Tang Nguyen, Long Vuong, Son Nguyen, Cam Pham · 5 authors
TomoChain1 is a blockchain based on Ethereum framework with the following advantages points: low transaction fee, fast confirmation time, double validation and randomization for security guarantees. In our previous technical white paper, we proposed Proof-of-Stake Voting (PoSV) consensus protocol, a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based blockchain protocol with a fair voting mechanism, rigorous security guarantees and fast finality. One of the key parts of PoSV is the double validation process, which requires randomization to generate the list of block verifiers (with uniform distribution and unpredictability) for each epoch. In other words, randomization of block verifiers in double validation is the key factor of reducing risks coming from paired hand-shaking attackers trying to commit malicious blocks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Cryptography is the art of converting readable data into indecipherable format using keys and vice versa. Strength of the algorithm is mainly measured by the complexity and CPU cycles required for cryptanalysis in the algorithm. But in an energy constrained environment like IoT, CPU intense complex algorithms will degrade the efficiency. Light-weight or cut down versions of symmetric and asymmetric cryptographies are found best suited for constrained environments. So accordingly, we in this paper have surveyed a lot of Hardware and software based Light-weight cryptographic algorithms in a quest to find the best suited cryptographic algorithm for signing and hashing blockchain in a constrained environment.
Cryptographic Implementations and Security
Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The first step in online shopping is, apparently, to choose a reliable supplier. However, consumers and merchants may have different perceptions of product quality, and this may result in business disputes. The dispute about buying inferior goods may be caused from simple product photos or merchants make over the top claims about their products. This dispute problem cannot be resolved completely, even though customers choose reputable e-commerce companies, e.g., Amazon.com and Alibaba.com. In the final analysis, the cause is that e-commerce companies do not adopt quality rating to evaluate products. If there is an alliance, among e-commerce companies and trusted organizations, which establishes credible product grading system (PGS), online shoppers may buy genuine product at a fair price from this e-commerce alliance. In this paper, we propose blockchain based PGS (BPGS) to deal with big data for this business model. The blockchain is a decentralized technology, and thus we can speed up the verification of product grading. In addition, for the proposed BPGS, 51% of attacks cannot be completed unless 51% of merchants and e-commerce companies in this alliance are simultaneously compromised. Therefore, our ecommerce environment based on BPGS is not only reliable but also secure.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Immutability is a core principle of blockchain platforms that help all participants to have an exact global log of transactions. Immutability is easier to achieve in permissioned blockchain platforms where a trusted group are the validators. In public platforms, this vital property of blockchain can be achieved only through decentralized economic mechanisms like Proof-of-Work(PoW). Blockchain along with the concept of asset tokenization provides liquidity to markets like stock trading and exchange other intangible objects. With changes in regulatory policies and/or government laws, there could be a requisite to alter the contents in such markets. We propose an idea of using Chameleon hash functions that will enable modification of a block without changing other block contents. In our proposal, the trapdoor key used to redact a block is split among major validators and is reconstructed using Multi-Party Computation(MPC). Redaction happens when the major validators agree the suggested changes by digitally signing the proposal. This eliminates the need to rely on a trusted party. We also propose an idea of using second trapdoor key that will be with the creator of the block. This can be used in scenarios where the block redaction should not happen without the consent of the creator.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Sabbir Ahmed, Soaibuzzaman, Mohammad Saidur Rahman, Mohammad Saiedur Rahaman
In this paper, we introduce an integrated smart parking system. The proposed integrated smart parking system brings multiple parking service providers together under a unified platform aiming to provide one-stop parking information services to the commuters in a smart city. However, the adaptation of such a system is prone to tempering while a massive amount of data is shared among different parties which raise concerns related to trust and performance. To address this challenge, we propose a blockchain-based architecture specific to the integrated smart parking systems. Finally, we present a set of design principles which shows the applicability of our proposed blockchain-based integrated parking system.
Smart Parking Systems Research
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
<p><span>Bitcoin uses elliptic curve cryptography for its keys and signatures, but the specific secp256k1 curve used is rather unusual. The ECDSA keys used to generate Bitcoin addresses and sign transactions are derived from some specific parameters. Due to this characteristic, several questions come up concerning Satoshi’s choice of this curve rather than that of the NIST standard secp256r1 curve. Former President Dan Brown’s address to Bitcoin users on the Bitcoin talk.org online forum concerning the use of secp256k1 in Bitcoin of SECG showed his surprise to see someone uses SECG secp256k1 instead of secp256r1 of NIST.</span><span>In this article, we will analyze the random secp256r1 curve and the Koblitz Secp256k1 curve (parameters, equation, automorphism…), by giving the strengths and weaknesses of each one of them, in order to justify the choice of Bitcoin’s creator, and then we will tackle the mining using the new graphic cards.</span></p>
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Gunit Malik, Kshitij Parasrampuria, Sai Prasanth Reddy, Seema Shah
Blockchain is peer-to-peer decentralized system that provides security, reliability, authenticity, immutability and transparency. It is an expandable list of records called blocks which are linked using cryptography. Blockchain by design, is resilient to modifications, it consists of an open distributed ledger that records all the transactions made between two parties which cannot be forged. This paper provides a unique model for document verification with use case of the government. Currently all issuing authorities are separate cells providing identity documents to a citizen. Due to this cellular nature document verification is a tedious and long process. The problem of falsifying documents is another issue within government bodies. We discuss the use of Blockchain to improve efficiency and security. The purpose of this project is to develop a private permissioned blockchain network where an individuals official documents can be shared by government bodies, organizations and educational institutions. Using the Blockchain technology, our platform achieves a decentralized system to share authenticated government documents between government bodies and private organizations without the need of a certain level of human intervention. With the concluding facts of this paper, it is observed that the process of document verification and issuing process's efficiency is drastically improved with our blockchain model. Along with this we reap benefits of security, reliability and transparency.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the domain of Internet of things there are large number of devices generating data in the network and submitting it to their respective configured data collectors. When the sensors are preconfigured by the data collectors, they can easily verify the data coming from those sensors for its authenticity using cryptography. But if a third party wants to buy that data, how can they trust the data collector for the authenticity of that data i.e whether the data they are buying is real data or some randomly generated stream of numbers. In fact, the only option left is to trust the claim made by the collectors that the data they are providing is authentic. This project resolves the trust issue by creating a distributed application using blockchains by distributing the trust factor to the entire network instead of trusting a single entity [5]. This system provides authenticity of data generated by sensor nodes in the network.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Linh Vo-Cao- Thuy, Khoi Cao-Minh, Chuong Dang-Le-Bao, Tuan Anh Nguyen
Blockchain, which is the underlying technology of the first cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has drawn a lot of global attention in recent years. Its notable characteristics of the distributed ledger, trustless system, and immutability not only makes it a disruptive innovation in the electronic payment industry but also potential solutions for other areas that require trust establishment. Electronic voting (E-voting) scheme is a use-case where all attributes of blockchain can offer a mechanism for an open, fair and universally verifiable electoral process. In this paper, we review the requirements and then propose Votereum, an E-voting system that utilizes the blockchain technology. The proposed system is empowered by Ethereum platform, including one server manages the entire system and the other handles all blockchain-related requests. The implementation is also deployed to Rinkeby testing network for evaluation on the feasibility and discussion on some security concerns, which are mentioned in the conclusion of this paper.
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This paper presents a literature review of Blockchain and Bitcoin technology future applications. Recently Blockchain has received special attention and is used as a new platform for digital information and to store encrypted data and process secure digital transactions. Noticeably, the majority of Blockchain cryptocurrency is structured based on the elliptic curves digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). In particular, Bitcoin uses special ECDSA called secp256k1. Losses of personal and organizational data occurred due to security breaches of data at small and large scales using traditional transactional and financial platforms. Furthermore, data on Blockchain and Bitcoin platforms are assumed to be highly encrypted and in secured state.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Arash Pourdamghani
