Blockchain Papers

Ivan Homoliak, Dominik Breitenbacher, Alexander Binder, Paweł Szałachowski

No abstract is available for this record.

Sijia Zhao, Donal O’Mahony

In this paper, we explore the design and construct a prototype implementation of an Ethereum application, BMCProtector, which is based on Blockchain and Smart Contract technology, to protect music copyright and ensure rights holders income rights. With the blockchain, musicians can easily authorize and manage their music copyright on a public ledger. Without intermediaries being involved during the propagation process, rights holders can receive a greater share of royalty payments from the music industry automatically and instantly. We deal with piracy issues using encryption and watermarking methods. We also introduce a versioning mechanism to update the data in the smart contract for correcting mistakes made by the publisher. BMCProtector provides a solution to protect music copyright more effectively.

Wubing Chen, Zhiying Xu, Shuyu Shi, Yang Zhao · 5 authors

Blockchains have received much attention recently since they provide decentralized approaches to the creation and management of value. Many banks, Internet companies, car manufacturers, and even governments worldwide have incorporated or started considering blockchains to improve the security, scalability, and efficiency of their services. In this paper, we survey blockchain applications in different areas. These areas include cryptocurrency, healthcare, advertising, insurance, copyright protection, energy, and societal applications. Our work provides a timely summary for individuals and organizations interested in blockchains. We envision our study to motivate more blockchain applications.

Liehuang Zhu, Baokun Zheng, Meng Shen, Feng Gao · 6 authors

With the more and more extensive application of blockchain, blockchain security has been widely concerned by the society and deeply studied by scholars. Moreover, the security of blockchain data directly affects the security of various applications of blockchain. In this survey, we perform a comprehensive classification and summary of the security of blockchain data. First, we present classification of blockchain data attacks. Subsequently, we present the attacks and defenses of blockchain data in terms of privacy, availability, integrity and controllability. Data privacy attacks present data leakage or data obtained by attackers through analysis. Data availability attacks present abnormal or incorrect access to blockchain data. Data integrity attacks present blockchain data being tampered. Data controllability attacks present blockchain data accidentally manipulated by smart contract vulnerability. Finally, we present several important open research directions to identify follow-up studies in this area.

Liehuang Zhu, Baokun Zheng, Meng Shen, Shui Yu · 8 authors

With the more and more extensive application of blockchain, blockchain security has been widely concerned by the society and deeply studied by scholars. Moreover, the security of blockchain data directly affects the security of various applications of blockchain. In this survey, we perform a comprehensive classification and summary of the security of blockchain data. First, we present classification of blockchain data attacks. Subsequently, we present the attacks and defenses of blockchain data in terms of privacy, availability, integrity and controllability. Data privacy attacks present data leakage or data obtained by attackers through analysis. Data availability attacks present abnormal or incorrect access to blockchain data. Data integrity attacks present blockchain data being tampered. Data controllability attacks present blockchain data accidentally manipulated by smart contract vulnerability. Finally, we present several important open research directions to identify follow-up studies in this area.

Ho-Kyung Yang, Hyun-Jong Cha, You-Jin Song

With the recent increase in the number of IoT devices and the development of centralized management systems, risks in cyber space, including personal information phishing, malicious code infection, hacking, and DDos attack, are becoming major issues in the real world. The recently developed distributed data management technology, blockchain, provides reliability in transactions without the intervention of a third party. This new technology, blockchain, promotes integrity and reliability of transaction records by allowing for all network participants to jointly own and verify data, which was previously done by a central server. Due to distributed data management, the technology can reduce brokerage fees and construction costs, and guarantees high levels of integrity and security of data. This paper examines the effective identifier management using blockchain technology under the named data networking environment. The proposed system does not expose a specific user's identifier by creating a transaction using the content name of the identifier. The identifier can be safely stored and managed through such an identifier split management technique.

Wenbo Jiang, Hongwei Li, Guowen Xu, Mi Wen · 6 authors

Traditional centralized PKIs are vulnerable due to the single point of failure. A feasible solution is to build a decentralized PKI without certificate authority (CA). Web of Trust is the first step toward realizing a decentralized PKI, but it still has some limitations such as missing incentive and leaking user's privacy. Blockchain's numerous desirable properties, such as cryptographical security, decentralized nature and unalterable transaction record, make it a suitable tool to implement a decentralized PKI. However, the latest research findings about blockchain-based PKI are still incompatible with the thin-clients which have limited storage ability to download the entire blockchain. To combat that, we firstly present a Privacy-preserving Thin-client Scheme (PTS) utilizing the idea of k-anonymity, which enables thin-clients to run normally as full node users and protect user's privacy simultaneously. After that, in order to reduce cost, we further propose an Efficient Privacy preserving Thin-client Scheme (EPTS) employing the method of PIR (private information retrieval). Then security analysis and functional comparison are performed to demonstrate the high security and comprehensive functionality of EPTS compared with existing schemes. Finally, extensive experiments are undertaken to confirm that EPTS can reduce computational cost and communication cost impressively.

Sthembile Mthethwa, Nelisiwe Dlamini, Graham Barbour

Even with the ability to produce documents digitally, the paperless environment has yet to become a reality in South Africa. Hardcopy documents are still printed daily which makes them susceptible to document fraud. In South Africa, a case was reported recently, where someone who was creating fake documents was exposed. This introduces the challenge when using hardcopy documents which is loss of integrity. Thus, it is vital to have systems in place to verify document integrity and be able to determine when a document has been tampered with. Various techniques have been used to secure documents, yet the challenge persists. The combination of 2D barcodes, digital signatures, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), cryptographic hashing has proved the potential to achieve good results when combined. Recently, blockchain has been added as one of the techniques to be employed for document verification. This paper presents a proposed solution that incorporates the combination of 2D barcodes, OCR, cryptographic hashing and blockchain. As this is still on-going work, experiments are still required to demonstrate the viability of the solution.

Mohamed Abdulaziz, Davut Çulha, Ali Yazıcı

Blockchain technology has been seeing widespread interest as a means to ensure the integrity, confidentiality and availability of data in a trustless environment. They are designed to protect data from both internal and external cyberattacks by utilizing the aggregated power of the network to resist malicious efforts. In this article, we will create our own decentralized messaging application utilizing the Ethereum Whisper protocol. Our application will be able to send encrypted messages both securely and anonymously. We will utilize the Ethereum platform to deploy our blockchain network. This application would be resistant to most suppression tactics due to its distributed nature and adaptability of its communication protocol.

Riya Sapra, Parneeta Dhaliwal

Now a days many applications are being built using the immutability and robustness of blockchain. Blockchain is a new class of information technology which combines cryptography and distributed ledger that already exists. The model is composed of a group of computers that collaborate towards maintaining a secured database, without storing the data at any central unit. It is the technology behind all the crypto currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Etherum and now finding its way to record everything possible. This paper focuses on the basic framework of blockchain model, its development history, prerequisites and challenges of blockchain. Finally, various current real time applications of the technology are discussed.

Raheel Ahmed Memon, Jianping Li, Junaid Ahmed, Asif Khan · 6 authors

Blockchain is the one of leading technology of this time; it has started to revolutionize several fields like, finance, business, industry, smart home, healthcare, social networks, Internet and the Internet of Things. It has many benefits like, decentralized network, robustness, availability, stability, anonymity, auditability and accountability. The applications of Blockchain are emerging, and it is found that most of the work is focused on its engineering implementation. While the theoretical part is very less considered and explored. In this paper we implemented the simulation of mining process in Blockchain based systems using queuing theory. We took the parameters of one of the mature Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin's real data and simulated using M/M/n/L queuing system in JSIMgraph. We have achieved realistic results; and expect that it will open up new research direction in theoretical research of Blockchain based systems.

Chun‐I Fan, Yi‐Fan Tseng, Hui-Po Su, Ruei‐Hau Hsu · 5 authors

As the rising popularity of Bitcoin, people tend to use Bitcoin wallets to managing the keys for spending or receiving funds. Instead of generating pairs of keys randomly which are hard to be stored, hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets derive all the keys from a single seed, thus storing that seed is sufficient to recover keys. In an HD wallet, it allows users to generate child public keys from parent public keys without knowledge of any private key. A suitable case for this feature is that an auditor is permitted to derive all the public keys for auditing, However, this impressive feature makes HD wallets suffered from so-called privilege escalation attacks that the leakage of any one of child private key along with its parent public key will cause the exposure of the other child private keys. To confront with this severe problem, we propose a novel HD wallet scheme that gives out a signature with trapdoor hash functions instead of directly giving anyone private keys for signing. Since it conceals private keys from any child nodes, it can prevent from privilege escalation attacks. Nevertheless, the proposed scheme also provides unlinkability between two public keys in order to achieve anonymity of user identity and high scalability to the derivations of keys. Thus, the proposed scheme achieves user anonymity, public key derivation and high scalability.

Osama Hosam

Digital coin became an interesting subject for research in the last few years. For security reasons, the technical detail of digital coins (for example Bitcoin) are studied to stop security breaches. Bitcoin work dependently on a blockchain. Blockchain holds the record of all user's transactions. The user opens a wallet with public/private key pairs. The user then buy/sell his coin through the wallet. The security of the user's wallet depends on how secure the user's private key. Some people hide bitcoins (which in this case refers to the private key) in their house. Others hide the security key into a plain-text. In this paper we proposed a robust steganography technique to hide bitcoins into steganographic fractals. Steganographic fractal is our novel approach, it is not explored before. The fractal tree is selected for its simple recursive structure. The private-key bit stream is hidden by discretizing the angles and lengths of the tree branches. The tree can then be printed without the fear of being lost or stolen. The proposed approach showed high security and robustness to attacks.

Thawatchai Chomsiri, Kan Kongsup

Various types of cryptocurrency e.g. BitCoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and more, are broadly accepted and used in many different forms of business but a typical problem that the cryptocurrency users are faced with is the delay of coin transfer. For example, it takes several hours for BitCoin and several minutes for Ethereum. These cryptocurrencies also consume a high quantity of electricity for transaction validation. Even though there currently is a type of cryptocurrencies, Ripple, that can be quickly transferred in 4 seconds but still it is a closed system with an owner, not a public cryptocurrency. Similarly, an algorithm "Proof of Stake" used by new coins that are more energy-saving but several problems are still found including (1) 51% attack, (2) a richer with more coins gains higher rewards, and (3) a problematic node for block validation that is not currently active. This research presents a model of an open cryptocurrency system that is able to transfer a coin within 3 seconds in which an algorithm called "Random-Checkers Proof of Stake" (RCPoS) was proposed to randomly select the inspectors for validation processes which can avoid those three problems of the Proof of Stake.

Yong Yu, Yannan Li, Junfeng Tian, Jianwei Liu

IoT is leading a digital revolution in both academia and industry. It brings convenience to people's daily lives; however, the issues of security and privacy of IoT become challenges. Blockchain, a decentralized database based on cryptographic techniques, is promising for IoT security, which may influence a variety of areas including manufacture, finance, and trading. The blockchain framework in an IoT system is an intriguing alternative to the traditional centralized model, which is struggling to meet some specified demands in IoT. In this article, we investigate typical security and privacy issues in IoT and develop a framework to integrate blockchain with IoT, which can provide great assurance for IoT data and various functionalities and desirable scalability including authentication, decentralized payment, and so on. We also suggest some possible solutions to these security and privacy issues in IoT based on blockchain and Ethereum to show how blockchain contributes to IoT.

Daoqi Han, Yueming Lu, Xiaofeng Du, Jiefu Gan

Driven by the technology of mobile Internet of things and the wide demand of sharing economy, the development of smart locks is changing with each passing day. Current schemes rely on the open network architecture which has security vulnerabilities, privacy leaks, vulnerability to various attacks and other security risks. We propose an end-to-end succinct non-interactive offline authentication scheme based on blockchain technology(BC-SNOA). Using blockchain techniques such as anonymity, ellipticcurve cryptography, workload consensus, and privacy-preserving zero-knowledge proof, the BC-SNOA implements one-time pad to improve confidentiality, offline authentication to avoid network remote intrusions and the risk of network services interruptions. It is difficult to replicate and crack because of the in chip calculation of workloads and mathematical problems. Compared with current smart locks which extract biometric verification information and control by network services, the BC-SNOA scheme is likely to accomplish beneficial properties such as high verification performance and more secure, and also makes simple hardware implementations possible.

Fei Gao

Aiming at the poor encryption effect existing in the data encryption algorithm of e-commerce platform, and the data lost and distorted easily after encrypting, a data encryption algorithm based on blockchain technology is proposed in this paper. By analyzing the symmetric key algorithm and the public key algorithm, the DES encryption algorithm is described in detail. The two related technologies of digital envelopes and message authentication are analyzed to ensure the accuracy of the data and the one time encryption of the data. Based on this, in order to ensure the effectiveness of encryption, the process of asymmetric encryption algorithm based on chaotic sequence of neural network and asymmetric encryption algorithm based on neural network chaotic attractor are analyzed, and the security is tested. While ensuring the accuracy of data, it improves the effect of data encryption and realizes the encryption of e-commerce platform data, which is to realize data encryption algorithm based on blockchain technology. Experimental results show that the~proposed algorithm can encrypt the data of e-commerce platform, and the encryption process is relatively simple, the encryption effect is better, and the accuracy of the encrypted data is relatively high, which provides a theoretical basis for further research of the subject.

Licheng Wang, Xiaoying Shen, Jing Li, Jun Shao · 5 authors

Blockchain, as one of the crypto-intensive creatures, has become a very hot topic recently. Although many surveys have recently been dedicated to the security and privacy issues of blockchains, there still lacks a systematic examination on the cryptographic primitives in blockchains. To this end, we in this paper conduct a systematic study on the cryptographic primitives in blockchains by comprehensive analysis on top-30 mainstream cryptocurrencies, in terms of the usages, functionalities, and evolutions of these primitives. We hope that it would be helpful for cryptographers who are going to devote themselves to the blockchain research, and the financial engineers/managers who want to evaluate cryptographic solutions for blockchain-based projects.

Qi Feng, Debiao He, Sherali Zeadally, Muhammad Khurram Khan · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Zijian Bao, Bin Wang, Yongxin Zhang, Qinghao Wang · 5 authors

We propose Lockcoin, a secure and privacy-preserving mix service for bitcoin anonymity. We introduce mix servers to provide mix service for user to prevent attackers linking the input address with output address by using blind signature shceme, multisignature scheme. Lockcoin provides anonymity, scalability, bitcoin compatibillity, theft impossibility and accountability. We have proposed a prototype of Lockcoin based on bitcoin test network, experimental results show that our solution is efficient. Lockcoin's source codes are released on github.com/Northeastern-University-Blockchain/Lockcoin.

Huige Li, Haibo Tian, Fangguo Zhang, Jiejie He

No abstract is available for this record.

João Alves, António Pinto

No abstract is available for this record.

Xueying Dong

With the rapid development of virtual economy, infringement disputes in intellectual property rights (IP) such as film and television, games, creativity and so on frequently appear. The market urgently needs effective IP protection solutions. There are many problems in the traditional way, and blockchain technology has produced a subversive innovation in IP protection, and thoroughly solve the IP protection problem. This paper proposes a method of image privacy protection based on blockchain technology to protect the copyright of images in the network, and to deal with the privacy content in the image, so as to protect the rights and privacy of image owners.

Maria Rona L. Perez, Bobby D. Gerardo, Ruji P. Medina

This research is composed of online transaction security; the mechanism of blockchain and proposed a modified SHA256 security protocol through smart contract to secure online transaction procedure specifically based on Blockchain Mechanism. It focus on the discussion of modifying security protocol specifically designed for practical applications of blockchain with particular reference to privacy and trust. The researcher recommend a new transaction procedure involving customer and merchant, permitting entities to recognize one another enabling them to proceed with their transactions securely using Blockchain Mechanism.