The security and accountability issues are a challenge to the traditional structure from still widespread elections. General e-voting system use a centralized system, where one organization manages overall system. These organisations have full control over the database and system, allowing manipulation of the database. There should be no e-voting system to secure data and potential attacks should be able to withstand. Blockchain technology should solve certain voting problems. In this paper we are implementing an ethereum blockchain based electronic voting system. Ethereum blockchain networks are used to transfer money and store data. Networks are organized by one or more machines. Every node is a machine that running an ethereum client. The eligible one can run the node. By adopting blockchain in e-voting system database distribution, one of the cheating sources of database manipulation and data loss can be reduced. This can be a better solution for the currently existing issues over rigging the electronic voting machines to win elections by the political parties in our government.
Lo‐Yao Yeh, Peggy Joy Lu, Szu-Hao Huang, Jiun‐Long Huang
IoT devices provide a significant medium for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In 2016, a large-scale DDoS attack, named Dyn, caused massive damage to several well-known companies. One effective countermeasure is observing previous network traffic information or abnormal behavior determined by the host machines and determining the latest DDoS-attack IP addresses. Because of the lack of a fair exchange mechanism, most security operation centers (SOCs) are unwilling to share their real-time DDoS data. In this article, we propose a decentralized DDoS data exchange platform, namely SOChain, using blockchain technology to overcome the trust and fairness issues. The platform incentivizes SOCs through the DDoS_coin token. The more DDoS information an SOC contributes, the more coins it earns. To confirm the validity of uploaded information, we enlist a content verifier to examine uploaded abnormal IP addresses. Moreover, the verifier is incentivized by the DDoS_coin. To decrease the management effort, the entire flow is automatically executed in smart contract deployed onto the blockchain system. To address the issue of privacy in smart contracts, we devise a novel dual-level Bloom filter to enable efficient searches with privacy protection. Herein, a verifiable method is designed without revealing the information to public.
Advanced smart grid technologies enable energy prosumers to trade surplus energy from their distributed renewable energy sources with other peer prosumers through peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. In many previous works, P2P energy trading was facilitated by blockchain technology through blockchain’s distributive nature and capacity to run smart contracts. However, the feature that all the data and transactions on a blockchain are visible to all blockchain nodes may significantly threaten the privacy of the parties participating in P2P energy trading. There are many previous works that have attempted to mitigate this problem. However, all these works focused on the anonymity of participants but did not protect the data and transactions. To address this issue, we propose a P2P energy trading system on a blockchain where all bids are encrypted and peer matching is performed on the encrypted bids by a functional encryption-based smart contract. The system guarantees that the information encoded in the encrypted bids is protected, but the peer matching transactions are performed by the nodes in a publicly verifiable manner through smart contracts. We verify the feasibility of the proposed system by implementing a prototype composed of smart meters, a distribution system operator (DSO) server, and private Ethereum blockchain.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing explosive growth and has gained extensive attention from academia and industry in recent years. However, most of the existing IoT infrastructures are centralized, which may cause the issues of unscalability and single-point-of-failure. Consequently, decentralized IoT has been proposed by taking advantage of the emerging technology called blockchain. Voting systems are widely adopted in IoT, for example a leader election in wireless sensor networks. Self-tallying voting systems are alternatives to unsuitable, traditional centralized voting systems in decentralized IoT. Unfortunately, self-tallying voting systems inherently suffer from fairness issues, such as adaptive and abortive issues caused by malicious voters. To address these issues, in this article, we introduce a framework of the self-tallying voting system in decentralized IoT based on blockchain. We propose a concrete construction and prove that the proposed system satisfies all the security requirements, including fairness, dispute-freeness, and maximal ballot secrecy. We simulate the algorithms on a laptop, an Android phone, and a Raspberry Pi to test the time consumption and evaluate the gas cost of each algorithm in a private blockchain as well. The implementation results demonstrate the practicability of our system.