In today's programmable blockchains, smart contracts are limited to being deterministic and non-probabilistic. This lack of randomness is a consequential limitation, given that a wide variety of real-world financial contracts, such as casino games and lotteries, depend entirely on randomness. As a result, several ad-hoc random number generation approaches have been developed to be used in smart contracts. These include ideas such as using an oracle or relying on the block hash. However, these approaches are manipulatable, i.e. their output can be tampered with by parties who might not be neutral, such as the owner of the oracle or the miners. We propose a novel game-theoretic approach for generating provably unmanipulatable pseudorandom numbers on the blockchain. Our approach allows smart contracts to access a trustworthy source of randomness that does not rely on potentially compromised miners or oracles, hence enabling the creation of a new generation of smart contracts that are not limited to being non-probabilistic and can be drawn from the much more general class of probabilistic programs.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mining pools, the main components of the Bitcoin network, dominate the computing resources and play essential roles in network security and performance aspects. Although many existing measurements of the Bitcoin network are available, little is known about the details of mining pool behaviors (e.g., empty blocks, mining revenue and transaction collection strategies) and their effects on the Bitcoin end users (e.g., transaction fees, transaction delay and transaction acceptance rate). This paper aims to fill this gap with a systematic study of mining pools. We traced over 1.56 hundred thousand blocks (including about 257 million historical transactions) from February 2016 to January 2019 and collected over 120.25 million unconfirmed transactions from March 2018 to January 2019. Then we conducted a board range of measurements on the pool evolutions, labeled transactions (blocks) as well as real-time network traffics, and discovered new interesting observations and features. Specifically, our measurements show the following. 1) A few mining pools entities continuously control most of the computing resources of the Bitcoin network. 2) Mining pools are caught in a prisoner's dilemma where mining pools compete to increase their computing resources even though the unit profit of the computing resource decreases. 3) Mining pools are stuck in a Malthusian trap where there is a stage at which the Bitcoin incentives are inadequate for feeding the exponential growth of the computing resources. 4) The market price and transaction fees are not sensitive to the event of halving block rewards. 5) The block interval of empty blocks is significantly lower than the block interval of non-empty blocks. 6) Feerate plays a dominating role in transaction collection strategy for the top mining pools. Our measurements and analysis help to understand and improve the Bitcoin network.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Data Stream Mining Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be executed solely by miners and are revealed entirely on-chain, resulting in reduced scalability and privacy. In this paper, we discuss that scalability and privacy of smart contracts can be enhanced by splitting a given contract into an off-chain contract and an on-chain contract. Specifically, functions of the contract that involve high-cost computation or sensitive information can be split and included as the off-chain contract, that is signed and executed by only the interested participants. The proposed approach allows the participants to reach unanimous agreement off-chain when all of them are honest, allowing computing resources of miners to be saved and content of the off-chain contract to be hidden from the public. In case of a dispute caused by any dishonest participants, a signed copy of the off-chain contract can be revealed so that a verified instance can be created to make miners enforce the true execution result. Thus, honest participants have the ability to redress and penalize any fraudulent or dishonest behavior, which incentivizes all participants to honestly follow the agreed off-chain contract. We discuss techniques for splitting a contract into a pair of on/off-chain contracts and propose a mechanism to address the challenges of handling dishonest participants in the system. Our implementation and evaluation of the proposed approach using an example smart contract demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in Ethereum.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Paul J. Taylor, Tooska Dargahi, Ali Dehghantanha, Reza M. Parizi · 5 authors
Since the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper on Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain has (slowly) become one of the most frequently discussed methods for securing data storage and transfer through decentralized, trustless, peer-to-peer systems. This research identifies peer-reviewed literature that seeks to utilize blockchain for cyber security purposes and presents a systematic analysis of the most frequently adopted blockchain security applications. Our findings show that the Internet of Things (IoT) lends itself well to novel blockchain applications, as do networks and machine visualization, public-key cryptography, web applications, certification schemes and the secure storage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This timely systematic review also sheds light on future directions of research, education and practices in the blockchain and cyber security space, such as security of blockchain in IoT, security of blockchain for AI data, and sidechain security.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Dongxiao Liu, Amal Alahmadi, Jianbing Ni, Xiaodong Lin · 5 authors
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is revolutionizing the retail industry for manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers to improve operational efficiency and consumer experience. In IIoT-enabled retail marketing, reputation systems play a critical role to boost mutual trust among industrial entities and build consumer confidence. In this paper, we focus on reputation management in the consumer–retailer channel, where retailers can accumulate reputations from consumer feedbacks. To encourage consumers to post feedbacks without worrying about being tracked or retaliated, we propose an anonymous reputation system that preserves consumer identities and individual review confidentialities. To increase system transparency and reliability, we further exploit the tamper-proof nature and the distributed consensus mechanism of the blockchain technology. With system designs based on various cryptographic primitives and a Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, our blockchain-based reputation system is more efficient to offer high levels of privacy guarantees compared with existing ones. Finally, we explore the implementation challenges of the blockchain-based architecture