Blockchain Papers

Nedaa Baker Al Barghuthi, Issam Hamdan, Saleh Al Suwaidi, Ahmed Lootah · 7 authors

Voting is a pillar of modern society, but the traditional paper voting system is prone to fraud and failure. Votes can sometimes be miscounted or might be lost in transit. Besides, the electronic voting system has been active subject research for decades. However, the old traditional voting system lacks security and privacy features, which has been a challenge for a long time. As a solution, this paper is proposing a prototype blockchain-based electronic voting system for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) political election process. A blockchain system is a distributed decentralized, immutable database; that allows the data to be distributed and shared among all the participants in a network. Also, it has many advantages that can be applied in many use cases, such as electronic voting systems. Implementing the blockchain-based electronic voting system will minimize the costs of running an election while ensuring integrity. It has the potential to limit voter fraud while making the votes traceable and verifiable, preventing unauthorized activity, and fake votes by authenticating each voter in the system. The UAE has a blockchain initiative that seeks to have 50 percent paperless transactions in all its governmental processes by the end of 2021. This paper studied the effectiveness of adopting blockchain in the UAE political election.

Donny Seftyanto, Amiruddin Amiruddin, Arif Rahman Hakim

Indonesia has held simultaneous general elections to elect the President/Vice President and legislative members on April 17, 2019. However, there were at least 4 (four) important problems arised in this election i.e. the problem of logistics distribution, the duration of the ballot counting that is too long, the inconsistent regulation of vote counting, and the error in votes recapitulation. Blockchain technology can be a solution to deal with those problems. In this paper, we propose a design of blockchain-based electronic voting system using Hyperledger for Indonesia case. Our design was analyzed in 3 (three) stages of analysis i.e. blockchain necessity, problem solution, and secure election requirements. Based on the results of the analysis, our proposed design can optimally apply the blockchain to solve the problems of Indonesia general voting system and can meet the secure election requirements to increase the trust of all the involved participants. The proposed design is able to secure votes in blockchain since the voting at the voting booth until the declaration of the elected candidate.

Shahidatul Sadiah, Toru Nakanishi

Recently, crowd sensing has been intensively researched, due to the rapid growth of sensor-integrated mobile devices. Crowd sensing is a participatory sensing service where a server gathers and analyzes sensing data submitted from mobile devices of lots of users. In crowd sensing, the user's anonymity is desired, since the server gathers sensitive data from the participants including their GPS locations and moving path. However, the anonymous data submission may compromise the trust of the sensing data, because anonymous users may submit inappropriate sensing data, but they cannot be traced. Therefore, as the system to achieve both anonymity and trust in crowd sensing, ARTSense has been proposed. In the system, the trust of the sensing data is assessed on the sensed environment, other users' sensing, and the reputation of the user, and furthermore the reputation of the user is anonymously managed on the feedback from the trust assessment for the data. However, the anonymous reputation system of ARTSense has the efficiency problem, i.e., the user needs to wait a random time after the data submission phase before requesting the reputation update, which causes the communication delay. In this paper, we propose an efficient anonymous reputation system for crowd sensing, which can be integrated to the trust assessment in ARTSense. In the proposed system, during the data submission, the reputation update is anonymously completed. This is because the server does not manage the reputation of each user, but each user manages his/her reputation in the user side, where the the validity of the reputation is ensured by a certificate and anonymously checked by zero-knowledge proofs. Therefore, the proposed system achieves the better efficiency with no delay.

Samiran Bag, Feng Hao

In this paper we propose an end-to-end (E2E) verifiable online shareholder voting system. Our system allows different voters to have different weights associated with their votes. These weights are dependent upon the number of shares owned by voters in an organization. In our system, the voters cast their votes over the Internet using a personal computing device, say a smart-phone. The voting client interacts with an online voting server which generates encrypted ballots for the chosen candidates with a receipt. Every encrypted ballot comes with a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof to prove the well-formedness of the ciphertext. In addition, the voting system allows the voters to verify their votes are cast as intended through voter initiated auditing. All the encrypted ballots and non-interactive proofs are made available on a publicly readable bulletin board. By checking the receipt against the bulletin board, voters are assured that their votes as recorded as cast. Finally, this e-voting scheme allows everyone including third-party observers to verify all votes are tallied as recorded without involving any tallying authorities. Once the polling concludes, the tallying result is available immediately on the bulletin board with publicly verifiable audit data to allow everyone including third-party observers to verify the tallying integrity of the entire election.

Amna Qureshi, David Megías

Due to the popularization of low-cost broadband Internet access, the amount of the digital data that is illegally redistributed is growing, making content creators and owners lose their income. Fingerprinting, a watermarking-based technology for embedding buyer identifications in legally distributed contents, has emerged as a promising approach to fight illegal redistribution. On the other hand, the blockchain technology is also shaping up to handle the challenge of digital copyright protection. With blockchain, media producers can authorize and manage their copyrights on a public ledger. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based distribution system which blends different technologies (collusion-resistant fingerprinting, perceptual hash functions, and a peer-to-peer file distribution network) to provide copyright protection, collusion resistance, atomic payment, piracy tracing, transparency, proof-of-delivery, revocable privacy (to a buyer), and dispute resolution. The paper also analyzes several security and privacy compromising attacks and countermeasures.

Yikang Lin, Peng Zhang

Electronic voting (E-voting) protocol is that voters can vote according to their wishes, and then the voting authority is responsible for collecting the votes and counting the final voting result. With the development of Blockchain, we tend to combine it with E-voting and propose Blockchain-based complete self-tallying E-voting protocol. Its distributed network makes the protocol more available than E-voting protocol based on centralized servers. In our protocol, Blockchain acts as bulletin board, and “Efficient One-out-of-T” zero knowledge proof (ZKP) is proposed to support multi-candidate voting. Moreover, the issues of abortive and adaptive are solved. The security analysis shows that our protocol meets the security requirements of E-voting, and it can be applied to small-scale and anonymous private scenario such as Corporate Board Voting. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed ZKP has low time consumption.

Samuel Agbesi, George Asante

Blockchain has been said to be one of the technologies for the future, and researchers have argued that this technology is going to disrupt many industries in the coming years, and democratic elections are one of the key areas blockchain is going to transform. Several organizations have begun experimenting on blockchain-enabled e-voting platforms, such as Democratic Earth, Horizon State and Follow My Vote. This study seeks to conceptualize a blockchain architecture for the storage of election results that provide trust, transparency, and immutability using distributed ledger technology (DLT). One of the main issues with elections in Ghana and other sub-Saharan African countries is the inaccurate recording of votes from polling stations, constituencies and at the national office. There are instances where votes recorded at the polling station changes at the constituencies either intentionally or accidentally. The study discussed the basic properties of the blockchain, such as distributed ledger, consensus mechanisms and cryptographic hash function, and how it can be used to address the current challenges in vote recording during elections. The study evaluates current blockchain-enabled e-voting systems and designs a blockchain-based vote recording system that provides immutability, trust, and transparency. The proposed design addresses the issues of vote tempering because transactions added to the block are secure with a cryptographic hash function which makes tempering of the votes stored in the blockchain nearly impossible and make it immutable.

Nasser Alsalami, Bingsheng Zhang

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been widely deployed and used in our daily life. Although there are numerous works in the literature surveying technical challenges and security issues in blockchains, very few works focused on the anonymity guarantees provided in cryptocurrencies. In this work, we conduct a systematic survey on anonymity in cryptocurrencies with a clear categorization for the different tiers of anonymity offered in the various cryptocurrencies as well as their known weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We also study the techniques that have been used to achieve each tier of anonymity. Finally, we asses the current techniques, and present a forecast for the technological trends in this field.

Noor Abdalkarem Mohammedali, Ali Al-Sherbaz

There is no uncertainty that the chroma currency is very popular for the transaction information stored in the block of blocks. To initiate the importance of blocking, there is only one distributed ledger in which data is stored, since many of the centers in the blockchain network limit enough records for these records. This document proposes a decision-making framework based on innovation to create a secure, unjustifiable, accurate and transparent framework for voter privacy. In addition, it is voted and declared in this context that the race has a short period of time, since it is automatically registered in the table. This framework also gives society confidence in its legislation when applying this technique. In this framework, an administrator can add a candidate and a voter to the block. In different hands, a voter can log into the framework and then decide in favor of a candidate that the details of the vote should be stored in the block. In addition, each square in the blockchain innovation that relates to the previous square contains the hash of the previous square, and each square contains explicit data based on the square footage. The hub is connected by a peer network in this framework, with all the hubs in the block site network that have a complete duplicate block.

Kazi Sadia, Md Masuduzzaman, Rajib Kumar Paul, Anik Islam

Voting is a very important issue which can be beneficial in term of choosing the right leader in an election. A good leader can bring prosperity to a country and also can lead the country in the right direction every time. However, elections are surrounds with ballot forgery, coercion and multiple voting issues. Moreover, while giving votes, a person has to wait in a long queue and it is a very time consuming process. Blockchain is a distributed database in which data are shared with the participant of the node and each participant holds the same copy of the data. Blockchain has properties like distributed, pseudonymous, data integrity etc. In the paper, a fully decentralized evoting system based on blockchain technology is proposed. This protocol utilizes smart contract into the evoting system to deal with security issues, accuracy and voters privacy during the vote. The protocol results in a transparent, non editable and independently verifiable procedure that discards all the intended fraudulent activities occurring during the election process by removing the least participation of the third party and enabling voters right during the election. Both transparency and coercion are obtained at the same time.

Hee-Dong Park

This paper describes a decentralized electronic voting system using blockchain technology with peer-to-peer network rather than the centralized voting system of server-client structure. In the proposed system, an Ethereum-based private blockchain network is configured and decentralized applications are implemented to store and distribute voting data to all nodes participating in the network to create secure and reliable electronic voting system. Smart contracts for electronic voting are implemented using the Solidity language and distributed to a configured network so that all users can view and vote on elections, and voting data are shared and contrasted by all users in the network, which makes it possible to build a safer and more reliable electronic voting system without third party involvement.

Dipti Pawade, Avani Sakhapara, Aishwarya Badgujar, Divya Adepu · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Aicha Fatrah, Said El Kafhali, Abdelkrim Haqiq, Khaled Salah

Blockchain is becoming the missing puzzle to solve many digital services problems these days. In this paper, we propose a design and implementation of a Blockchain-based voting system that can be used in national elections. In the paper, we argue that our Blockchain-based voting system is more secure, reliable and it has the ability to protect voter privacy which will help boost the number of voters and their trust in the electoral system as well as reducing considerably the cost of national elections.

Maurantonio Caprolu, Simone Raponi, Gabriele Oligeri, Roberto Di Pietro

Cryptojacking occurs when an adversary illicitly runs crypto-mining software over the devices of unaware users. This novel cybersecurity attack, that is emerging in both the literature and in the wild, has proved to be very effective given the simplicity of running a crypto-client into a target device. Several countermeasures have recently been proposed, with different features and performance, but all characterized by a host-based architecture. The cited solutions, designed to protect the individual user, are not suitable for efficiently protecting a corporate network, especially against insiders. In this paper, we propose a network-based approach to detect and identify crypto-clients activities by solely relying on the network traffic, even when encrypted and mixed with non-malicious traces. First, we provide a detailed analysis of the real network traces generated by three major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Monero, and Bytecoin, considering both the normal traffic and the one shaped by a VPN. Then, we propose Crypto-Aegis, a Machine Learning (ML) based framework built over the results of our investigation, aimed at detecting cryptocurrencies related activities, e.g., pool mining, solo mining, and active full nodes. Our solution achieves a striking 0.96 of F1-score and 0.99 of AUC for the ROC, while enjoying a few other properties, such as device and infrastructure independence. Given the extent and novelty of the addressed threat we believe that our approach, supported by its excellent results, pave the way for further research in this area.

Majid Khabbazian, Tejaswi Nadahalli, Roger Wattenhofer

In the context of second layer payments in Bitcoin, and specifically the Lightning Network, we propose a design for a lightweight watchtower that does not need to store signed justice transactions. We alter the structure of the opening and commitment transactions in Lightning channels to encode justice transactions as part of the commitment transactions. With that, a watchtower just needs to watch for specific cheating commitment transaction IDs on the blockchain and can extract signed justice transactions directly from these commitment transactions that appear on the blockchain. Our construction saves an order of magnitude in storage over existing watchtower designs. In addition, we let the watchtower prove to each channel that it has access to all the data required to do its job, and can therefore be paid-per-update.

Michael Kerr

This research explores Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) applications for digital watermarking performed on the camera in real time, combining this with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to suggest workable systems for data cataloguing and image integrity. Reference implementations of both technologies are developed and evaluated for their effectiveness and suitability for these purposes.

D. L. Kuteynikov

The modernization of democratic institutions has been greatly influenced by the intensive development of technology. Various innovations in the field of digital communications have affected a rather traditional sphere of popular votings. The widespread introduction of the distributed ledger technology has enormously changed approaches to organizing them. Distributed registers gained the widest popularity after the technology of the chain of blocks (blockchain) was introduced. Despite the fact that initially this technology was considered exclusively as an element of the development of information, and later financial technologies, at the present stage it is gradually becoming increasingly common in other areas of human activity due to a high degree of security and confidentiality. The paper deals in detail with the world practice concerning using this technology in popular voting. Also, the author analizes the technical solutions applied in the most actively developing projects aimed at developing a software used to conduct electronic voting with the use of blockchain technology. The article investigates some problems of voting with the use of blockchain technology, such as identification and secrecy of the vote.

Chen Qian

Les primitives lossy trapdoor, preuve à divulgation nulle de connaissance et applications Dans cette thèse, nous étudions deux primitives différentes : les lossy trapdoor functions (LTF) et les systèmes de preuve à divulgation nulle de connaissance. Les LTFs sont des familles de fonctions dans lesquelles les fonctions injectives et les fonctions lossy sont calculatoirement indistinguables. Depuis leur introduction, elles se sont avérées utiles pour la construction de diverses primitives cryptographiques. Nous donnons dans cette thèse des constructions efficaces d’une variante de la LTF : le filtre algébrique lossy. Avec cette variante, nous pouvons améliorer l’efficacité du schéma de chiffrement KDM-CCA et extracteur flous. Dans la deuxième partie de cette thèse, nous étudions les constructions de systèmes de preuve à divulgation nullle de connaissance. Nous donnons la première signature d’anneau de taille logarithmique avec la sécurité étroite en utilisant une variante de Groth-Kolhweiz Σ-protocole dans le modèle de l’oracle aléatoire. Nous proposons également une nouvelle construction d’arguments à divulgation nulle de connaissance non-intéractive et à vérifieur désigné (DVNIZK) sous l’hypothèse de réseaux Euclidiens. En utilisant cette nouvelle construction, nous construisons un système de vote basé sur les réseaux Euclidiens dans le modèle standard.

Shutong Wang, Xiaorong Zhu, Su Zhao

At present, the software-defined network lacks a complete security mechanism for guarantee stream rule integrity, which contributes to attackers to trigger a variety of destructive network attacks through malicious tampering. Based on the non-tamperable performance of the blockchain technology and the characteristics of decentralization, this paper proposes a blockchain-based SDN security model, which could ensure the integrity of the network information by saving SDN flow rules, node identity and privilege information, and controller global information to the blockchain. The model establishes a distributed authentication mechanism through the blockchain network, which alleviates the problem that traditional centralized authentication is vulnerable to single-point attacks. In addition, the model performs role-based rights management based on data uplink storage and distributed authentication. Also, the Markov model is used to analyze the security performance of the blockchain-based SDN model. Analysis and simulation results show that the model can significantly improve the security performance of SDN.

Kirsten Cremona, Donald Tabone, Clifford De Raffaele

The fight against child pornography on the Internet is difficult due to the inability of controlling the dissemination of content. While the cryptocurrency applications of a blockchain, such as Bitcoin, primarily store financial data in blockchain transactions, numerous approaches to arbitrarily insert other types of data are possible, including content in the form of readable text and images. Thus, considering the blockchain principles of decentralization, immutability, censorship resistance, and net neutrality, we are suddenly presented with a set of new challenges for mitigating the storage and distribution of illicit and potentially illegal data. Such a novel cybersecurity threat requires an adequate solution within a decentralized paradigm. In stark contrast to the countermeasures proposed in literature for filtering out illicit content from other legitimate data, this study proposes the first appropriately designed solution for effectively mitigating these threats whilst maintaining fidelity to the underlying core principles of the blockchain. Through the designed approach, arbitrary images in blockchain transactions are detected, and whilst leveraging an off-chain content filtering service, successful discrimination is achieved between clean and illicit embedded data. The proposed methodology was evaluated directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, successfully demonstrating a pioneering and viable approach for thwarting the insertion of child pornography images. The presented solution within this research is made available on GitHub [1] for open-source use.

Chinnapong Angsuchotmetee, Pisal Setthawong, Sapjarern Udomviriyalanon

Voting is an essential activity in the modern democracy. To facilitate the voting process, there are several attempts on proposing an electronic voting system such that, the voting and tallying processes can be done efficiently and the results would be accountable to the public. To date, however, an online electronic voting system has been rarely adopted in practice due to the possibility of having the voting result tampered through vote-rigging or cyber-attacking. In 2009, the blockchain algorithm was proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Blockchain is a technique for recording transactions between self-auditing ledgers in an open, distributed, permanent, and verifiable manner. Even though blockchain was originally designed for a financial applications, it is possible to apply blockchain to other domains, including in the implementation of an online decentralized-based electronic voting system. In this study, the architecture of a blockchain-based electronic voting system, named \textit{BlockVOTE}, is proposed. The architecture design and all related formal definitions are given. To validate the proposal, two BlockVOTE prototypes were implemented using two different blockchain application frameworks. The performance analysis of both versions of the prototypes are given. The analysis of both technical and management aspects on the possibility of adopting the proposed decentralized voting system in an actual voting scenario is also given at the end of this study.

B Sudharsan, R. Tharun, Nidhish Krishna M P, Boopathi Raj J · 6 authors

Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are replacing paper ballots because of (i) the errors involved in the manual counting process and (ii) the large time period required to count the votes. Even though these digital recording electronic systems are advancements, they are prone to tampering and electoral frauds. The suspected vulnerabilities in EVMs are (i) the possibilities of tampering with the EVM's memory chip or switching it with a fake one, (ii) their simplicity, which enables them to be tampered without requiring much skill and (iii) the chances of double voting. This paper attempts to solve the above problems by storing the vote data in a decentralized network and securing the data using a security mechanism derived from the blockchain framework (which is currently used for securing cryptocurrencies). The vote data is shared among all the devices in the network and peer to peer verification is done to verify the authenticity of the vote data. In order to successfully tamper with the system, the data stored in all the nodes must be changed. This makes the proposed system more efficient and reliable. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, which is based on the concepts of blockchain, to secure the votes stored in an EVM. A fingerprint authentication system is also added as an extra layer of security to prevent double voting. The proposed EVM will be tamperproof, and any attempt to manipulate the registered votes, will be detected and the tampered data will be replaced with the correct data.

Aldo Febro, Hannan Xiao, Joseph Spring

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating Voice/Video over IP sessions. While deployed globally to facilitate multimedia communications, SIP is subject to various attacks. The defense against SIP attacks, however, often lack expertise due to the limited resources within the organization. When there is a large footprint of SIP systems, scaling and keeping up SIP defense becomes crucial in safeguarding these systems. This paper proposes SIPchain, a distributed SIP defense cluster system that leverages Blockchain technology as a distributed, highly-available, and permanent ledger of Indicator of Compromise (IOC). Each node in this cluster is a sensor and shares attack intelligence with other nodes via Blockchain. Each node reads information from the Blockchain and implements the appropriate firewall rule based on this information. This approach scales the defense because each node can leverage the actionable intelligence provided by other nodes and does not have to perform detection on their own. Experiments have been performed using a cluster of three SIP nodes in three different countries (US, UK, and Singapore) and the Ethereum Blockchain network. The result shows that when a node detected an attack, it produced and stored the IOC information at the Ethererum. Fellow SIP nodes retrieved this information, implemented firewall rule based on this information, and were proactively prepared when the same attack was launched against them. This SIPchain approach scales the SIP defense effort by utilizing Blockchain technology to secure the ever-growing footprint of SIP systems within the organization.

Nazim Faour

Since 2004, different research was handling the challenges in the centralized voting systems, e-voting protocols and recently the decentralized voting. Electronic voting puts forward some difficulties regarding the voter anonymity, the secure casting of the votes and to prevent the voting process from fraud. The decentralized property of the blockchain technology will bring new solutions for many of the challenges in the voting research area and it will bring a new security mechanism of safe and transparent voting. In this paper, a broad comparison between ongoing voting systems has studied by analyzing their structure and the drawbacks that should consider in future to improve the whole election process from keeping the privacy of the voter, casting a vote with the possibility to check if it was counted correctly to publishing the results. The result of the paper will give a new approach to extend the target of the election from small scale to large scale despite the fact of Ethereum limitation which can cast five votes per minute on an average. The primary challenge is to find an answer for this question: “how to balance between voter privacy and transparency without breaking the important rule where the voter can proof for a specific candidate that he voted for him in a bribe situation?”.