The e-voting system is one of the frameworks which decreases the percentage of abstention and to ensure the security against tampering of the votes, Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger that is used to record the transactions in an efficient and verifiable manner. Blockchain plays an important role in the e-voting system which ensures the security of votes by preventing modification of data stored in blocks using the cryptographic technique. Aadhar integration to the e-voting system overcomes the duplication or tampering of votes. The proposed scheme provides the secured e-voting system by using biometric details and VID(Virtual ID) of voters obtained from the Aadhar database to cast the Vote and also using the digital signature as the key for the encryption of the votes inside the block.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology is an immutable database that cannot be censored, tampered with, or erased, which can increase credibility and reduce interaction costs. Therefore, blockchain technology is expected to become the next generation Internet infrastructure, with broad application prospects in many industries, such as medicine, energy, and finance. The open network and publicly stored data in a blockchain system, however, raise serious risks of data theft and user privacy leakage, which has become a core issue that restricts the blockchain technology from becoming practical. This article uses kleptography technology to design a blockchain covert data transmission scheme to achieve high-concealment and high-performance data transmission under open network conditions. Experiments conducted in the Bitcoin network prove that the covert data transmission mechanism of this article has high compatibility and high performance, and can be practically applied to many popular blockchain systems.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract The electoral process has suffered from deep political instability following the post-colonial independence of most African nations. Moreover, the electoral process in many countries is characterized by massive rigging, high cost of electoral materials, and declaration of false results. In this paper, we will present a review of the blockchain Technology and some of the potential roles to play in conducting a transparent election. This paper opines that with the emergence of the blockchain technology, African Nations should tap from it and build a reliable, secure, and convenient electoral voting system. It further suggests that a blockchain electoral voting system will eliminate most of the challenges faced by African nations in conducting a free, fair and transparent election with low cost and total security. The issue of election rigging is almost completely eradicated with this technology (if properly installed). An attempt to alter/manipulate records (votes) in the system’s database can be spotted easily, because of its rigorous consensus rules, such an attempt is considered void and denied permission to access, alter, or destroy any of the previously saved votes. However, the paper argues that there are institutional challenges to implementing this technology within the continent. Specifically, there is a need to educate the masses as well as create robust policies that can accommodate this technology within the continent. Failure to acknowledge these challenges may well prevent the application of blockchain technology in African electoral process in the foreseeable future.
Utz Nisslmueller, Klaus-Tycho Foerster, Stefan Schmid, Christian Decker
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden\n(e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain\ntransactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their\ntransactions, these networks need to provide gossip and probing mechanisms.\nThis paper explores whether these mechanisms may be exploited to infer\nsensitive information about the flow of transactions, and eventually harm\nprivacy. In particular, we identify two threats, related to an active and a\npassive adversary. The first is a probing attack: here the adversary aims to\ndetect the maximum amount which is transferable in a given direction over a\ntarget channel by actively probing it and differentiating the response messages\nit receives. The second is a timing attack: the adversary discovers how close\nthe destination of a routed payment actually is, by acting as a passive\nman-in-the middle and analyzing the time deltas between sent messages and their\ncorresponding responses. We then analyze the limitations of these attacks and\npropose remediations for scenarios in which they are able to produce accurate\nresults.\n
With the rapid dissemination of the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of resources deployed in IoT systems such as devices and data is growing explosively. Since IoT systems often handle private information, it is essential to enforce appropriate access control to prevent unauthorized access. However, conventional access control schemes in which access rights are stored in a centralized server are prone to load concentration and a single point of failure. Although distributed access control schemes leveraging blockchain technologies have been proposed to deal with such problems, they inherit the drawbacks of the blockchain technologies, such as high transaction fee and low throughput. This paper proposes a novel access control framework based on IOTA, an emerging distributed ledger technology which enables free micro transactions with high throughput. This framework provides scalable and fine-grained access control by encrypting access rights using the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology and storing them on the distributed ledger of IOTA, called Tangle.
National elections are a big deal which has a major role in the development and progress of a country. The security of an election is in fact the matter of national security. Current voting systems in the context of Nepal and other parts of the world are still traditional and insecure. From the dawn of democracy, elections are still based on pen and papers. While there are new electronic voting machines, these systems have a high risk of rigging and are prone to failure, crashes, and attacks from intruders. The stated problems can be addressed through the implementation of new technology namely Blockchain for a transparent and reliable voting process. A blockchain based voting platform has been built to make the voting process digital, secure, reliable and intuitive. The votes casted by voters are stored in the blockchain, thus making it immutable and secure. The system can be scaled based on the requirements of an election. Voters can login to the system with the help of encrypted identification. This encrypted identification will lead to secure voting process. A separate portal for both voters and the election commission reduces the election hassle and time. So, in this system, it is demonstrated how the use of blockchain platform could contribute to modern elections using Ethereum, smart contracts and distributed systems to provide voters with secure, transparent and reliable voting platform.
The Rapid growth of agile gadgets has led to tremendous increase in digital media utilization, mostly for mobile video in ease of marketing. As encryption provides better user confidentiality and perseveration, greater number of online movement is associated with end-to-end encryption form. Irrevlant content such as unreal, violent and unconstitutional videos are being circulated online without being identified its truthfulness creating a platform for intruders and attackers. It is necessary for users to identify and report the contents of the video. Sometimes these videos act as evidence in courts to prove the guilty and the proper state and contents recorded in it .We aim a system to detect and classify the video's truthfulness to solve these problems. A detailed collection of studies has been toted to demonstrate the efficacy of new program over current literature.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ethereum Smart contracts use blockchain to transfer values among peers on networks without central agency. These programs are deployed on decentralized applications running on top of the blockchain consensus protocol to enable people to make agreements in a transparent and conflict-free environment. The security vulnerabilities within those smart contracts are a potential threat to the applications and have caused huge financial losses to their users. In this paper, we present a framework that combines static and dynamic analysis to detect Reentrancy vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts. This framework generates an attacker contract based on the ABI specifications of smart contracts under test and analyzes the contract interaction to precisely report Reentrancy vulnerability. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of our proposed framework on 5 modified smart contracts from Etherscan and our framework was able to detect the Reentrancy vulnerability in all our modified contracts. Our framework analyzes smart contracts statically to identify potentially vulnerable functions and then uses dynamic analysis to precisely confirm Reentrancy vulnerability, thus achieving increased performance and reduced false positives.
Shakkeera L, Hem Pransanth K C, Sabareesh, Sumaiya Begum · 5 authors
In today’s era, the cloud database security is one of the main concerns for any of the real time data accessing web/mobile applications. The cloud database protection involves accessibility and vulnerability of data, data protection, storage space, integrity and confidentiality on sensitive data. Building an electronic voting system that tries to completely fulfill the needs of the people has always been a challenge to achieve. The existing E-Voting System (E-VS) is not that much compatible with that of the current trends and does not assure to provide more security A lot of distributed ledger technologies which has been an exciting approach during existing election voting process. If we take a look on the ways of implying E-VS in a distribute ledger then Blockchain would be the right choice. As we all know that nowadays, Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies in the field of Information Technology. It normally stores information in batches called blocks which are linked together in a chronological way or method to form chain of blocks using cryptography techniques. During online voting process, many fraudulent activities happens which corrupt the entire election process. One of the major problems faced are fake voting which is obviously done by unauthorized people, inconvenient to reach to the respective places, average security level which may lead to the chances of an electoral fraud or any other malpractices.. Our proposed E-Voting System is mainly to protect the cloud database for real time data and to reduce the time consumption in voting and vote counting processes. Instead of standing in the queue for casting the vote, people can cast their votes from anywhere they want through online. The E-VS gives complete privacy and security for the online voting and makes it an ease for every individual to access it and cast their votes from anywhere possible with full pronounced security. In our proposed E-VS, Blockchain security concept called Consensus algorithm is implemented which makes it impossible for any unwanted activities to occur during election process. The E-VS system also achieves a higher level of security. Hence, the proposed system achieves data integrity, data confidentiality, eliminates storage overhead, and reduces time consumption for overall electronic voting system.
We present eclipse attacks on Ethereum nodes that exploit the peer-to-peer network used for neighbor discovery. Our attacks can be launched using only two hosts, each with a single IP address. Our eclipse attacker monopolizes all of the victim’s incoming and outgoing connections, thus isolating the victim from the rest of its peers in the network. The attacker can then filter the victim’s view of the blockchain, or co-opt the victim’s computing power as part of more sophisticated attacks. We argue that these eclipse-attack vulnerabilities result from Ethereum’s adoption of the Kademlia peer-to-peer protocol, and present countermeasures that both harden the network against eclipse attacks and cause it to behave differently from the traditional Kademlia protocol. Several of our countermeasures have been incorporated in the Ethereum geth 1.8 client released on February 14, 2018.
Lingling Wang, Xiaodong Lin, Eugene V. Zima, Chunguang Ma
Private parking spot sharing can help relieve the parking problem due to insufficient public parking facilities in big cities. Meanwhile, users who share parking spots can also benefit, either by getting a free parking spot or by obtaining a parking fee payment. However, when users are sharing their private parking spots, their privacy is inevitable to be disclosed. This could put these parking spots owners into some unnecessary inconveniences, such as identity theft. Existing private parking spot sharing schemes either do not consider privacy issues. Or, when privacy is taken into account, they assume the existence of a trusted third party. To address these issues, we propose a privacy-enhanced private parking spot sharing scheme without trusted third parties. Specifically, we use market design method to share parking spots. We achieve enhanced privacy with decentralized anonymous credentials and confidential anonymous payment with a variant Monero. Extensive analysis confirms the security and privacy protection of the proposed scheme. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has moderate computational costs and communication overhead.
Sri Aravinda Krishnan Thyagarajan, Adithya Bhat, Bernardo Magri, Daniel Tschudi · 5 authors
Although blockchains aim for immutability as their core feature, several instances have exposed the harms with perfect immutability. The permanence of illicit content inserted in Bitcoin poses a challenge to law enforcement agencies like Interpol, and millions of dollars are lost in buggy smart contracts in Ethereum. A line of research then spawned on Redactable blockchains with the aim of solving the problem of redacting illicit contents from both permissioned and permissionless blockchains. However, all the existing proposals follow the build-new-chain approach for redactions, and cannot be integrated with existing systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. We present Reparo, a generic protocol that acts as a publicly verifiable layer on top of any blockchain to perform repairs, ranging from fixing buggy contracts to removing illicit contents from the chain. Reparo facilitates additional functionalities for blockchains while maintaining the same provable security guarantee; thus, Reparo can be integrated with existing blockchains and start performing repairs on the pre-existent data. Any system user may propose a repair and a deliberation process ensues resulting in a decision that complies with the repair policy of the chain and is publicly verifiable. Our Reparo layer can be easily tailored to different consensus requirements, does not require heavy cryptographic machinery and can, therefore, be efficiently instantiated in any permission-ed or -less setting. We demonstrate it by giving efficient instantiations of Reparo on top of Ethereum (with PoS and PoW), Bitcoin, and Cardano. Moreover, we evaluate Reparo with Ethereum mainnet and show that the cost of fixing several prominent smart contract bugs is almost negligible. For instance, the cost of repairing the prominent Parity Multisig wallet bug with Reparo is as low as 0.000000018% of the Ethers that can be retrieved after the fix.
In this paper, the prototype of Thai voting sys-tem using blockchain technology (B-VoT) has been successfully designed and developed. Hyperledger Fabric was chosen to be a major blockchain infrastructure. The web-application was developed to allow voters to vote. In addition, real-time voting results will be shown on the same website after election period has passed. We connected the web-application and blockchain database together in order to store the votes as a blockchain transaction. With our Blockchain Internet Election, the voters can easily elect on the website and their votes is automatically stored in the blockchain database as a single blockchain transaction. This voting prototype can assure the data integrity because no one can modify any information or voting results. Therefore, our system could have a huge impact on the voting reliability as well as rebuild public trustworthiness in Thailand election.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Kateryna Isirova, Анастасія Кіян, Mariia Rodinko, Alexandr Kuznetsov
Electronic trust services are becoming an integral part of the information space. With the reliable implementation of basic services as an electronic signature and electronic authentication, it is possible to build more complex systems that rely on them, particularly the electronic voting system. In the paper, the new concept for developing a decentralized electronic voting system using blockchain technology is proposed. The two-level architecture provides a secure voting process without redundancy of existing (not based on blockchain) systems. The presented blockchain-based voting protocol has six steps that ensure all requirements that are put forward to such types of protocols including voting transparency and anonymity.