and present a proof-of-concept prototype system by Parity Ethereum. We measure the on/off -chain performance with the scalability discussion to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain miners processing the transactions and generating blocks are rational and incentivized by financial rewards. Prior research in blockchain security studied such financial incentives for the miners and identified attacks based on withholding and delaying block submissions. Among such attacks, the fork-after-withholding (FAW) attack is the state of the art and provides practical incentives to the rational attacker by increasing its reward at the expense of the rest of the miners in the compromised pool. To defend against FAW attack, we propose Silent Timestamping, which has the mining pool manager enforce the ordering of the shares. Implemented at the mining pool manager, Silent Timestamping does not require networking nor any behavior-or implementation-changes in the miners; the lack of the implementation overheads distinguish Silent Timestamping from other schemes which have been proposed but had limited success in practice. We analyze the optimal attacker behavior against Silent Timestamping and the effectiveness of Silent Timestamping against FAW attack. Silent Timestamping effectively nullifies the reward gain of the FAW attack and reduces the optimal FAW attacker strategy to be either the suboptimal block-withholding attack (which never submits the withheld block in the compromised pool and provides limited incentives for a rational attacker) or honest mining.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Data Stream Mining Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
As a collection of innovative technologies, blockchain has solved the problem of reliable transmission and exchange of information on untrusted networks. The underlying implementation is the basis for the reliability of blockchain, which consists of various cryptographic algorithms for the use of identity authentication and privacy protection of distributed ledgers. The cryptographic algorithm plays a vital role in the blockchain, which guarantees the confidentiality, integrity, verifiability and non-repudiation of the blockchain. In order to get the most suitable cryptographic algorithm for the blockchain system, this paper proposed a method using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to evaluate and score the comprehensive performance of the three types of cryptographic algorithms applied in the blockchain, including symmetric cryptographic algorithms, asymmetric cryptographic algorithms and hash algorithms. This paper weighs the performance differences of cryptographic algorithms considering the aspects of security, operational efficiency, language and hardware support and resource consumption. Finally, three cryptographic algorithms are selected that are considered to be the most suitable ones for block-chain systems, namely ECDSA, sha256 and AES. This result is also consistent with the most commonly used cryptographic algorithms in the current blockchain development direction. Therefore, the reliability and practicability of the algorithm evaluation pro-posed in this paper has been proved.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
S.V. Juno Bella Gracia, Dipendra Raghav, R Santhoshkumar, B Velprakash
Blockchain Based Aadhaar uses Blockchain platform for securing Aadhaar information. The system stores the Aadhaar data in a group of computers interconnected to each other. The Blockchain uses a hashing function to transform the data and produces a hash code. The hash code ensures the identity of user is kept secure. The data is stored in blocks in the nodes. The system also uses Ethereum Smart Contracts to ensure to only the authenticated data is accessed by the third parties. The Blockchain based Aadhaar uses distributed databases (decentralized databases) math and cryptography to record transactions, transactional data is secured and the data is stored in distributed small chunks and spreads across the entire network of computers, and so it is difficult to hack these systems than hacking the centralized or traditional servers.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Day to day revolutionizing technology is coming up with their positive impacts on our social life. And this all-time globally connected network enables us to access variety of resources easily. One such revolution is Blockchain. With its special characteristics of immutability and decentralized architecture, many services are shifting towards it. One potential application of blockchain can be found in e-voting schemes. It has been a challenge since a long time for building an e-voting system which satisfies all legal requirements of legislators. Distributed ledger technologies can offer infinite range of applications. This paper discusses various e-voting system frameworks conceptualized by different teams. Blockchain will bring its benefits on e-voting systems including immutability of votes, security of system, real-time validation and updation of count of votes in global ledger with not depending upon number of nodes in the network.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is an innovative application model that integrates distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, consensus mechanisms, digital encryption technology and other computer technologies. It is decentralized, secure, and Information disclosure. In the blockchain, digital encryption technology has a core position. The security of user information and transaction data is a necessary condition for the promotion of blockchain. The development of cryptography technology promotes and restricts the further development of blockchain. This paper outlines the infrastructure of blockchain, including the data layer, network layer, consensus layer, contract layer and application layer. The principles of encryption technology is introduced briefly, such as hash function, asymmetric cryptosystem, digital signature. The application of cryptography in all levels of blockchain is analyzed, including data layer, network layer, consensus layer, etc. It shows that cryptography runs through the whole blockchain system. The existing security problems of blockchain is analyzed, and the future research direction is expected.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques