Bitcoin is an open source payment system with a market capitalization of about 15 G$. During the years several key management solutions have been proposed to enhance bitcoin. The common characteristic of these techniques is that they allow to derive public keys independently of the private keys, and that these keys match. In this paper we overview the historical development of such techniques, specify and compare all major variants proposed or used in practical systems. We show that such techniques can be designed based on 2 distinct ECC arithmetic properties and how to combine both. A major trend in blockchain systems is to use by Stealth Address (SA) techniques to make different payments made to the same payee unlikable. We review all known SA techniques and show that early variants are less secure. Finally we propose a new SA method which is more robust against leakage and against various attacks.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Loi Luu, Yaron Velner, Jason Teutsch, Prateek Saxena
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are operated by a handful of mining pools. Nearly 95% of Bitcoin's and 80% of Ethereum's mining power resides with less than ten and six mining pools respectively. Although miners benefit from low payout variance in pooled mining, centralized mining pools require members to trust that pool operators will remunerate them fairly. Furthermore, centralized pools pose the risk of transaction censorship from pool operators, and open up possibilities for collusion between pools for perpetrating severe attacks.
In this work, we propose SMARTPOOL, a novel protocol design for a decentralized mining pool. Our protocol shows how one can leverage smart contracts, autonomous blockchain programs, to decentralize cryptocurrency mining. SMARTPOOL gives transaction selection control back to miners while yielding low-variance payouts. SMARTPOOL incurs mining fees lower than centralized mining pools and is designed to scale to a large number of miners. We implemented and deployed a robust SMARTPOOL implementation on the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic networks. To date, our deployed pools have handled a peak hashrate of 30 GHs from Ethereum miners, resulting in 105 blocks, costing miners a mere 0:6% of block rewards in transaction fees.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bharanidharan Shanmugam, Sami Azam, Kheng Cher Yeo, Jithin Jose · 5 authors
Bitcoin is a new form of global digital currency based on peer-to-peer network, enabling a new payment system, and also a completely decentralised cryptocurrency. The P2P network consists of a digital file listing transactions like a ledger, a copy of which is also maintained on every computer on the network, and the transactions are also broadcasted in the public ledger of the Bitcoin network. Anonymity is the core feature that makes Bitcoin popular among people around the world. This feature is attained through the Bitcoin addresses in the public ledger, which represents the users in the Bitcoin network. Because of the illicit use of Bitcoins, the level of anonymity has reduced even though the users are still using the anonymizers like TOR to keep the anonymity stronger to connect to the Bitcoin network. In this paper, we analyse the complete process of transaction of Bitcoins and the anonymity thatlies in that process. The study also focuses on finding the forensic artefacts and the investigative way of approach towards the Bitcoin using forensic tools. The forensic tools are used to analyse the web browser activities, local drive, hard disk image, cookies, downloads and session data related to Bitcoins. The attacker can relate the transaction of the users and can control the Bitcoin blocks by even delaying the transactions. This research will focus on the methods in which the memory and even mobile devices involved in the transaction could be captured and analysed.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Most modern electronic devices can produce a random number. However, it is difficult to see how a group of mutually distrusting entities can have confidence in any such hardware-produced stream of random numbers, since the producer could control the output to their gain. In this work, we use public and immutable cryptocurrency smart contracts, along with a set of potentially malicious randomness providers, to produce a trustworthy stream of timestamped public random numbers. Our contract eliminates the ability of a producer to predict or control the generated random numbers, including the stored history of random numbers. We consider and mitigate the threat of collusion between the randomness providers and miners in a second, more complex contract.
Open access
2 source records
Cryptography and Data Security
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
L Er-Rajy, El Kiram My A, El Ghazouani M, Omar Achbarou
Bitcoin has experienced rapid growth in the transactions number and in their value since its appearance in 2008. Its success is mainly due to the innovative use of a peer-to-peer network to implement all aspects of the currency life cycle, from creation to transfer between users. Bitcoin offers cash transactions that are almost instant and non-refundable, while allowing truly global transactions processed at the same speed as local ones. It offers a public transactions history, which allows untrusted audibility, and introduces many new and innovative use cases such as smart property, micropayments, contracts and escrow transactions for disputes mediation. However, the same features that make Bitcoin attractive to its end users are also its main limitations. Its decentralized nature limits the number of transactions and the speed at which transactions can be carried out and confirmed. The problem with slow confirmations is combined with the semantics of the confirmations which are not definitive, requiring several confirmations and further delaying the transaction acceptance. In this paper, we described the operating principles of peer-to-peer cryptographic currencies and especially security of bitcoin system. Moreover, For Bitcoin enhancements and additional mitigations we provide ideas for node auditing users in the network in aim to keep clients from the trusted transaction branch database generated by the attackers.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Daniel Augot, Hervé Chabanne, Thomas Chenevier, William R. George · 5 authors
We present an identity management scheme built into the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for identities that are as indelible as the blockchain itself. Moreover, we take advantage of Bitcoin's decentralized nature to facilitate a shared control between users and identity providers, allowing users to directly manage their own identities, fluidly coordinating identities from different providers, even as identity providers can revoke identities and impose controls.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Stefan Dziembowski, Lisa Eckey, Sebastian Faust, Daniel Malinowski
Payment channels emerged recently as an efficient method for performing cheap micropayments in cryptocurrencies. In contrast to traditional on-chain transactions, payment channels have the advantage that they allow for nearly unlimited number of transactions between parties without involving the blockchain. In this work, we introduce Perun, an off-chain channel system that offers a new method for connecting channels that is more efficient than the existing technique of ``routing transactions'' over multiple channels. To this end, Perun introduces a technique called ``virtual payment channels'' that avoids involvement of the intermediary for each individual payment. In this paper we formally model and prove security of this technique in the case of one intermediary, who can be viewed as a ``payment hub'' that has direct channels with several parties. Our scheme works over any cryptocurrency that provides Turing-complete smart contracts. As a proof of concept, we implemented Perun's smart contracts in Ethereum.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin was introduced in a self-published paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in October, 2008[1, 2]. Bitcoin is a decentralized system which requires no central authority. In recent years, bitcoin has become increasingly accepted and used in many fields in place of physical cash. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network of nodes that distribute and record transactions [3]. Bitcoin transaction is a statement that Player 1 (address 1) would like to transfer some bitcoin values to Player 2 (address 2), signed by Player 1 by his private key. Transactions are verified by network nodes and confirmed in a public distributed ledger called the block chain. The block chain consists of a series of blocks in which each block contains the hashed value of subsequent block. Every bitcoin block contains a set of verified transactions that are collected from the bitcoin broadcast network. It is assumed that the majority of nodes in the bitcoin network are honest. This makes the verification done by the nodes is correct with high probability. More technically, bitcoin is an electronic-cash system based on cryptographic algorithms.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We present cryptocurrency-based lottery protocols that do not require any collateral from the players. Previous protocols for this task required a security deposit that is $O(N^2)$ times larger than the bet amount, where $N$ is the number of players. Our protocols are based on a tournament bracket construction, and require only $O(\log N)$ rounds. Our lottery protocols thus represent a significant improvement, both because they allow players with little money to participate, and because of the time value of money. The Ethereum-based implementation of our lottery is highly efficient. The Bitcoin implementation requires an $O(2^N)$ off-chain setup phase, which demonstrates that the expressive power of the scripting language can have important implications. We also describe a minimal modification to the Bitcoin protocol that would eliminate the exponential blowup.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Cryptocurrencies which evolved with bitcoin has a decentralized structure based on the ledger which is handled via proof of work mechanism, indeed generating a monetary supply. We all agree that decentralization save us from the cruel national political system but has a limitation of computational cost involved and problem related to scalability. The idea is to introduce a new cryptocurrency named UV Coin which is a cryptocurrency framework having control of the central banks but involves distributed set of authorities to prevent double spending. This coin will maintain enough transparency. The proof of the benefits is partial centralization such as elimination of wasteful hashing and involves a scalable system to avoid double spending attack.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin system, when more than 51% computing power is controlled by a single node, the block chain can be distorted maliciously. This is called 51% attack which is a well-known potential risk that could destroy the Bitcoin system. The paper proves that under the current proof-of-work mechanism, computing power eventually will be centralized at a single node if miners are rational enough. The paper propose a new proof-of-work mechanism that improves decentralization and reduces the risk of 51% attack without increasing the risk of Sybil attack. This new mechanism introduces a series of principles such as Career open to all talents, without distinction of birth, Distribution according to labor and All Men are created equal.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We address two problems: first, we study a variant of block withholding (BWH) attack in Bitcoins and second, we propose solutions to prevent all existing types of BWH attacks in Bitcoins. We analyze the strategies of a selfish Bitcoin miner who in connivance with one pool attacks another pool and receives reward from the former mining pool for attacking the latter. We name this attack as “sponsored block withholding attack.” We present detailed quantitative analysis of the monetary incentive that a selfish miner can earn by adopting this strategy under different scenarios. We prove that under certain conditions, the attacker can maximize her revenue by adopting some strategies and by utilizing her computing power wisely. We also show that an attacker may use this strategy for attacking both the pools for earning higher amount of incentives. More importantly, we present a strategy that can effectively counter block withholding attack in any mining pool. First, we propose a generic scheme that uses cryptographic commitment schemes to counter BWH attack. Then, we suggest an alternative implementation of the same scheme using hash function. Our scheme protects a pool from rogue miners as well as rogue pool administrators. The scheme and its variant defend against BWH attack by making it impossible for the miners to distinguish between a partial proof of work and a complete proof of work. The scheme is so designed that the administrator cannot cheat on the entire pool. The scheme can be implemented by making minor changes to existing Bitcoin protocol. We also analyze the security of the scheme.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Roman Matzutt, Oliver Hohlfeld, Martin Henze, Robin Rawiel · 6 authors
As transaction fees skyrocket today, blockchains become increasingly expensive, hurting their adoption in broader applications. This work tackles the saving of transaction fees for economic blockchain applications. The key insight is that other than the existing "default'' mode to execute application logic fully on-chain, i.e., in smart contracts, and in fine granularity, i.e., user request per transaction, there are alternative execution modes with advantages in cost-effectiveness. On Ethereum, we propose a holistic middleware platform supporting flexible and secure transaction executions, including off-chain states and batching of user requests. Furthermore, we propose control-plane schemes to adapt the execution mode to the current workload for optimal runtime cost. We present a case study on the institutional accounts (e.g., coinbase.com) intensively sending Ether on Ethereum blockchains. By collecting real-life transactions, we construct workload benchmarks and show that our work saves 18%\sim 47%18%-47% per invocation than the default baseline while introducing 1.81%\sim 16.59%1.81%-16.59% blocks delay.
This paper presents a possible solution to a fundamental limitation facing all blockchain-based systems; scalability. We propose a temporal rolling blockchain which solves the problem of its current exponential growth, instead replacing it with a constant fixed-size blockchain. We conduct a thorough analysis of related work and present a formal analysis of the new rolling blockchain, comparing the results to a traditional blockchain model to demonstrate that the deletion of data from the blockchain does not impact on the security of the proposed blockchain model before concluding our work and presenting future work to be conducted.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Juan José García Chávez, Carlo Kleber da Silva Rodrigues
Herein it is proposed a simple algorithm for automatic hopping among mining pools in the Bitcoin network. The hopping ceases to occur when the best pool to be mined is found. The choice of the best pool is based on statistical data generated and collected during the operation of the Bitcoin network. Experiments for validation and performance analysis are based on mining networks built specifically for this purpose. The major results show for instance that the bitcoin generation increases at 46.0% comparing to when the mining is carried out in only one isolated pool. Additionally, it is evaluated the possibility of implementing a distributed application making use of the proposed algorithm. Lastly, general conclusions and possible avenues for future works are highlighted at the end of this article.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Retinal Imaging and Analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Luke Anderson, Ralph Holz, Alexander Ponomarev, Paul Rimba · 5 authors
Half a decade after Bitcoin became the first widely used cryptocurrency, blockchains are receiving considerable interest from industry and the research community. Modern blockchains feature services such as name registration and smart contracts. Some employ new forms of consensus, such as proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work. However, these blockchains are so far relatively poorly investigated, despite the fact that they move considerable assets. In this paper, we explore three representative, modern blockchains---Ethereum, Namecoin, and Peercoin. Our focus is on the features that set them apart from the pure currency use case of Bitcoin. We investigate the blockchains' activity in terms of transactions and usage patterns, identifying some curiosities in the process. For Ethereum, we are mostly interested in the smart contract functionality it offers. We also carry out a brief analysis of issues that are introduced by negligent design of smart contracts. In the case of Namecoin, our focus is how the name registration is used and has developed over time. For Peercoin, we are interested in the use of proof-of-stake, as this consensus algorithm is poorly understood yet used to move considerable value. Finally, we relate the above to the fundamental characteristics of the underlying peer-to-peer networks. We present a crawler for Ethereum and give statistics on the network size. For Peercoin and Namecoin, we identify the relatively small size of the networks and the weak bootstrapping process.
Bitcoin is gaining more popularity because it is designed initially to reduce the transaction cost and improve the online payment security. It is expected to replace the traditional currencies among online transactions. Building on that, we believe that the security issues during Bitcoin payment must be put in high priority. Therefore, we performed some researches on Double-spending issues. In this paper, the root causes of double spending are discussed, we focus on one possible method of double spending under the circumstance that the network connection status is not stable. We further simulate the attacking in a local area with network impairment. In terms of the reasons and specific conditions of this type of attacking, we propose a new mechanism to help these community merchants to recognize the double spending transactions and defend the related attacking. Finally, an analysis is performed among this defending strategies and it proves that the countermeasures are effective to reduce the double-spending risks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Since the invention of the camera, photos have been used to document reality and to supply proof of events. Yet today it is easy to fabricate realistic images depicting events that never happened. Thus, dozens of papers strive to develop methods for authenticating images. While some commercial cameras already attach digital signatures to photographs, the images often undergo subsequent transformations (cropping, rotation, compression, and so forth), which do not detract from their authenticity, but do change the image data and thus invalidate the signature. Existing methods address this by signing derived image properties that are invariant to some set of transformations. However, these are limited in the supported transformations, and often offer weak security guarantees. We present PhotoProof, a novel approach to image authentication based on cryptographic proofs. It can be configured, according to application requirements, to allow any permissible set of (efficiently computable) transformations. Starting with a signed image, our scheme attaches, to each legitimately derived image, a succinct proof of computational integrity attesting that the transformation was permissible. Anyone can verify these proofs, and generate updated proofs when applying further permissible transformations. Moreover, the proofs are zero-knowledge so that, for example, an authenticated cropped image reveals nothing about the cropped-out regions. PhotoProof is based on Proof-Carrying Data (PCD), a cryptographic primitive for secure execution of distributed computations. We describe the new construction, prove its security, and demonstrate a working prototype supporting a variety of permissible transformations.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques