity and security. Through Decentralized System, focus is drifting towards making Voting Process simple, secure and anonymity in the hand of the public. This paper presents a literature review on the papers and the techniques used to tackle voting challenges.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This article presents WekaCoin, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency based on a new distributed consensus protocol called Proof-of-Learning. Proof-of-learning achieves distributed consensus by ranking machine learning systems for a given task. The aim of this protocol is to alleviate the computational waste involved in hashing-based puzzles and to create a public distributed and verifiable database of state-of-the-art machine learning models and experiments.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Blockchain technology has been one of the major innovations in recent years. Crypto-currencies and decentralized applications are increasingly adopted. Their principles led the foundation for new ideas underlying others distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). In particular, decentralized storage employs non-recursive functions and similar algorithms compared to the Blockchain technology. Furthermore, digital signatures procedures have been used for storage validation. This paper summarizes IPFS and Swarm technologies and exposes how we managed to hide our malware on distributed storage. Our demonstration's results illustrate the possibility to hide malicious content by segregating it and reveal that decentralized storages have many concerns and lack security verification procedures.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is the core technology underlying the first decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, introduced by Nakamoto in 2008. Since then, blockchain technology has many more advancements that are being developed and experimented. In particular, recent blockchain platforms such as Ethereum offer general and executable scripts, namely smart contracts, that can be employed to develop decentralized applications (DApps) in many domains beyond payment. However, the transparency of blockchain data raises concerns for many applications that require high privacy level. Therefore, many privacy enhancing technologies have been applied to DApp development, including zero knowledge proof (ZKP). This paper focuses on a particular kind of ZKP, called zero knowledge range proof (ZKRP), that has been applied in blockchain-based payments for banks. ZKRP allows a user to convince other people that a secret value actually lies within an interval without revealing any information about the secret. Here we introduce a new ZKRP which has the following remarkable features: (1) Non-interactive: No communication is required between a user and a verifier during the proof. (2) Range-flexibility: There is no limitation on the lower bound and the upper bound of the range except that they are natural numbers. (3) Efficiency: Our scheme is modified from that of Pang et al. (2010), yet achieves better security and is more efficient than their scheme. We believe our new ZKRP can be beneficial to the development of DApps and can extend the application scope to more scenarios.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency scheme which has decentralized electronic payment system. The transaction records of bitcoin are stored in public ledger which is connected to the blockchain. The reliability of bitcoin is based on the incentive with compatible proof-of-work that depends on the distributed concord protocol. For a specific state of problem, the attacker can maximize his\her revenue by understanding cryptographic scheme in order to utilize his\her computational power. It shows that a selfish miner earn huge amount of incentives for initiating a block withholding attack within a mining pool. In this work, we implemented various attacks to prevent the pools from rogue miners and rogue pool administrator.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The previous blockchain data transmission techniques in industrial Internet of Things (IoT) have low security, high management cost of the trading center, and big difficulty in supervision. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure FaBric blockchain-based data transmission technique for industrial IoT. This technique uses the blockchain-based dynamic secret sharing mechanism. A reliable trading center is realized using the power blockchain sharing model, which can also share power trading books. The power data consensus mechanism and dynamic linked storage are designed to realize the secure matching of the power data transmission. Experiments show that the optimized FaBric power data storage and transmission has high security and reliability. The proposed technique can improve the transmission rate and packet receiving rate by 12% and 13%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed technique has good superiority in sharing management and decentralization.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques