Yi Liu, Ruilin Li, Xingtong Liu, Jian Wang · 6 authors
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, widely used for its perceived anonymity property, and has surged in popularity in recent years. Bitcoin publishes the complete transaction history in a public ledger, under pseudonyms of users. This is an alternative way to prevent double-spending attack instead of central authority. Therefore, if pseudonyms of users are attached to their identities in real world, the anonymity of Bitcoin will be a serious vulnerability. It is necessary to enhance anonymity of Bitcoin by a coin mixing service or other modifications in Bitcoin protocol. But in a coin mixing service, the relationship among input and output addresses is not hidden from the mixing service provider. So the mixing server still has the ability to track the transaction records of Bitcoin users. To solve this problem, We present a new coin mixing scheme to ensure that the relationship between input and output addresses of any users is invisible for the mixing server. We make use of a ring signature algorithm to ensure that the mixing server can't distinguish specific transaction from all these addresses. The ring signature ensures that a signature is signed by one of its users in the ring and doesn't leak any information about who signed it. Furthermore, the scheme is fully compatible with existing Bitcoin protocol and easily to scale for large amount of users.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We introduce a privacy preserving biometrics-based authentication solution by which users can authenticate to different service providers from mobile phones without involving identity providers in the transactions. Authentication is performed via zero-knowledge proof of knowledge, based on a cryptographic identity token that encodes the biometric identifier of the user and a secret provided by the user, making it three-factor authentication. Our approach for generating a unique, repeatable, and revocable biometric identifier from the user’s biometric image is based on a machine learning-based classification technique, which involves the features extracted from the user’s biometric image. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed authentication solution and evaluated our solution with respect to its performance, security, and privacy. The evaluation has been performed on a public data set of face images.
User Authentication and Security Systems
Biometric Identification and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The IoT presents opportunities in all industrial sectors and is integral to the future of goods and services. The IoT includes the old Internet, but is substantially different from the old Internet for at least one very simple reason: the devices at the periphery of the network are not operated by people. These devices may be semi-or fully automated. And they will vastly outnumber the human operated devices in a short period of time. Blockchain is the basis technology for crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. But Blockchain can have far larger applications in the IoT, because Blockchain is highly distributed and publically viewable system of sequentially linked cryptographically. This in turn means that the Blockchain can be used to build trusted connections without an intermediary. This paper presents a concept of application.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yi Liu, Xingtong Liu, Lei Zhang, Chaojing Tang · 5 authors
Bitcoin is decentralized cryptocurrency which has recently become increasingly popular all over the world. Blockchain works as a public ledger to record all transactions in Bitcoin system. A transaction to transfer bitcoins includes a set of inputs and outputs, with its unique hash value. However, the owners of transferred bitcoins can only sign on the transaction to provide integrity for its content without guarantee for its output script. This is considered as transaction malleability in Bitcoin system, which allows an attacker to intercept, modify, and rebroadcast a transaction into the Bitcoin network. This attack deceives the transaction issuer into believing that the original transaction failed to be recorded in blockchain. The vulnerability has been utilized by attackers leading a bankruptcy of the largest Bitcoin exchange at that time. To avoid this situation happens again, we present an efficient strategy to secure user wallet in this paper. Our scheme confirms success of a transaction not only relying on its unique hash value, but also relying on the address balance it spends. This strategy doesn't add too much complexity and is easy to implement in existing wallets. It is resistant to transaction malleability and helps Bitcoin users to protect their property from malicious entities.
Cryptography and Data Security
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the accelerated iteration of technological innovation, blockchain has rapidly become one of the hottest Internet technologies in recent years. As a decentralized and distributed data management solution, blockchain has restored the definition of trust by the embedded cryptography and consensus mechanism, thus providing security, anonymity and data integrity without the need of any third party. But there still exists some technical challenges and limitations in blockchain. This paper has conducted a systematic research on current blockchain application in cybersecurity. In order to solve the security issues, the paper analyzes the advantages that blockchain has brought to cybersecurity and summarizes current research and application of blockchain in cybersecurity related areas. Through in-depth analysis and summary of the existing work, the paper summarizes four major security issues of blockchain and performs a more granular analysis of each problem. Adopting an attribute-based encryption method, the paper also puts forward an enhanced access control strategy.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Now, the authors’ life is full of vast amount of information, the era of information has arrived. So the content‐centric networks face severe challenges in dealing with a huge range of content requests, bringing protection and sharing concerns of the content. How to protect information in the network efficiently and securely for the upcoming 5G era has become a problem. The authors propose a scheme based on a blockchain to solve the privacy issues in content‐centric mobile networks for 5G. The authors implement the mutual trust between content providers and users. Besides, the openness and tamper‐resistant of the blockchain ledger ensure the access control and privacy of the provider. With the help of a miner, selected from users, the authors can maintain the public ledger expediently. Also, in return, the authors share the interesting data with low overhead, network delay and congestion, and then achieve green communication.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Daniel Augot, Hervé Chabanne, Olivier Clémot, William R. George
The most fundamental purpose of blockchain technology is to enable\npersistent, consistent, distributed storage of information. Increasingly common\nare authentication systems that leverage this property to allow users to carry\ntheir personal data on a device while a hash of this data is signed by a\ntrusted authority and then put on a blockchain to be compared against. For\ninstance, in 2015, MIT introduced a schema for the publication of their\nacademic certificates based on this principle. In this work, we propose a way\nfor users to obtain assured identities based on face-to-face proofing that can\nthen be validated against a record on a blockchain. Moreover, in order to\nprovide anonymity, instead of storing a hash, we make use of a scheme of Brands\nto store a commitment against which one can perform zero-knowledge proofs of\nidentity. We also enforce the confidentiality of the underlying data by letting\nusers control a secret of their own. We show how our schema can be implemented\non Bitcoin's blockchain and how to save bandwidth by grouping commitments using\nMerkle trees to minimize the number of Bitcoin transactions that need to be\nsent. Finally, we describe a system in which users can gain access to services\nthanks to the identity records of our proposal.\n
Among the smart cities applications, optimizing lottery games is one of the urgent needs to ensure their fairness and transparency. The emerging blockchain technology shows a glimpse of solutions to fairness and transparency issues faced by lottery industries. This paper presents the design of a blockchain-based lottery system for smart cities applications. We adopt the smart contracts of blockchain technology and the cryptograph blockchain model, Hawk [8], to design the blockchain-based lottery system, FairLotto, for future smart cities applications. Fairness, transparency, and privacy of the proposed blockchain-based lottery system are discussed and ensured.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yi Liu, Ruilin Li, Xingtong Liu, Jian Wang · 7 authors
With widely adoption of Bitcoin, Many malicious software trying to steal bitcoins through network has emerged in a large scale. Bitcoin makes heavy use of elliptic curve digital signature algorithm to guarantee transactions security. Each user can have lots of addresses hashed from his public keys to receive coins, and need private keys associated with these addresses to authorize spending those coins. A Bitcoin wallet give a good assistance to manage and preserve all private keys belong to its owner. However, saving complete private keys on local storage meets a big challenge in case of theft. For the purpose of securing user's private keys, we propose an efficient method to enhance Bitcoin wallet security. We combine random seeds and a passphrase for user easy to keep in mind to generate private keys whenever needed. It is only need to reserve a list of random seeds on local storage instead of complete private keys. Nobody could generate the whole private keys just relying on random seeds without the passphrase. Therefore, our method increases the difficulty for attackers to steal bitcoins. We also introduce a key recovery approach in case of the passphrase being forgotten. Our method does not incur any additional operations and is convenient to use by a common customer without professional knowledge.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mehrdad Salimitari, Mainak Chatterjee, Murat Yüksel, Eduardo L. Pasiliao
It is predicted that cryptocurrencies will play an important role in the global economy. Therefore, it is prudent for us to understand the importance and monetary value of such cryptocurrencies, and strategize our investments accordingly. One of the ways to obtain cryptocurrency is via mining. As solo mining is not possible because of the computational requirements, pool mining has gained popularity. In this paper, we focus on Bitcoin and its pools. With more than 20 pools in the network of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it becomes challenging for a new miner to decide the pool he must join such that the profit is maximized. We use prospect theory to predict the profit that a specific miner, given his hash rate power and electricity costs, is expected to make from each pool. A utility value is calculated for each pool based on its recent performance, hash rate power, total number of the pool members, reward distribution policy of the pool, electricity fee in the new miner's region, pool fee, and the current Bitcoin value. Then, based on these parameters during a certain time duration, the most profitable pool is found for that miner. We show how the utility values from a pool varies with electricity fee and dollar equivalent of a Bitcoin. To find the accuracy of our predictions, we mine Bitcoin by joining 5 different pools- AntPool, F2Pool, BTC.com, Slushl'ool, and BatPool. Using an Antminer 55 for each pool, we mine Bitcoin for 40 consecutive days. Results reveal that our prospect theoretic predictions are consistent with what we actually mine; however predictions using expected utility theory are not as close.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
C. E. Veni Madhavan, Ch. Srikanth, H.V. Kumar Swamy
We present a computational system for handling, in an integrated manner, distributed transactional information and the associated monetary payment information, arising in typical organizational applications. Our paper contains three ideas: (i) a conceptual architectural design for chains of blocks of content transaction chains, (ii) a conceptual architectural design for blocks of financial instrument transaction chains including a proposed form of denominational digital cash, and (iii) a new, versatile cryptographic hash function to support all the chaining operations. In the total design, the transactional and financial information are chained together. We call these chains the VSK chains. Our system consists of centralized, auditable chains to manage distributed transactions of: (i) financial instruments (such as coins, tokens, or coupons used as a medium of exchange) and (ii) associated transactions of plain content (such as documents, or mail). The digital cash and the blockchains of our system can be adapted to models of decentralized blockchains, akin to cryptocurrencies, using proof-of-work/proof-of-stake computational principles. We have recently proposed a new key stream generator based on certain types of collections of arithmetic progressions of integers. Our scheme provides for enhanced flexibility and versatility with respect to parametric choices.We build our hashchains using the integer sequences derived from this collection. We present an outline of prototype development and implementation of certain modules of the VSK chains system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A blockchain maintains a permanent record of all the transactions that happen in a bitcoin network. It is an append-only ledger which is distributed to every node in the network. We have made use of blockchain technology for recording the transactions of peers without any supervision of a central authority. A cryptographic protocol using the Merkle tree and SHA-256 hashing technique is described which makes it possible to confirm the transactions are integrity protected and to archive the transactional history using Merkle tree in an append only ledger. Paper also discusses miners, who contribute to proof of work and validation of transactions in the peer to peer network.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
After more than eight years since the launch of Bitcoin, the decentralized transaction ledger functionality implemented through the blockchain technology is being used not only for cryptocurrencies, but to register, confirm and transfer any kind of contract and property. In this work, we analyze the most relevant functionalities and known issues of this technology, with the intent of pointing out the possible behaviours that are not as efficient and reliable as they should be when thinking with a broader outlook.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Since its inception, the blockchain technology has shown promising application prospects. From the initial cryptocurrency to the current smart contract, blockchain has been applied to many fields. Although there are some studies on the security and privacy issues of blockchain, there lacks a systematic examination on the security of blockchain systems. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on the security threats to blockchain and survey the corresponding real attacks by examining popular blockchain systems. We also review the security enhancement solutions for blockchain, which could be used in the development of various blockchain systems, and suggest some future directions to stir research efforts into this area.
Open access
4 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Anand Kumar Mishra, Shrikant Tiwari, Kanchan Naithani, Amit Kumar Tyagi
Blockchain has drawn attention as the next-generation financial technology due to its security that suits the informatization era. In particular, it provides security through the authentication of peers that share virtual cash, encryption, and the generation of hash value. According to the global financial industry, the market for security-based blockchain technology is expected to grow to about USD 20 billion by 2020. In addition, blockchain can be applied beyond the Internet of Things (IoT) environment; its applications are expected to expand. Cloud computing has been dramatically adopted in all IT environments for its efficiency and availability. In this paper, we discuss the concept of blockchain technology and its hot research trends. In addition, we will study how to adapt blockchain security to cloud computing and its secure solutions in detail.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a peer-to-peer payment system, where transactions directly take place between pseudo-anonymous users, without any centralised authority. Since the block-chain (i.e., the public ledger where transactions are registered) is an example of Big Data, a straightforward visualisation is not very informative. For this reason, we employ techniques from Visual Analytics to filter out undesired information in order to obtain a tool to visually analyse the transactions and help its analysis. For instance, different views can highlight miners, or sources and leaves of bitcoin flows, together with the balance of each address and transaction. Moreover, the main view sees transactions as grouped into disconnected "islands", making it possible to focus on only one of them at once.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Felix Konstantin Maurer, Till Neudecker, Martin Florian
Bitcoin, the arguably most popular cryptocurrency to date, allows users to perform transactions using freely chosen pseudonymous addresses. Previous research, however, suggests that these pseudonyms can easily be linked, implying a lower level of privacy than originally expected. To obfuscate the links between pseudonyms, different mixing methods have been proposed. One of the first approaches is the CoinJoin concept, where multiple users merge their transactions into one larger transaction. In theory, CoinJoin can be used to mix and transact bitcoins simultaneously, in one step. Yet, it is expected that differing bitcoin amounts would allow an attacker to derive the original single transactions. Solutions based on CoinJoin therefore prescribe the use of fixed bitcoin amounts and cannot be used to perform arbitrary transactions.In this paper, we define a model for CoinJoin transactions and metrics that allow conclusions about the provided anonymity. We generate and analyze CoinJoin transactions and show that with differing, representative amounts they generally do not provide any significant anonymity gains. As a solution to this problem, we present an output splitting approach that introduces sufficient ambiguity to effectively prevent linking in CoinJoin transactions. Furthermore, we discuss how this approach could be used in Bitcoin today.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A distributed and tamper proof media transaction framework is proposed based on the blockchain model. Current multimedia distribution does not preserve self-retrievable information of transaction trails or content modification histories. For example, digital copies of valuable artworks, creative media and entertainment contents are distributed for various purposes including exhibitions, gallery collections or in media production workflow. Original media is often edited for creative content preparation or tampered with to fabricate false propaganda over social media. However there is no existing trusted mechanism that can easily retrieve either the transaction trails or the modification histories. We propose a novel watermarking based Multimedia Blockchain framework that can address such issues. The unique watermark information contains two pieces of information: a) a cryptographic hash that contains transaction histories (blockchain transactions log) and b) an image hash that preserves retrievable original media content. Once the watermark is extracted, first part of the watermark is passed to a distributed ledger to retrieve the historical transaction trail and the latter part is used to identify the edited / tampered regions. The paper outlines the requirements, the challenges and demonstrates the proof of this concept.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Daniel Augot, Hervé Chabanne, Olivier Clémot, William R. George
The most fundamental purpose of blockchain technology is to enable persistent, consistent, distributed storage of information. Increasingly common are authentication systems that leverage this property to allow users to carry their personal data on a device while a hash of this data is signed by a trusted authority and then put on a blockchain to be compared against. For instance, in 2015, MIT introduced a schema for the publication of their academic certificates based on this principle. In this work, we propose a way for users to obtain assured identities based on face-to-face proofing that can then be validated against a record on a blockchain. Moreover, in order to provide anonymity, instead of storing a hash, we make use of a scheme of Brands to store a commitment against which one can perform zero-knowledge proofs of identity. We also enforce the confidentiality of the underlying data by letting users control a secret of their own. We show how our schema can be implemented on Bitcoin's blockchain and how to save bandwidth by grouping commitments using Merkle trees to minimize the number of Bitcoin transactions that need to be sent. Finally, we describe a system in which users can gain access to services thanks to the identity records of our proposal.
Bayu Adhi Tama, Bruno Joachim Kweka, Youngho Park, Kyung-Hyune Rhee
Blockchain technology has been known as a digital currency platform since the emergence of Bitcoin, the first and the largest of the cryptocurrencies. Hitherto, it is used for the decentralization of markets more generally, not exclusively for the decentralization of money and payments. The decentralized transaction ledger of blockchain could be employed to register, confirm, and send all kinds of contracts to other parties in the network. In this paper, we thoroughly review state-of-the-art blockchain-related applications emerged in the literature. A number of published works were carefully included based on their contributions to the blockchain's body of knowledge. Several remarks are explored and discussed in the last section of the paper.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques