In recent times, data has become an inevitable factor in cloud computing. The word data eventually seeks its issue on privacy and security. With the rise of new technologies, the need for data storage has increased. Massive increase in the datasets has led to the evolution of cloud storage. The benefits of cloud computing are immense, but on the contrary there is an increasing risk to the security of the data stored in the cloud. This paper deals with a survey on the security issues which highlights the effectiveness of security that has been implied in the forms of cloud computing and blockchain technologies. The survey also includes a deep understanding of a PoW-based blockchain model using the blockchain technology. The idea behind this work is to provide a detailed survey about the blockchain technology which is growing tremendously.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This paper proposes a JPEG-blockchain framework for trusted media transaction. The new distributed and tamperproof framework intends to aid an emerging JPEG Privacy and Security standard. The blockchain network records any media transaction with necessary information related to intellectual property rights, access control rules and content signature. The content signature, generated by compressed sensed samples or low-resolution, low bit-rate compression is used to verify the image integrity and authenticity. We propose that every blockchian record, linked to a unique transaction hash, is encapsulated within the metadata contained in the JPEG box structure. As an example use case we have chosen the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector due to its emerging need. This paper presents the proof of the concept and reports preliminary infrastructural development.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Jul 1, 2018·2018 15th International Conference on Electrical Engineering/Electronics, Computer, Telecommunications and Information Technology (ECTI-CON)
Currently, government identification systems are still underdeveloped. The government has adopted computer technology to serve the policy of Thailand 4.0. Thai national ID still segmented and distributed between government agencies and has no centralization, and it brings bad experience to the users because each service must be registered and the users have to remember the username and password for every service. We demonstrated Thailand national Digital ID Framework based on Blockchain (NIDBC) to help improve digital identity government service to simple single sign-on and kept preserving privacy by providing personal information to service only when users grant permission for each service. In addition, the system is secure because the data is distributed to each node, making the attackers hard to attack or edit information. The security properties of the proposed protocol have been verified using Scyther tool and are presented here with results.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
The immense promise of reinventing business processes has led to the development of alternative blockchain technologies, such as consortium blockchain, that can deal with some of the issues of public blockchains such as used in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. However, a consortium blockchain, where its tokens have no market value, suffers from a lack of a method for payment for services, since the authority is concentrated with the entities that secure payment. Here, we describe Niji, a new cross-chain payment protocol that allows parties to perform Bitcoin payment securely on a consortium chain, without any trusted third-party or mediator. Niji introduces templatization of a transaction to validate Bitcoin payments efficiently on different consortium blockchains. The process from payment to service provision runs autonomously without any interaction between parties. An experiment measuring the computational cost and latency demonstrates the feasibility and efficacy of our implementation.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bit coin is a crypto-currency that is based on a block-chain technology. All transactions in bit coin recorded in the block-chain and the transactions are validated through mining. When mining, honest miners are rewarded in proportion to their computing power. However, it has been proven that selfish mining can get more mining rewards beyond computing power. Selfish mining intentionally makes block fork of the block-chain and wastes the computing power of honest miners. In this paper, we analyze selfish mining and existing countermeasures, and propose a new method to prevent selfish mining by adding the transaction creation time to the transaction data structure. The proposed method is the highest threshold compared to existing methods, which is 33% threshold required for successful selfish mining. The threshold is also the most optimized result with the probability of an honest miner mining in selfish mining pools to zero.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The existing identity authentication of IoT devices mostly depends on an intermediary institution, i.e., a CA server, which suffers from the single-point-failure attack. Even worse, the critical data of authenticated devices can be tampered by inner attacks without being identified. To address these issues, we utilize blockchain technology, which serves as a secure tamper-proof distributed ledger to IoT devices. In the proposed method, we assign a unique ID for each individual device and record them into the blockchain, so that they can authenticate each other without a central authority. We also design a data protection mechanism by hashing significant data (i.e. firmware) into the blockchain where any state changes of the data can be detected immediately. Finally, we implement a prototype based on an open source blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric to verify the proposed system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
User Authentication and Security Systems
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We propose a decentralized routing algorithm that can be implemented in Bitcoin Lightning Network. All nodes in the network contribute equally to path searching. The algorithm is inspired from ant path searching algorithms.
In the past, the improvement of digital copyright protection system based on digital watermarking mainly focused on algorithms, while generation and storage of the watermark information was ignored. In this paper, a new design scheme of copyright management system based on digital watermarking and its information, such as blockchain, is proposed, which combines digital watermarking, blockchain, perceptual hash function, Quick Response(QR) code, and InterPlanetary File System(IPFS). Among them, blockchain is used to securely store watermark information and provide timestamp authentication for multiple watermarks (multiple copyrights) to confirm the creation order. Perceptual hash function is used to generate hash value based on the structure information of images, that watermark information can be confirmed without the original image. QR code is used to generate QR code images containing image hash and copyright information as watermark images to improve robustness and capacity of digital watermarking; IPFS is used to store and distribute watermarked images without a centralized server. This scheme can enhance the effectiveness of digital watermarking technology in the field of copyright protection. In this way, use P2P network to integrate and complete copyright management and distribution of copyrighted works without requiring a trusted third party. Nodes rely on cryptography to confirm the identity of each other and ensure the security of information. It can reduce information leakage, data destruction and other risks caused by collapse of the centralized system in the past. This improves the security and transparency of information, and speeds up the distribution of copyrighted works to facilitate circulation in the network. This scheme can also improve copyright protection of multiple creations. Combine blockchain and multiple digital watermarks to record copyright information of every copyright owner in the authoring process and fully prove this information. In order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of each copyright owner.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin and Ethereum are novel mechanisms for decentralizing the concept of money and computation. Extending decentralization to the human identity concept, we can think of using blockchain for creating a list of verified human identities with a one-person-one-ID property. UniqueID is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) for maintaining human identities such that every physical human entity can have no more that one account. One part of this identity is simply the user's claim on one of his unique, permanent, and measurable characteristics -biometrics. Blockchain has proved its integrity as a platform for storing and performing computations on such claims. The biggest challenge here is to ensure that the user has submitted his own valid biometric data. Human verifiers can check if there is any inconsistency in other users' data, by peer-to-peer checks. For preventing bad behavior and centralization in the verification process, UniqueID benefits from novel governance mechanisms to choose verifiers and punish unjust ones. Also, there are incentives for honest verifiers and users by newly generated tokens. We show how the users' privacy can be preserved by using state-of-the-art cryptographic techniques, and so they can use their identity without any concerns for votings, financial and banking purposes, social media accounts, reputation systems etc.
Tooba Faisal, Nicolas T. Courtois, Antoaneta Serguieva
The use of blockchains is growing every day, and their utility has greatly expanded from sending and receiving crypto-coins to smart-contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations. Modern blockchains underpin a variety of applications: from designing a global identity to improving satellite connectivity. In our research we look at the ability of blockchains to store metadata in an increasing volume of transactions and with evolving focus of utilization. We further show that basic approaches to improving blockchain privacy also rely on embedding metadata. This paper identifies and classifies real-life blockchain transactions embedding metadata of a number of major protocols running essentially over the bitcoin blockchain. The empirical analysis here presents the evolution of metadata utilization in the recent years, and the discussion suggests steps towards preventing criminal use. Metadata are relevant to any blockchain, and our analysis considers primarily bitcoin as a case study. The paper concludes that simultaneously with both expanding legitimate utilization of embedded metadata and expanding blockchain functionality, the applied research on improving anonymity and security must also attempt to protect against blockchain abuse.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Digital identity is unsolved: after many years of research there is still no trusted communication over the Internet. To provide identity within the context of mutual distrust, this paper presents a blockchain-based digital identity solution. Without depending upon a single trusted third party, the proposed solution achieves passport-level legally valid identity. This solution for making identities Self-Sovereign, builds on a generic provable claim model for which attestations of truth from third parties need to be collected. The claim model is then shown to be both blockchain structure and proof method agnostic. Four different implementations in support of these two claim model properties are shown to offer sub-second performance for claim creation and claim verification. Through the properties of Self-Sovereign Identity, legally valid status and acceptable performance, our solution is considered to be fit for adoption by the general public.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Identity-based encryption is a key distribution system in which the public key of a user is derived directly from his identity information. Compared with PKI, Identity-based encryption simplifies key management issue, but it still suffers from drawbacks inkey escrow and private key delivering. Motivated by this, we propose an improved key distribution solution called BIBE by integrating the technique of blockchain into the identity-based encryption. Specifically, we split the nodes in the chain to complete user authentication and private key protection, respectively. Furthermore, the two sides complete the mutual identity authentication with the identity information key pairs obtained from BIBE. Additionally, to prevent network attack, we employ timestamps, random numbers and hash algorithm in the process of identification. Through the rigorous and mathematical analysis, the proposed scheme demonstratesa far better performance on correctness, safety and efficiency.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin has introduced a new concept that could feasibly revolutionise the entire Internet as it exists, and positively impact on many types of industries including, but not limited to, banking, public sector and supply chain. This innovation is grounded on pseudo-anonymity and strives on its innovative decentralised architecture based on the blockchain technology. Blockchain is pushing forward a race of transaction-based applications with trust establishment without the need for a centralised authority, promoting accountability and transparency within the business process. However, a blockchain ledger (e.g., Bitcoin) tend to become very complex and specialised tools, collectively called “Blockchain Analytics”, are required to allow individuals, law enforcement agencies and service providers to search, explore and visualise it. Over the last years, several analytical tools have been developed with capabilities that allow, e.g., to map relationships, examine flow of transactions and filter crime instances as a way to enhance forensic investigations. This paper discusses the current state of blockchain analytical tools and presents a thematic taxonomy model based on their applications. It also examines open challenges for future development and research.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin blockchain is growing big, yet its transaction capacity hit its limits in 2017. One solution heavily discussed within the bitcoin community is to let it grow faster by increasing size of the blocks. However, making transactions smaller instead of blocks bigger is more sustainable and also brings other additional benefits. In this paper, we focus on space wasted by non-cryptographic use of hashes and uncompressed numbers within transaction inputs. In our analyses, we show that transactions can be made approximately 16% smaller, depending on their complexity.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin is a digital asset which is a crypto currency that can be buy, sell or transfer between two parties securely over the web. It can be proposed as the most secure digital currency in world and can be used as a medium to exchange values electronically without involvement of third parties like banks and other types of organizations or Institutions or any clearinghouse that act as a middleman in these transactions. It happens because it is a secure medium due to cryptographic hashing used in peer-to-peer connection which is possible within blockchain technology. Blockchain solves three issues of internet: value, trust and Reliability. In our research survey, we had analyse the working of blockchain and Cryptographic Hash technology. We also include the analysis of different secure options of transferring crypto currency. At the end, we have define relation between trust, security and reliability which helps in developing satisfaction in client in using these crypto currency.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Thomas Hepp, Patrick Wortner, Alexander Schönhals, Béla Gipp
The use of blockchain technology to track physical assets is not new. However, the state of the art concepts are not applicable due to several limitations. One limitation is the scalability of blockchains with regard to the number of transactions that can be processed by the network. The well-established technology in tracking products is based on RFID chips that can be cloned. This paper provides insights into how objects can be protected and monitored by a varnish with a unique crack pattern, as an example of a Physical Unclonable Function. The perceptual hash of the unique pattern is used to encrypt the associated data to ensure privacy. Instead of logging each event on the blockchain individually, which is not possible due to the limited transaction throughput, OriginStamp is used to preserve data integrity on the blockchain. OriginStamp aggregates events, combines them through hashing and embeds this hash into a Bitcoin transaction. Once the Bitcoin network mines the transaction into a block and confirms it, the timestamp is considered as immutable proof of existence. With this approach, the integrity of tracking data cannot be contested.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Freya Sheer Hardwick, Apostolos Gioulis, Raja Naeem Akram, Konstantinos Markantonakis
Technology has positive impacts on many aspects of our social life. Designing a 24hour globally connected architecture enables ease of access to a variety of resources and services. Furthermore, technology like Internet has been a fertile ground for innovation and creativity. One of such disruptive innovation is blockchain -- a keystone of cryptocurrencies. The blockchain technology is presented as a game changer for many of the existing and emerging technologies/services. With its immutability property and decentralised architecture, it is taking centre stage in many services as an equalisation factor to the current parity between consumers and large corporations/governments. One of such potential applications of the blockchain is in e-voting schemes. The objective of such a scheme would be to provide a decentralised architecture to run and support a voting scheme that is open, fair and independently verifiable. In this paper, we propose potentially a new e-voting protocol that utilises the blockchain as a transparent ballot box. The protocol has been designed with adhering to the fundamental e-voting properties in mind as well as offering a degree of decentralisation and allowing for the voter to change/update their vote (within the permissible voting period). The paper highlights the pros and cons of using blockchain for such a proposal from practical point view in both development/deployment and usage contexts. Concluding the paper with a potential roadmap for blockchain technology to be able to support complex applications.
The blockchain is an emerging technology. Because of its efficiency and functionality, it is widely considered to have revolutionary application prospects. As a supporting part of the data structure, the hash function is important for ensuring the availability and security of the blockchain. To evaluate the security of blockchain technology it is important to analyze several security criteria of the hash functions used in the blockchain. This paper focuses on two security criteria-hiding and puzzle-friendliness-that the hash function should satisfy in the blockchain proposed by Narayanan et al. (Narayanan A, Bonneau J, Felten E, et al. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton University Press, 2016). Under the framework of Rogaway?Shrimpton's theory, their definitions are mathematically described and their relation is proved. Also, comparisons between the two criteria and traditional ones in hash functions are made. The conclusions of this paper point out that for hash functions, it is harder to break hiding and puzzle-friendliness than to break preimage resistance, which shows that hash functions proven to be preimage-resistant or tested by preimage cryptanalysis like SHA256 tend to be enough to be used in the corresponding parts of the blockchain design. At the same time, from the attackers' view the conclusions can provide a theoretical basis for studying the potential attacks on and defects that may exist in the structure of the hash functions applied in the blockchain.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Recently, blockchain systems have attracted intensive attentions from academia, industrial circles and governments, which make smart contract a hit since it is an important research topic for blockchain system. We propose a logic-based smart contract model Logic-SC for blockchain system based on semantics and syntax of Active-U-Datalog with some temporal extensions. Logic-SC model owns a triggering mechanism by temporal active rules, which can satisfy the expressiveness and flexibility of the smart contracts for blockchain system. The paper introduces the rules, structure of contracts and implementation of the model. Finally, an application is exampled to show the effectiveness of the model.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auction Theory and Applications
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Robert Alexandru Dobre, Radu Preda, Claudia Cristina Oprea, Ionuţ Pirnog
Image authentication importance increases as image acquisition becomes easier with the help of new technologies. Today, almost any phone has a camera with decent performances and sharing images is encouraged by social media. Image tampering is also decreasing in difficulty because of the advances in image editing software. Today's signature-based image authentication techniques rely on storing the image signature until the authentication is needed. This is a disadvantage because the storage support is usually unique, controlled by one entity and could fail. Also, this centralized approach is not fundamentally trustworthy. To solve these problems, the paper proposes a signature-based image authentication method resistant to JPEG compression which makes use of new blockchain technology to store the image signature. With this method, the signature is stored in a decentralized network, significantly increasing the security.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The use of technology has become important at this point in helping to meet human needs.Due to the increasing use of technology, new challenges are brought in the process of democracy as most people today don’t trust their governments, making elections is very important in modern democracy . Elections have a great importance in determining who will rule a nation or an organization or it can be said as it is an event that decides the fate of any nation. In modern democracy, elections are very important but large sections of society around the world do not trust their election system which is a major concern for democracy. Even the world’s largest democracies like India, United States, still suffer from a flawed electoral system. Vote rigging, hacking of EVM (Electronic voting machine), election manipulation, and polling booth capturing are the major issues in the current voting system The blockchain is said as emerging, decentralized, and distributed technology that promises to enhance different aspects of many industries. Expanding e-voting into blockchain technology could be the solution to eliminate the present concerns in e-voting system There is no doubt that the ever changing concept of the blockchain, which is the backbone of the famous cryptocurrency Bitcoin has triggered the start of a new era in the Internet and the online services. While most people focus only on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; there are in fact, many operations, both administrative and fintech that can only be done online/offline can now safely be moved to the Internet as online services because of immutability of blockchain. What makes blockchain a powerful tool is its smarts contracts and many features which overcomes traditional systems. Smart contracts are meaningful pieces of codes, to be integrated in the blockchain and executed as scheduled in every step of blockchain updates. E-votin, is another trending, yet critical, topic related to the online services. The blockchain with the smart contracts, emerges as a good candidate to use in developments of safer, cheaper, more secure, more transparent, and easier-to-use e-voting systems.Due to its consistency, widespread use, and provision of smart contracts logic, Ethereum and its network is one of the most suitable ones. An e-voting system must be secure, as it should not allow duplicated votes and be fully transparent, while protecting the privacy of the attendees. In this project, we have implemented and tested an e-voting application as a smart contract for the Ethereum network using the Ethereum and the Solidity language.
Cryptocurrency wallets store the wallet's private key(s), and hence, are a lucrative target for attackers. With possession of the private key, an attacker virtually owns all of the currency in the compromised wallet. Managing cryptocurrency wallets offline, in isolated (`air-gapped') computers, has been suggested in order to secure the private keys from theft. Such air-gapped wallets are often referred to as `cold wallets.' In this paper we show how private keys can be exfiltrated from air-gapped wallets. In the adversarial attack model, the attacker infiltrates the offline wallet, infecting it with malicious code. The malware can be preinstalled or pushed in during the initial installation of the wallet, or it can infect the system when removable media (e.g., USB flash drive) is inserted into the wallet's computer in order to sign a transaction. These attack vectors have repeatedly been proven feasible in the last decade (e.g., [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]). Having obtained a foothold in the wallet, an attacker can utilize various air-gap covert channel techniques (bridgeware [11]) to jump the airgap and exfiltrate the wallet's private keys. We evaluate various exfiltration techniques, including physical, electromagnetic, electric, magnetic, acoustic, optical, and thermal techniques. This research shows that although cold wallets provide a high degree of isolation, it's not beyond the capability of motivated attackers to compromise such wallets and steal private keys from them. We demonstrate how a 256-bit private key (e.g., Bitcoin's private keys) can be exfiltrated from an offline, air-gapped wallet of a fictional character named Satoshi within a matter of seconds.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques