A noble multi-factor authentication (MFA) algorithm is developed for the security enhancement of the Cryptocurrency (CR). The main goal of MFA is to set up extra layer of safeguard while seeking access to a targets such as physical location, computing device, network or database. MFA security scheme requires more than one method for the validation from commutative family of credentials to verify the user for a transaction. MFA can reduce the risk of using single level password authentication by introducing additional factors of authentication. MFA can prevent hackers from gaining access to a particular account even if the password is compromised. The superfluous layer of security introduced by MFA offers additional security to a user. MFA is implemented by using time-based onetime password (TOTP) technique. For logging to any entity with MFA enabled, the user first needs username and password, as a second factor, the user then needs the MFA token to virtually generate a TOTP. It is found that MFA can provide a better means of secured transaction of CR.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the popularity of Bitcoin, there is a greater demand for the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain, which is susceptible to the efficiency of block propagation. In the Bitcoin blockchain, efficient block propagation approach can reduce the computing power and the risk of forks. Meanwhile, larger blocks help to improve the throughput of transactions. Thus, the block propagation is a major issue of the scalability of the Bitcoin network. This paper introduces a method to reduce the required bandwidth of block propagation with erasure coding. To begin with, the network nodes are classified into several clusters. When a node wants to propagate a block, the node does not need to propagate the whole information of the block. Instead, the node can only transmit the transaction IDs and the coded information to each cluster. The simulation shows that the proposed method can significantly ease the network traffic among these clusters.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Caching and Content Delivery
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The protection of digital resource copyrights has drawn extensive public concern in the past decade. Traditional methods, however, fail to satisfy the requirements due to their poor timeliness, frequent infringement, and cumbersome in rights confirmation, etc. In this paper, we investigate and design a novel approach for cross-platform digital resource rights confirmation and infringement tracking based on smart contracts. We utilize smart contracts to realize rights transactions and protection. As another contribution, we propose to establish fine-grained digital resource rights, which are divided into ownership and usufruct. For tracking infringement acts, we invoke smart contracts to extract the rights transfer chain for resources. Furthermore, we reveal the source of resource leakage by embedding digital watermarks when distributing the resources. By combining resource rights transfer chain and digital watermarking, we can effectively achieve digital resource rights confirmation and infringement tracking. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method.
2 source records
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Xiaoliang Wang, Pengjie Zeng, Nick Patterson, Frank Jiang · 5 authors
Thanks to the rapid development in mobile vehicles and wireless technologies, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become an attractive application that can provide a large number of mobile services for drivers. Vehicles can be informed of the mobile position, direction, speed, and other real-time information of nearby vehicles to avoid traffic jams and accidents. However, the environments of IoV could be dangerous in the absence of security protections. Due to the openness and self-organization of IoV, there are enormous malicious attackers. To guarantee the safety of mobile services, we propose an effective decentralized authentication mechanism for IoV on the basis of the consensus algorithm of blockchain technology. The simulation under the veins framework is carried out to verify the feasibility of the scheme in reducing the selfish behavior and malicious attacks in IoV.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the rapid development of electronic information technology, online transaction will gradually surpass traditional market transaction, among which online payment and asset delivery become the focus of attention. But in fact, due to the incomplete third-party payment mechanism and the intrusion risk of various charging Trojan, it is easy to cause a trust crisis. The existing centralized framework often leads to information asymmetry between the two parties. Therefore, how to realize the fairness of payment and the auditability of assets in the distributed system is a challenging problem. The emerging blockchain technology provides a new method with its openness, transparency and verifiability. Existing researches do not provide a complete shopping model for consumers, most of which focuses on payments or only on asset delivery. In this paper, we propose an auditable fair payment and physical asset delivery protocol based on smart contracts. Three types of smart contracts are designed to achieve reliable and fair payment among merchants, consumers and logistics companies. The traceability and auditability of blockchain provide an effective method to audit assets and data sharing in the whole transportation. In view of the phenomenon of goods being switched, the way of ”pre-verification” is added. In order to prevent the illegal elements to fake pickup code, induce consumers to conduct illegal operations, cause property loss, in our system the pickup codes are generated by consumers to reduce the risk of fraud. In addition, our plan designs a complete return process for the first time, providing better service experience and higher efficiency for consumers. Finally, all the contracts involved in the scheme are implemented and deployed on the ethereum test network. The results of security analysis and evaluation showed that our scheme was improved in cost, with high security and availability.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The evolution of Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) boosts the amount of IIoT data. Machine learning promotes the progress of data analytics services. In order to facilitate the flow and explore the economic value of IIoT data, it is crucial to consider data packet transactions (DPTs) and data analytics service transactions (DASTs) simultaneously. Centralized data trading platforms emerge to realize transactions of data commodities. However, centralized platforms lack trust and robustness. How to realize DPTs and DASTs in a decentralized way is a challenging issue. In this paper, a new transaction solution based on the smart contract-enabled blockchain technology is proposed, which consists of the DPT smart contract and DAST smart contract. The DPT smart contract is implemented to trade data packets. The DAST smart contract provides a competitive way to trade data analytics services. Both smart contracts are designed to enable entities in IIoT to execute DPTs and DASTs automatically and honestly. Moreover, the transaction disputes between different IIoT entities are solved by the big data center off-chain, and the treatment results will be recorded on the blockchain by the big data center. The DPT smart contract and DAST smart contract are implemented and tested on Remix integrated development environment to achieve DPTs and DASTs. The gas costs of smart contracts are estimated and the security of the proposed solution is analyzed. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed solution is secure and feasible.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Kentaroh Toyoda, P. Takis Mathiopoulos, Tomoaki Ohtsuki
Bitcoin is one of the most popular decentralized cryptocurrencies to date. However, it has been widely reported that it can be used for investment scams, which are referred to as high yield investment programs (HYIP). Although from the security forensic point of view it is very important to identify the HYIP operators' Bitcoin addresses, so far in the open technical literature no systematic method which reliably collects and identifies such Bitcoin addresses has been proposed. In this paper, a novel methodology is introduced, which efficiently collects a large number of the HYIP operators' Bitcoin addresses and identifies them based upon a novel analysis of their transactions history. In particular, a scraping-based method is first proposed which is able to collect more than 2,000 HYIP operators' Bitcoin addresses from the Internet thus providing a large number of the HYIPs' samples. Second, a supervised machine learning technique, which classifies, whether or not, specific Bitcoin addresses belong to the HYIP operators, is introduced and its performance is evaluated. The proposed classification method is based upon two novel approaches, namely the rate conversion technique that mitigates the effect of Bitcoin price volatility and the sampling technique that reduces the computational amount without sacrificing the classification performance. By employing close to 30,000 real Bitcoin addresses, extensive performance evaluation results obtained by means of computer simulation experiments have shown that the proposed methodology achieves excellent performance, i.e., 95% of the HYIP addresses can be correctly classified, while maintaining a false positive rate less than 4.9%. In order to further validate the proposed classifier's ability to detect the HYIP operators' Bitcoin addresses, our designed classifier has been tested against a recently published list of the HYIP addresses maintaining its excellent detection accuracy by achieving a 93.75% success rate.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Sehyun Park, Seongwon Im, Youhwan Seol, Jeongyeup Paek
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that has gained significant attention and growth in recent years. Unlike traditional currencies, Bitcoin does not rely on a centralized authority to control the supply, distribution, and verification of the validity of transactions. Instead, Bitcoin relies on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of volunteers to distribute pending transactions and confirmed blocks, to verify transactions, and to collectively implement a replicated ledger that everyone agrees on. This P2P network is at the heart of Bitcoin and many other blockchain technologies. In this paper, we present a comparative measurement study of nodes in the Bitcoin network. We measure and analyze how many the so-called “volunteers” are in the Bitcoin P2P network by scanning the live Bitcoin network for 37 days in 2018 and compare them with the data reported by prior work in 2013~2016. This paper is motivated by the fact that Bitcoin has experienced explosive growth in terms of a number of users, transactions, value, and interest over a recent couple of years. Our investigation includes the IP addresses of Bitcoin nodes, size of the network, power law in the geographic distribution, protocol, and client versions, and network latencies and shows how today's network is different from early days. In addition, based on the observations made from the measurement study, we propose a simple distance-based peer selection rule for improved connectivity and faster data propagation. The evaluation results show that our proposed lightweight and backward-compatible peer selection rule has the potential to reduce data dissemination latency.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning techniques, fake digital contents have proliferated in recent years. Fake footage, images, audios, and videos (known as deepfakes) can be a scary and dangerous phenomenon and can have the potential of altering the truth and eroding trust by giving false reality. Proof of authenticity (PoA) of digital media is critical to help eradicate the epidemic of forged content. Current solutions lack the ability to provide history tracking and provenance of digital media. In this paper, we provide a solution and a general framework using Ethereum smart contracts to trace and track the provenance and history of digital content to its original source even if the digital content is copied multiple times. The smart contract utilizes the hashes of the interplanetary file system (IPFS) used to store digital content and its metadata. Our solution focuses on video content, but the solution framework provided in this paper is generic enough and can be applied to any other form of digital content. Our solution relies on the principle that if the content can be credibly traced to a trusted or reputable source, the content can then be real and authentic. The full code of the smart contract has been made publicly available at Github.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Jesús Máximo Montes Díaz, Víctor M. Larios, Manuel Avalos, Cecilia E. Ramírez
Nowadays, performance and promptness in the production line are significantly relevant; solutions are being delivered each quarter lead by the evolving innovation of technology which is moving at a fast paste. Taking into consideration concepts from Smarter Cities, Smart Contracts, and Blockchain, we will include these tools in the daily operations of International Business Machines' supply chain to reduce these transaction times radically, implementing agile practices. Fundamentally using IBM Bluemix, which is a fast-growing Platform that provides support for development organizations by defining various users and roles in the cloud environment. IBM Bluemix provides an extensive inventory of runtime and services that enterprises and developers can use in cloud applications without requiring significant development effort. We as developers can quickly build applications with a choice of several runtimes as can be needed in Supply Chain operations. Furthermore, as the workloads increase, applications can promptly scale ondemand to add more memory or processing power to ensure an optimal block chain experience application. Supply Chain operations can now shift their client-side code into a cloud system environment to leverage service integration, internal confidential activities and services, cloud data and the infrastructure capabilities. It will allow operations to be more productive and highly available and flexible, achieving efficient and sustainable development based on the analysis of real-time information shared by stakeholders and connected devices in a Smart City Environment. IBM is seen as a leader in blockchain, from recent surveys it is revealed that IBM is leading the way of blockchain technology, with more than 40% of respondents raking it number one. International customers are working with IBM to introduce Blockchain to their businesses. These customers are currently testing out IBM's blockchain technology to help small/medium sized enterprises become more evident and attract investment. Another result of working with IBM is that the customers 65
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The reward of the Bitcoin system is designed to be proportional to miner's computational power. However, rogue miners can increase their rewards by using the block withholding attacks. For raising awareness on the Bitcoin reward system, a new attack scheme is proposed, where the attackers infiltrate into an open pool and launch the selfish mining as well as the block withholding attack. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed attack outperforms the conventional block withholding attacks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain, as a secured, trusted, and decentralized architecture, is used to create secure and tamper-proof payment schemes, which can serve economies and societies without trusted parties. However, the transparency and traceability of blockchain severely restrict the anonymity of participants in the real world, which will cause participants' privacy leakage. Toward this end, in this paper, an anonymous off-blockchain micropayments scheme (AOM) is proposed for cryptocurrencies in the real world. In AOM, a payee receives micropayments from an “honest-but-curious” intermediary T by solving puzzles which are generated based on the standard RSA assumption. Meanwhile, T also receives micropayments from the payers by payee's solutions and T will randomly select the inputs of the merging transaction Tmer. In order to improve service efficiency of T and resist denial of service attack, one of the outputs of Tmeris paid for T as a service fee. Besides, AOM simultaneously ensures the correctness and fairness of transactions. Finally, from the analyses of property and security, AOM has strong unlinkability, ability for anti-attacks and unforgeability.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques