Students at the University of Wyoming designed two blockchain-based voting systems during a class offered only once at the University. The first system (re-use) branched Ethereum to leverage its security and privacy benefits. The second system (re-invent) created a new blockchain voting system which used two separate chains, one for validating voters and another for securing votes. This research looked at the benefits and flaws of current election systems as well as benefits and flaws of blockchain technology to improve upon the current election infrastructure. These systems aim to provide integrity, privacy and security to its users. Further, they strive to be fault-tolerant. Finally, these systems could be extended to mobile voting platforms and smart contracts. Based on current decentralized services, this research demonstrates a proof-of-concept that elections could benefit from blockchain-based systems. These types of systems would be ideal in smart cities to ensure the reliability of the voting procedure.
In todays digital environment, the voting system move from paper based to a digital system. A digital e-voting system have many properties such as transparency, decentralization, irreversibility, and non-repudiation. The growth in digital e-voting system arises many security and transparency issues. In this paper, we used the blockchain technology in digital e-voting system to solve the security issues and fulfill the system requirements. It offers new opportunities to deploy a secure e-voting system in any organization or country. The solution is far better as compared to other solution because, it is a decentralized system, contain the results in the form of bit-coins, having different locations. We will also analyze the security of our proposed voting system, which shows our protocol is more secure as compared to other solutions.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Domain name systems and certificate authority systems may have security and trust problems in their implementation. This article summarizes how these systems work and what the implementation problems may be. There are blockchain-based decentralized solutions that claim to overcome those problems. We provide a brief explanation on how blockchain systems work, and their strengths are explained. DNS security challenges are given. Blockchain-based DNS solutions are classified and described in detail according to their services. The advantages and feasibility of these implementations are discussed. Last but not least, the possibility of the decentralized Internet is questioned.
In the Bitcoin blockchain, rewarding methods for remunerating miners participating in a pool have to meet certain requirements in order to guarantee the proper functioning of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In particular, these allocation rules reward pool participants in proportion to their contribution in the transaction validation process. Deployed rewarding methods met fairness concerns at the expense of vulnerability to miners exploiting pools' attractiveness for deciding when to mine for a pool and when to `hop' to another one resulting more attractive: a phenomenon called pool-hopping. The most used score-based methods are designed to prevent this practice, but are not completely hopping proof. In this work, we propose a methodology to analyze the pool-hopping phenomenon, focusing on the detection of pool-hoppers. Analyzing those Bitcoin transactions that pools create for rewarding its participants, it is possible to determine time epochs where miners worked. Thus, we analyze those miners that have worked intermittently for pools adopting a rewarding system which pays out for each validated block. This evaluation leads us qualifying the miners that have hopped along with their hopping behavior and financial performance.
Shalini Shukla, A.N. Thasmiya, Donthi Shashank, H. R. Mamatha
Voting is an important part of the administration of a country. Votes are still being carried out by physically going to voting booths. This process doesn't guarantee security and cases of tampering has been observed. This paper aims at removing these issues in the voting process by making it online and using the technology, Blockchain. Blockchain uses encryption and hashing to make every vote secure. In this case, one vote is considered as a transaction. A peer to peer network is created to create a private blockchain that share this distributed ledger having voting transaction. The application is designed in such a way so that the intricacies of the underlying architecture is hidden from the user. Each voter is uniquely identified by Government approved Aadhar number. The application makes use of this number to make sure that each voter gets only one chance to vote. When the vote gets submitted as a transaction then all the peers get synch up. Since each peer is associated with a public and private key the votes are encrypted and hashed and added to the blockchain to increase security and form a chain of blocks. Votes cannot be tracked back to the voter. In this paper, a peer to peer network is created having minimum three peers. Since voting is made online, it is expected that this paper will increase the voter turnouts. The scalability of the blockchain application depends on the secondary memory limit of the peer.
Maria Apostolaki, Gian Marti, Jan Müller, Laurent Vanbever
Routing attacks remain practically effective in the Internet today as existing countermeasures either fail to provide protection guarantees or are not easily deployable. Blockchain systems are particularly vulnerable to such attacks as they rely on Internet-wide communication to reach consensus. In particular, Bitcoin -the most widely-used cryptocurrency- can be split in half by any AS-level adversary using BGP hijacking. In this paper, we present SABRE, a secure and scalable Bitcoin relay network which relays blocks worldwide through a set of connections that are resilient to routing attacks. SABRE runs alongside the existing peer-to-peer network and is easily deployable. As a critical system, SABRE design is highly resilient and can efficiently handle high bandwidth loads, including Denial of Service attacks. We built SABRE around two key technical insights. First, we leverage fundamental properties of inter-domain routing (BGP) policies to host relay nodes: (i) in locations that are inherently protected against routing attacks; and (ii) on paths that are economically preferred by the majority of Bitcoin clients. These properties are generic and can be used to protect other Blockchain-based systems. Second, we leverage the fact that relaying blocks is communication-heavy, not computation-heavy. This enables us to offload most of the relay operations to programmable network hardware (using the P4 programming language). Thanks to this hardware/software co-design, SABRE nodes operate seamlessly under high load while mitigating the effects of malicious clients. We present a complete implementation of SABRE together with an extensive evaluation. Our results demonstrate that SABRE is effective at securing Bitcoin against routing attacks, even with deployments as small as 6 nodes.
Anonymity networks and hidden services like those accessible in Tor, also called the "darknet", in combination with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin provide a relatively safe environment for criminal online activities. While this is a challenge for law enforcement, it brings opportunities for researchers to monitor these activities as they are often not really hidden but rather obfuscated and/or anonymized. In this paper we discuss such a monitoring approach for product sales in the darknet. We collect bitcoin addresses and data about product offerings in a number of shops run as hidden services in Tor. We then analyze transactions in the bitcoin blockchain that can be mapped to specific product sales in these shops.
K. Aditya Shastry, H D Aishwarya, M Madhushree, P Pooja · 5 authors
The blockchain is a decentralized, distributed database. A decentralized application utilizing blockchain technology enables you to perform similar activities you would do today yet without a trusted outsider. It is a shared system, a peer-to-peer network. Blockchain solves primary issues like transparency, security, accessibility that are the fundamental issues in current law based races. Ethereum is a platform that can be utilized to assemble the decentralized application. The blockchain is a changeless record of exchanges (votes) that are distributed in the system. Everyone’s information that is the votes is stored in blockchain as transactions. The past votes can't be changed, while the present can't be hacked, on the grounds that each exchange is checked by each and every hub in the system. What's more, any outside or inside aggressor must have control of the hubs in the system to modify the record. Along these lines, every one of the exchanges stored on the blockchain is unchanged and thus this makes the application more secure in every aspect.
As technology advances, many countries have now opted for electronic voting systems. Any voting system must follow principles of transparency and impartiality in order to achieve fairness; the electronic voting process must also be protected against cyberattacks or denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) because such attacks may affect the processing time in voting procedures and even hinder the fairness in voting. This study establishes a network security mechanism for voting systems based on blockchain technology. The blockchain mechanism employs a distributed architecture that can prevent system shutdown resulting from malicious cyberattacks; additionally, any user in the blockchain can authenticate data integrity, which satisfies requirements of transparency and impartiality in voting systems. This study utilizes bilinear pairing to establish network security in voting systems, which call for anonymity, authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. When authenticating voting integrity, the user's anonymity must be ensured to prevent identity revelation, and the data must be protected against malicious tampering such security measures also fulfill blockchain requirements. The proposed voting system relies on the basis of blockchains to create a trustworthy voting system. In current blockchain technology, smart contracts allow the establishment of voter-related regulations to prevent controversies during voting processes. Additionally, in order to establish both a secret ballot and an open ballot system, the study also implements a bilinear pairing security mechanism to ensure the overall security of a voting procedure.
A trusted electronic election system requires that all the involved information must go public. However, it focuses not only on transparency but also on privacy issues. In other words, each ballot should be counted anonymously, correctly, and efficiently. In this work, an effective e-voting system is proposed for voters to minimize their trust in the authority or government. We ensure the transparency of election by putting all messages on the Ethereum blockchain; in the meantime, the privacy of individual voter is protected via an effective ring signature mechanism. Besides, the attractive self-tallying feature is also built in our system, which guarantees that everyone who can access the blockchain network is able to tally the result on his own, i.e., no third party is required after the voting phase. More importantly, we ensure the correctness of voting results and keep the Ethereum gas cost of individual participant as low as possible, at the same time. Moreover, the pre-described characteristics of stealth address in our system makes it more suitable for large-scale election on line.
Aug 1, 2018·2018 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/ 12th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Many Internet services require the registration of an account before permitting use of their services. Over time, many Internet users end up with a multitude of accounts with separated identities. A solution to this problem is offered by single-sign-on (SSO) providers, where a user can create a single identity and use this identity for multiple services. However it requires the user to trust the SSO provider. When the provider blocks access to the identities the users lose access to their subscribed services. To avoid this problem, we propose DecentID, a completely decentralized identity storage system that does not require a centralized trusted third party. Instead, a public blockchain is used as trust anchor. Identities can be created and used for different services. Each service can only read the identity attributes disclosed for it without being able to read attributes the user wants to keep secret.
Stefano Angieri, Alberto García-Martínez, Bingyang Liu, Zhiwei Yan · 6 authors
The current system to manage the global pool of IP addresses is centralized\nin five transnational organizations, the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).\nEach of these RIRs manage the address pool for a large number of countries.\nBecause the RIRs are private organizations, they are subject to the legal\nframework of the country where they are based. This configuration results in a\njurisdictional overflow from the legal framework of the countries where the RIR\nis based to all the countries that the RIRs are serving (the countries served\nby the RIRs de facto become subjects of the legal system of the country where\nthe RIR is hosted). The situation is aggravated by the deployment of new\nsecurity techniques such as the RPKI and BGPsec, that enable enforcement of\nallocations by the RIRs. In this paper we present InBlock, a blockchain-based\ndistributed governance body aimed to provide de-centralized management of IP\naddresses. InBlock also aims to fulfil the same objectives as the current IP\naddress allocation system, namely, uniqueness, fairness, conservation,\naggregation, registration and minimized overhead. InBlock is implemented as a\nDecentralized Autonomous Organization, i.e., as a set of blockchain's smart\ncontracts in Ethereum. Any entity may request an allocation of addresses to the\nInBlock registry by solely performing a (crypto)currency transfer to the\nInBlock. The fee required, along with the annual renewal fee, serves as a\nmechanism to deter stockpiling and other wasteful practices. As with any novel\ntechnology, there are many open questions about the usage of blockchains to\nbuild an IP address registry. For this reason, we believe that practical\nexperimentation is required in order to have hands-on experiences about such a\nsystem. We propose to conduct an experiment on distributed address management\nusing InBlock as a starting point to inform future directions in this area.\n
While the smart surveillance system enhanced by the Internet of Things (IoT) technology becomes an essential part of Smart Cities, it also brings new concerns in security of the data. Compared to the traditional surveillance systems that is built following a monolithic architecture to carry out lower level operations, such as monitoring and recording, the modern surveillance systems are expected to support more scalable and decentralized solutions for advanced video stream analysis at the large volumes of distributed edge devices. In addition, the centralized architecture of the conventional surveillance systems is vulnerable to single point of failure and privacy breach owning to the lack of protection to the surveillance feed. This position paper introduces a novel secure smart surveillance system based on microservices architecture and blockchain technology. Encapsulating the video analysis algorithms as various independent microservices not only isolates the video feed from different sectors, but also improve the system availability and robustness by decentralizing the operations. The blockchain technology securely synchronizes the video analysis databases among microservices across surveillance domains, and provides tamper proof of data in the trustless network environment. Smart contract enabled access authorization strategy prevents any unauthorized user from accessing the microservices and offers a scalable, decentralized and fine-grained access control solution for smart surveillance systems.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Secure naming systems, or more narrowly public key infrastructures (PKIs), form the basis of secure communications over insecure networks. All security guarantees against active attackers come from a trustworthy binding between user-facing names, such as domain names, to cryptographic identities, such as public keys. By offering a secure, distributed ledger with highly decentralized trust, blockchains such as Bitcoin show promise as the root of trust for naming systems with no central trusted parties. PKIs based upon blockchains, such as Namecoin and Blockstack, have greatly improved security and resilience compared to traditional centralized PKIs. Yet blockchain PKIs tend to significantly sacrifice scalability and flexibility in pursuit of decentralization, hindering large-scale deployability on the Internet. We propose Conifer, a novel PKI with an architecture based upon CONIKS, a centralized transparency-based PKI, and Catena, a blockchain-agnostic way of embedding a permissioned log, but with a different lookup strategy. In doing so, Conifer achieves decentralized trust with security at least as strong as existing blockchain-based naming systems, yet without sacrificing the flexibility and performance typically found in centralized PKIs. We also present our reference implementation of Conifer, demonstrating how it can easily be integrated into applications. Finally, we use experiments to evaluate the performance of Conifer compared with other naming systems, both centralized and blockchain-based, demonstrating that it incurs only a modest overhead compared to traditional centralized-trust systems while being far more scalable and performant than purely blockchain-based solutions.
Kyoungmin Kim, Youngin You, Mookyu Park, Kyungho Lee
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are intense and are targeted to major infrastructure, governments and military organizations in each country. There are a lot of mitigations about DDoS, and the concept of Content Delivery Network (CDN) has been able to avoid attacks on websites. However, since the existing CDN system is fundamentally centralized, it may be difficult to prevent DDoS. This paper describes the distributed CDN Schema using Private Blockchain which solves the problem of participation of existing transparent and unreliable nodes. This will explain DDoS mitigation that can be used by military and government agencies.
K Navaneeth Krishnan, Roopesh Jenu, Tintu Joseph, M L Silpa
The buss words blockchain and internet of things has been floating around the tech world for quite a while. IoT has already proved that it can have a significant impact on our daily life. A significant amount of data is collected and transmitted through the internet from various devices across the globe. IoT consists of heterogeneous devices communicating over a wide range of networks transmitting lots of critical and non-critical data, which raises concern about the security of such collected data from the users and the ownership of the data. This paper introduces a security framework for the internet of things implementation in a confined environment, such as smart city, power grid or metro rail systems, etc. The framework ensures the secure communication and authentication of the data across such diversified networks and devices. The framework is built upon the underlying mechanism of blockchain technology combined with the use of secure hashing algorithm.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Readers' capability to consider and assess sources is imperative. Digital preservation efforts, however, mostly neglected citation provenance, which is a necessity for transparent source verification. We therefore present Webchain, a new system enabling verifiable citations and references on the World Wide Web. Its architecture combines a distributed ledger with secure timestamping to ensure history of creation, ownership, and referential integrity of online resources. With Webchain, readers can independently detect content manipulation by verifying authenticity, integrity, and time consistency. At the same time, authors gain a proof of existence for referenced articles. Web-chain extends a well-known distributed timestamping scheme to handle an open and dynamic network topology by providing a solution for membership management. We examine the security of our approach, particularly regarding forging attacks. Our results show that we are able to render such attacks infeasible, even in the face of a powerful attacker.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Botnets provide the foundation for a wide range of malicious activities on the Internet. Sophisticated Command and Control (C&C) infrastructures aim to prevent the detection and takedown of botnets and therefore pose a big challenge in the battle against network attacks of all kinds. In this paper, we present Chain Channels, a method for hidden botnet communication that exploits the digital signatures used in blockchains to inject subliminal messages. We show how subliminal messages can be included in signatures and distributed in blockchain transactions to the bots. We also show how the keying material required for extracting the subliminal information can be transmitted privately to the bots while being stored on a public blockchain. As proof of concept, we inject a subliminal message and a key in the Bitcoin blockchain and show how this information can be extracted from the transactions. Our method allows to establish a hidden C&C infrastructure over blockchains and send instructions to all bots without leaving any suspicious communication activities. The method relies only on digital signatures and is therefore applicable to numerous blockchains. The subliminal communication can not be distinguished from legitimate transactions, and mitigation would require redesigning blockchains to use new subliminal-free signature schemes. Our method provides a general hidden distribution channel over block chains and can be also applied to other scenarios where information needs to be transmitted covertly. It scales extremely well with the number of receivers (i.e., bots), and subliminal messages can even be distributed over different blockchains to exploit specific features of blockchains such as low transaction cost or fast confirmation times or to further obfuscate the existence of the C&C communication.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Omnia Mahmoud, Henning Kopp, Amr T. Abdel-Hamid, Frank Kargl
Insurances are a way of financial risk mitigation that pay the user in case of damage. However, once the event happens, the user does not get paid immediately due to the large degree of human interaction required. In this paper, we automate insurance payment by using smart contracts. As additional contribution, our design supports integration of IoT devices to register events that trigger insurance contracts and offers additional privacy-protection even on public blockchains. In order to allow users to retrieve their payment from the insurance contract anonymously we remove the linkability and traceability between events that triggers the contract and the insurance holder by applying ring signatures. Using a prototypical implementation based on Ethereum, we study the additional overhead and cost that our design incurs and can show that exploiting latest features of Ethereum, gas cost can be driven down substantially compared to earlier approaches. In sum, we propose, implement, and evaluate a design for smart insurance contracts integrating IoT sensors and including additional privacy protection using ring signatures.
As blockchain technologies mature and ecosystems over blockchain evolve, peers on blockchain networks often face situations in which they need to conduct voting for decision-making; as happened in the case of the DAO hard fork event on Ethereum. However, a natively built-in voting mechanism is not available on any of the existing blockchain platforms. Thus, the decision making either is delegated to a few network members who make such decisions offline or is dependent on third party online voting services. In both cases, peers directly or indirectly rely on trusted parties or centralized systems. This is against the basic decentralization principle of blockchain and exposes the election to frauds. To facilitate decision-making in a decentralized and secure manner, we propose a native blockchain voting protocol for peers to vote over their existing blockchain network without the need of any trusted or third party. Our protocol preserves end-to-end privacy and possesses desirable properties such as detectability and correctability against cheating. A reference implementation of our protocol on Hyperledger Fabric that demonstrates the validity and practical applicability of our protocol is also provided.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Kentaroh Toyoda, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, P. Takis Mathiopoulos
In recent years, Bitcoin has been used for many services and purposes, e.g. gambling, marketplace, but also even as an investment scam. In order to clarify how Bitcoin is used, it is in great importance to identify what kind of services are operated by Bitcoin addresses. In this paper, we propose a multiclass service identification scheme in Bitcoin based on novel transaction history summarization. Our novelty is to propose how transaction history is retrieved and how the retrieved transactions are processed for better identification. When a Bitcoin address is given, the characteristics of its transaction history is calculated as features. Then, the set of calculated features is fed into a supervised classifier and the services operated by the given Bitcoin addresses are identified among seven major services: (i) exchange, (ii) faucet, (iii) gambling, (iv) investment scam, (v) marketplace, (vi) mining pool, and (vii) mixer. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a multi-class identification. We show that our scheme achieves 72 % of accuracy through performance evaluation with more than 26,000 Bitcoin addresses that have been used for seven services/purposes from Jan. 2009 to Feb. 2017.
Privacy, facilitated by a confluence of cryptography and decentralization, is one of the primary motivations for the adoption of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Alas, Bitcoins privacy promise has proven illusory, and despite growing interest in privacy-centric blockchains, most blockchain users remain susceptible to privacy attacks that exploit network-layer information and access patterns that leak as users interact with blockchains. Understanding if and how blockchain-based applications can provide strong privacy guarantees is a matter of increasing urgency. Many researchers advocate using anonymous communications networks, such as Tor, to ensure access privacy. We challenge this approach, showing the need for mechanisms through which non-anonymous users can (i) publish transactions that cannot be linked to their network addresses or to their other transactions, and (ii) fetch details of specific transactions without revealing which transactions they seek. We hope this article inspires blockchain researchers to think beyond Tor and tackle these important access privacy problems head-on.
Blockchain-enabled e-voting (BEV) could reduce voter fraud and increase voter access. Eligible voters cast a ballot anonymously using a computer or smartphone. BEV uses an encrypted key and tamper-proof personal IDs. This article highlights some BEV implementations and the approach’s potential benefits and challenges.