Democratic principles demand that every voter should be able to individually verify that their vote is recorded as intended and counted as recorded, without having to trust any authorities. However, most end-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting protocols that provide universal verifiability and voter secrecy implicitly require to trust some authorities or auditors for the correctness guarantees that they provide.
In this paper, we explore the notion of individual verifiability. We evaluate the existing E2E voting protocols and propose a new protocol that guarantees such verifiability without any trust requirements. Our construction depends on a novel vote commitment scheme to capture voter intent that allows voters to obtain a direct zero-knowledge proof of their vote being recorded as intended. We also ensure protection against spurious vote injection or deletion post eligibility verification, and polling-booth level community profiling.
In this work, we present a systems centric approach towards implementing security in Blockchain ecosystems. First, we detail the motivation for our security approach. Then, we detail the foundation of this approach by describing the concept of inline, Non-invasive High Granularity Metrics (HGMs). Following this, we outline how such metrics can be used effectively to monitor Blockchain ecosystems to detect behavior that is not deemed secure. We describe how they can be used to build whitelist and blacklist access controls in an adaptive manner, and then describe how they can be effectively used to detect potentially malicious behavior that is not yet baked into the access control structures. Finally, we discuss scalability and potential improvements for future work.
Driven by the increasing number of stationary and portable devices, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks pose a major threat to Internet availability. While advantages of cooperative defenses have been widely recognized over traditional on-premise defenses, there is not a widespread deployment of such cooperative defenses. This work demonstrates the Blockchain Signaling System (BloSS), a modular, network-agnostic and cooperative DDoS defense system consisting of independent instances working together to mitigate attacks targeted at any member of this alliance.
Stefano Angieri, Alberto García-Martínez, Bingyang Liu, Zhiwei Yan · 6 authors
The current system to manage the global pool of IP addresses is centralized in five transnational organizations, known as regional internet registries (RIRs). Each of them manages the address pool for many countries. In this paper, we present InBlock, a distributed autonomous organization that provides the decentralized management of IP addresses. The InBlock also fulfills the same objectives as those fulfilled by the current IP address allocation organizations, i.e., uniqueness, fairness, conservation, aggregation, registration, and minimized overhead. The InBlock is implemented as a set of blockchain's smart contracts in Ethereum, and it implements all the functions needed for the management of a global pool of addresses without any human intervention. Any entity may request an allocation of addresses to the InBlock registry by performing a (crypto)currency transfer to the InBlock. The fee required, along with the annual renewal fee, serves as a mechanism to deter stockpiling and other wasteful practices. As with any novel technology, there are many open questions about the usage of blockchains to build an IP address registry. For this reason, we believe that practical experimentation is required in order to have hands-on experience, so we propose to conduct an experiment on the InBlock as a starting point to inform about the future directions in this space.
Stefano Bistarelli, Ivan Mercanti, Francesco Santini
In Bitcoin, the most common kind of transactions is in the form “Bob pays Alice”, and it is based on the Pay to-Public Key Hash(P2PKH) script, which are resolved by sending the public key and a digital signature created by the corresponding private key. P2PKH transactions are just one among many standard classes: a transaction is standard if it passes Bitcoin Core’s IsStandard() and IsStandardTx() tests. However, the creation of ad-hoc scripts to lock (and unlock) transactions allows for also generating non-standard transactions, which can be nevertheless broadcast and mined as well. In this work, we explore the Bitcoin block-chain with the purpose to analyze and classify standard and non-standard transactions, understanding how much the standard behaviour is respected.
Marius Musch, Christian Wressnegger, Martin Johns, Konrad Rieck
With the introduction of memory-bound cryptocurrencies, such as Monero, the implementation of mining code in browser-based JavaScript has become a worthwhile alternative to dedicated mining rigs. Based on this technology, a new form of parasitic computing, widely called cryptojacking or drive-by mining, has gained momentum in the web. A cryptojacking site abuses the computing resources of its visitors to covertly mine for cryptocurrencies. In this paper, we systematically explore this phenomenon. For this, we propose a 3-phase analysis approach, which enables us to identify mining scripts and conduct a large-scale study on the prevalence of cryptojacking in the Alexa 1 million websites. We find that cryptojacking is common, with currently 1 out of 500 sites hosting a mining script. Moreover, we perform several secondary analyses to gain insight into the cryptojacking landscape, including a measurement of code characteristics, an estimate of expected mining revenue, and an evaluation of current blacklist-based countermeasures.
Lo‐Yao Yeh, Jiun‐Long Huang, T.S. Benedict Yen, Jen-Wei Hu
In this paper, we propose a consortium blockchainbased system sharing malicious IP to prevent further attacks happening among other hosts. In our scheme, every security operation center (SOC) serving as a blockchain-node uploads some suspicious IPs to find the potential attackers' IPs. A smart contract is responsible for comparing the loaded IPs and the existing ones without human interference. If IPs in different lists are matched with certain degree, this system will respond by giving the whole list of malicious IP. By means of these steps, shares of IP lists are achieved and attacks are prevented in advance. Besides, when uploading and sharing, we utilize elliptic curve cryptography to ensure data confidentiality and integrity.
Aug 1, 2019·2019 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)
Rabeya Bosri, Abdur Razzak Uzzal, Abdullah Al Omar, A S M Touhidul Hasan · 5 authors
The voting system is the process to take the opinion of people to run the constitution properly. Fairness, independence, and unbiasedness should be present in the voting system. Hence, it must be a transparent and secured process so that everybody can express their own opinion freely. Worldwide vote manipulation is an intriguing problem in existing voting systems. Since people in different countries are using digital technology in the voting process (e.g., Optical Scan Voting system, Internet Voting system, Electronic Voting system) instead of traditional way (e.g., Ballot Box). Only digitization could not solve the issues completely. Because still there are numerous ways to manipulate or tamper digital technology and hamper the voting process. To build a secure electronic voting environment, we introduce an application of blockchain technology as a service for the distributed electronic voting system. With the use of blockchain, we achieve data integrity which is a necessary attribute of a voting environment. The anonymity of the voters, privacy, and security of the voting environment is the main goal of this work. Through the design of our system and with the help of blockchain we have solved all the security issues in the voting environment.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aug 1, 2019·2019 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)
Software defined networking (SDN) is one of the most popular network technologies which provides an adaptive, agile and flexible network management and visibility. Although SDN architecture provides manifold benefits but on the same time its dependence on a logically centralized controller lead to the single point of failure. An attacker can easily capture the any forwarding device and restrict the availability of the controller using different prevalent attacks. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is one of the most popular attack of this category which is quiet prevalent in SDN. Here, the aim of the attackers is to inject false script in the open flow tables through malicious switches which multiply exponentially. Therefore, in this paper, a blockchain as a service framework has been presented wherein BlockSDSec model is designed to provide security as a separate service for the SDN architecture. This work provides a mechanism to prevent the threats of DDoS at the switch level by embedding an security using blockchain onto the interaction channels of data and control planes. The load balancing at the controller level is achieved using a virtual controller. The proposed scheme is simulated using MiniNet Emulator to analyze the delay originating from usage of blockchain.
Malik Hamza Murtaza, Zahoor Ahmed Alizai, Zubair Iqbal
This paper presents a very simple approach for a fair electronic voting system that guarantees anonymity, coercion resistance, correctness, easy tallying, eligibility, fairness, high availability, integrity, robustness, voter authentication, voter confidentiality, vote verifiability and public verifiability of any electoral process. These properties are achieved using blockchain technology. A relatively new type of zero knowledge proof known as zkSNARKs has been used to provide voter unlinkability.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Jiazhuo Lyu, Zoe L. Jiang, Xuan Wang, Zhenhao Nong · 6 authors
E-voting plays a significant role in social activities. The trust of the voting results and the privacy of each voter are always the most important concerns in designing secure e-voting system. In this paper, we design a decentralized trustless e-voting system based on the smart contract. To guarantee the correctness of the voting result, the smart contract on Blockchain is used to provide a trusted public bulletin board and trusted computing environment. To hide the identity of each voter as well as avoid multiple voting, linkable ring signature is used for each voter to group a signing ring. In addition, to make sure that all voters will see the voting result at the same time, or nobody can get it, threshold encryption without trusted third party is used to make secret-key secretly before tally stage. Moreover, the trust (power) of the voting system is separated to all voters. Even though some of them are malicious, the final result will not be influenced. The contract is deployed on the Ethereum private network. Some feasibility and cost analysis on money and time are also provided.
2 source records
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Xianglin Bao, Cheng Su, Yan Xiong, Wenchao Huang · 5 authors
Federated learning (shorted as FL) recently proposed by Google is a privacy-preserving method to integrate distributed data trainers. FL is extremely useful due to its ensuring privacy, lower latency, less power consumption and smarter models, but it could fail if multiple trainers abort training or send malformed messages to its partners. Such misbehavior are not auditable and parameter server may compute incorrectly due to single point failure. Furthermore, FL has no incentive to attract sufficient distributed training data and computation power. In this paper, we propose FLChain to build a decentralized, public auditable and healthy FL ecosystem with trust and incentive. FLChain replace traditional FL parameter server whose computation result must be consensual on-chain. Our work is not trivial when it is vital and hard to provide enough incentive and deterrence to distributed trainers. We achieve model commercialization by providing a healthy marketplace for collaborative-training models. Honest trainer can gain fairly partitioned profit from well-trained model according to its contribution and the malicious can be timely detected and heavily punished. To reduce the time cost of misbehavior detecting and model query, we design DDCBF for accelerating the query of blockchain-documented information. Finally, we implement a prototype of our work and measure the cost of various operations.
Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at an exponential rate but the area of privacy and security in IoT still remains unexplored. The existing algorithms or methods are mainly centralized and hence they are vulnerable due to their single point authentication topology. As it has been estimated that by 2020 there will be more ‘things’ than people on this earth the problem of security becomes a major concern in IoT networks, as a person having control to an IoT network will be able to control a large portion of an organization. Blockchain has recently been used to provide security to peer-to-peer networks. Blockchains are computationally expensive, heavyweight and are considered unsuitable for IoT architecture. In this paper a new lightweight and secure architecture for IoT by using Ethereum Blockchain retaining most of its security providing powers is proposed. Since Blockchain is decentralized it solves the single point authentication problem existing in IoT networks. A Smart Home System as a representative case study has been implemented for broader IoT applications. The two parameters measured are temperature and intrusion detection. The proposed model tackles some more challenges that exist in IoT networks. The Qualitative evaluation of the proposed architecture highlights how it tackles various attacks.
Bitcoin denkler arası/eşitler arası ağa dayalı olan kripto bir birimidir. Bitcoinin en temel özelliği herhangi bir otorite tarafından arz ve garanti edilmemesidir. Bitcoin işlemleri, bunları dijital bir deftere kaydeden blok zinciri ile bütün kullanıcılar için umumi hâle gelir. Bitcoin ağının merkezî olmayan yapısı, cebri icra süreci bakımından bazı sorunları da beraberinde getirmektedir. Bir taraf akdi bir ilişkiye istinaden belirli bir tutar bitcoini ifa etmeyi taahhüt ederse, diğer taraf kararlaştırılan bitcoini almak için cebri icra takibi başlatabilmelidir. Diğer taraftan, bir icra dairesi, takip alacaklısının talebi üzerine, bir bitcoin kullanıcısının para borcundan ötürü bitcoinini haczedebilmelidir. Haciz işleminde bitcoinin merkezî olmayan yapısı dikkate alınmalıdır.
Blockchain sistemi blokların birbirine zincir gibi bağlandığı bir dağıtık veri tabanıdır. Bu sistemde merkezi bir sunucu bulunmamaktadır. Sistemdeki işlemler eşler arası aracısız bir şekilde gerçekleşmektedir. Blockchain’in işlevleri arasında kripto paraların işleyişi de bulunmaktadır. Kripto para kavramı Bitcoin, Altcoin ve Token’ları kapsamaktadır. Blockchain temelinde işleyen Bitcoin ilk ve en popüler kripto para konumundadır.   Şu an için dünya genelinde binin üzerinde kripto para bulunmaktadır. Bunların toplam piyasa değeri şu an için 320 milyar dolar civarındadır. Kripto paraların ticaret şirketlerine getirilmesiyle etkin bir şekilde ekonomi çarkının içine dâhil edilmesi oldukça önem arz etmektedir. Çalışmamızda Bitcoin’in ticaret şirketlerine sermaye olarak getirilip getirilemeyeceği tespit edildikten sonra bunların sermaye niteliğine ve ticaret şirketlerine sermaye olarak konulması usulüne değinilecektir. 
Due to little attention given to anonymous protection against eavesdropping attacks in Bitcoin network, this paper initiatively proposes a solution to Bitcoin anonymization based on network structure. We first present a general adversarial network model for formulizing deanonymization attack, then present a novel propagation method APRP(Adaptive PageRank Propagation) that adopts PageRank as propagation delay factor and constantly adjusts PR-value of nodes to adapt to network dynamics. Experiments on both simulated and real Bitcoin networks confirm the superiority of APRP in terms of 20-50% performance enhancement under various deanonymization attacks.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Over the years, elections at different levels are the subject of many disputes, consolidation and reaffirmation of confidence in different leaders. These elections range from either boardroom elections, local elections to national elections. Correspondingly, electioneering as an institutional process has transformed with both technological advancements as well political sophistication. Blockchain as a nascent technology has ushered in a range of opportunities in different sectors such as finance, real estate, supply chain management, medical records, elections etc. In this paper, we leveraged on some of the key characteristics of Blockchain technology in form of immutability, auditability, confidentiality, transparency, decentralization etc to develop a Blockchain eVoting network system that can be utilized for geographically dispersed elections. Key users of the system or actors were isolated and their interactions with the system identified using Use Case Methodology. The system actors are the voters, miners that consists of Universities and public libraries, central authority, candidates and the voters. The different stages of an election process such as pre-election, registration of both candidates and voters, voting/balloting, tallying and auditing were equally enumerated. The interactions of the actors with the system were equally captured, analyzed and used to develop the conceptual system. The proposed system is made up of a multichain Blockchain network, an arbitration server, distributed database, an interactive, multi-device graphic user interface GUI, and an application server. To engender anonymity, a combination of Digital Signature and Secure Hash Algorithm SHA was proposed, also Proof of Work PoW was the proposed consensus algorithm. The identified stages of the election were evaluated against the requirements of an eVoting system. The proposed system was found to satisfy the requirements of an eVoting system such as transparency, privacy, scalability, receipt freeness, security, integrity, accuracy, auditable etc.