Blockchain Papers

Jinze Du, Chundong Wang, Lihai Nie

No abstract is available for this record.

Marco Hünseler, Kerstin Lemke‐Rust

Petitions are popular among internet users to share their opinions on various topics. However, most petitions are created and signed on few central platforms that retain control over content, participation and the technical implementation.Public Blockchains have the potential to increase trust in petition results, as their workings are transparent and the integrity of processed data is verifiable by anyone. We define the scope of petitions and their relationship to voting systems and present several approaches, ranging from Ethereum addressbased authentication and zero-knowledge proofs to pseudonymous signatures.These approaches are compared in terms of functional and security properties, cost and user requirements. Using the proposed methods, users can sign petitions based on their identity such that they are both universally verifiable and unique, without allowing attackers to infer their identities. We evaluate all schemes by deploying them to Ethereum-based blockchains and find that some of them fulfill all stated requirements and are practically usable on Layer 2 networks.

Andrew Le Gear, Farshad Ghassemi Toosi, Ashish Rajendra Sai, Tawny Whatmore · 5 authors

In the unregulated world of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), hiding malicious trading is all too easy in a large-scale set of transactions. This paper uses a graph-based representation of the blockchain to identify a topology that reveals suspicious intent to manipulate the perceived value of those offerings. As the computational complexity of identifying this topology could be prohibitive for unfiltered data-sets, this work derives metrics indicative of the topology. Using these explicitly-defined metrics and a past degradation of service on the Ethereum network originating with the iFishYunYu token, we show how this approach can reveal it to have been a deliberate attack, rather than simply an unprecedentedly highly-traded token. The formalization of this approach in the paper will allow detection of other such “pump-and-dump” attacks in the future.

Masure, Anthony, Helleu, Guillaume, Juvin, Océane, Gay, Elise · 5 authors

The CryptoKit research project provides a visual mapping of blockchain technology and Web3 protocols to make them accessible to a wide audience. It includes an open source typeface of more than 200 pictograms of key blockchain terms. When paired with IBM Plex, these icons can be arranged in didactic diagrams thanks to a dedicated tool on this website.

D. Aswini

Electronic voting (e-voting) has become an essential topic in the modernization of democratic systems, with promises of accessibility, faster counting, and reduced logistical challenges compared to traditional paper ballots. Yet, widespread adoption has been hindered by persistent trust and security concerns. Vulnerabilities such as malware, server compromise, insider threats, and limited verifiability have generated skepticism regarding the integrity of e-voting platforms. Blockchain technology has emerged as a disruptive innovation capable of reshaping this discourse. Its intrinsic properties—immutability, decentralization, transparency, and consensus-driven validation—directly address many of the fundamental challenges associated with securing digital elections. This manuscript provides a comprehensive exploration of blockchain-based electronic voting, with particular emphasis on the trust and security challenges that shape its practical deployment. Drawing on global case studies, theoretical models, and simulation insights, the research examines how blockchain can ensure tamper resistance, facilitate end-to-end verifiability, and empower voters through transparent audit trails. Key challenges such as scalability bottlenecks, voter anonymity risks, usability barriers, and regulatory gaps are analyzed in depth. The results indicate that hybrid blockchain architectures, which integrate advanced cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and sharding, hold promise for balancing the competing demands of scalability, privacy, and trust. Furthermore, blockchain must be supported by strong institutional frameworks, inclusive accessibility measures, and continuous technical audits to achieve legitimacy in electoral processes. By systematically mapping both the opportunities and limitations, this research contributes to the ongoing discourse on how technology can strengthen democratic resilience in the digital era. Ultimately, blockchain-enabled voting should be regarded not as a replacement but as an augmentation of existing systems, combining the strengths of distributed technologies with constitutional safeguards to advance secure, transparent, and inclusive electoral participation.

Dr Amit Kumar Jain

This study examines the design and deployment of scalable blockchain protocols that can serve as the backbone for smart city applications. The manuscript reviews existing blockchain consensus mechanisms—including Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and Proof of Authority (PoA)—and evaluates their suitability for heterogeneous smart city ecosystems. It further explores emerging scalability approaches such as sharding, sidechains, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and layer-2 protocols, alongside hybrid models that incorporate AI-driven optimization. A comparative simulation-based methodology is employed, assessing throughput, latency, and energy consumption across multiple blockchain prototypes. Results demonstrate that modular hybrid architectures leveraging sharding and DAG structures can increase throughput by up to 400% compared to traditional blockchains, with latency reductions of over 90% and significant energy savings. Beyond technical findings, the study contextualizes blockchain scalability within broader smart city governance frameworks, addressing interoperability between diverse urban domains such as energy microgrids, healthcare data platforms, autonomous mobility systems, and decentralized citizen services. The implications for data privacy, regulatory compliance, and citizen trust are also highlighted, emphasizing the necessity of balancing decentralization with governance oversight. By synthesizing technical, social, and policy considerations, this work contributes a comprehensive roadmap for scalable blockchain adoption in smart cities. Ultimately, the research demonstrates that with careful architectural design and integration of scalability-enhancing techniques, blockchain can evolve from a niche financial tool into a universal urban infrastructure enabler. The findings not only advance blockchain scalability research but also provide actionable insights for policymakers, urban planners, and technologists seeking to design sustainable, citizen-focused smart cities.

P Kalaiarasi, C. Vignesh, Gajarla Harshitha, K. Abhiram · 5 authors

Secure, transparent, and tamper-proof voting systems are essential to maintain democratic values and public confidence. Conventional paper ballot and electronic voting systems are prone to problems like fraud, manipulation, double voting, and transparency issues. This study envisions a blockchain-based voting system based on the Ethereum platform and smart contracts to guarantee decentralization, immutability, and verifiability. The system implements multi-layered authentication using email-based OTP verification, cryptographic hashing of the vote, blockchain-like ledger entries, and a distinct voting receipt token to preserve privacy and accountability. Real-time visualization of results using Chart.js and an interactive front-end with Tailwind CSS improves usability. In contrast to existing literature, our system incorporates secure receipt verification and live dashboards, decreasing dependency on intermediaries while guaranteeing trust. Experimental testing reveals that the system enhances election security through blocking double votes, facilitating real-time auditing, and providing tamper-proof evidence. Its future extensions involve biometric verification, mobile and remote voting, and integration into national ID systems for large-scale adoption. This paper illustrates the potential of blockchain in transforming electoral procedures and overcoming transparency, accessibility, and auditability issues.

Jules Maire, Alan Pulval-Dady

Blind signatures have become a cornerstone for privacy-sensitive applications such as digital cash, anonymous credentials, and electronic voting. The elliptic curve variant of the Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) is widely adopted due to its efficiency in resource-constrained environments, such as mobile devices and blockchain systems. Building blind ECDSA is hence a natural goal. One presents the first such construction relying solely on the ECDSA assumption. Despite the inherent complexities in integrating blindness with ECDSA, we design a protocol that ensures both unforgeability and blindness without introducing new computational assumptions and ensuring concurrent security. It involves zero-knowledge proofs based on the MPC-in-the-head paradigm for complex statements combining relations on encrypted elliptic curve points, their coordinates, and discrete logarithms.

N. Mohankumar, V. Sindhu, N. Nageswari, N. Silambarasan

Safe and transparent e-voting is becoming more and more important in modern democracies, as the confidence of citizens in electoral systems is determined by the issues of trust, privacy and scalability. Existing e-voting systems, however, have privacy, impersonation vulnerability, lack of transparency, and coercive weaknesses, and so they must be improved through cryptographic and identity solutions. In an attempt to provide security at these points, to propose a voting system that uses Aadhaar-linked decentralized identities together with iris scan biometrics to authenticate voters, zk-SNARKs to produce zero-knowledge proofs of voter eligibility without revealing their personal data, and homomorphic encryption to ensure ballot confidentiality and allow vote counting to be verifiably processed. Moreover, coercion resistance is ensured by a revoting mechanism, as only the last authenticated vote is included in the counting, thereby mitigating external pressure or vote-buying. The results demonstrate that the proposed design is capable to concurrently deliver strong authentication, biometric-based impersonation resistance, privacy preservation, end-to-end verifiability, and scalability in e-voting. In general, this framework eliminates major weaknesses of the old systems in addition to increasing voter confidence and integrity of the elections. The integration of decentralized identity, biometric iris recognition, and modern cryptography allows the model to provide a secure, transparent, and non-coercible framework of next-generation democratization procedures in India and can present an open-source, globally replicable solution with large-scale elections.

Omid Mirzamohammadi, Jan Bobolz, Mahdi Sedaghat, Emad Heydari Beni · 7 authors

An anonymous credential (AC) system with partial disclosure allows users to prove possession of a credential issued by an issuer while selectively disclosing a subset of their attributes to a verifier in a privacy-preserving manner. In keyed-verification AC (KVAC) systems, the issuer and verifier share a secret key. Existing KVAC schemes rely on computationally expensive zero-knowledge proofs during credential presentation, with the presentation size growing linearly with the number of attributes. In this work, we propose two highly efficient KVAC constructions that eliminate the need for zero-knowledge proofs during the credential presentation and achieve constant-size presentations. Our first construction adapts the approach of Fuchsbauer, Hanser and Slamanig (JoC'19), which achieved constant-size credential presentation in a publicly verifiable setting using their proposed structure-preserving signatures on equivalence classes (SPS-EQ) and set commitment schemes, to the KVAC setting. We introduce structure-preserving message authentication codes on equivalence classes (SP-MAC-EQ) and designated-verifier set commitments (DVSC), resulting in a KVAC system with constant-size credentials (2 group elements) and presentations (5 group elements). To avoid the bilinear groups and pairing operations required by SP-MAC-EQ, our second construction uses a homomorphic MAC with a simplified DVSC. While this sacrifices constant-size credentials (n+2 group elements, where n is the number of attributes), it retains constant-size presentations (2 group elements) in a pairingless setting. We formally prove the security of both constructions and provide open-source implementation results demonstrating their practicality. We extensively benchmarked our KVAC protocols and, additionally, bechmarked the efficiency of our SP-MAC-EQ scheme against the original SPS-EQ scheme, showcasing significant performance improvements.

Jeongin Lee, Geunyeong Choi, Jihyo Han, Jungheum Park

Monero, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, employs advanced cryptographic techniques to obfuscate transaction participants and amounts, thereby achieving strong untraceability. However, digital forensic approach can still reveal sensitive information by examining off-chain artifacts such as memory and wallet files. In this work, we conduct an in-depth forensic analysis of Monero's wallet application, focusing on the handling of public and private keys and the wallet's data storage formats. We reveal how these keys are managed in memory and develop a memory scanning algorithm capable of identifying key-related data structures. Furthermore, we analyze the wallet keys and cache files, presenting a method for decrypting and interpreting serialized keys and transaction data encrypted with a user-specified passphrase. Our approach is implemented as an open-source Volatility3 plugin and a set of decryption scripts. Finally, we discuss the applicability of our methodology to multi-cryptocurrency wallets that incorporate Monero components, thereby validating the generalizability of our techniques.

Saifuddin Shaik Mohammed

The rapid progress of large-scale models, including foundational and generative, brings to the forefront the tension between data-driven innovation and core privacy concerns. Such contracts as the GDPR and the undue privacy threats of data aggregation make centralized training approaches less desirable. To analyze the data’s distributed characteristics and their application to FLO, we investigate the role of federation analytics in a plausible paradigm that shunts data. In this paper, we present a new federated learning (FL) framework enhanced with cutting-edge privacy technologies (PET) such as Differential privacy for user-level formal guarantees of confidentiality, and strengthened secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), which guards the model updates. This paper studies more recent approaches to resolving the principal challenges of FL: statistical heterogeneity, communication bottlenecks, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. We greatly appreciate what this new method portends, especially for training large language models (LLMs) and the more delicate areas of healthcare and finance. By evaluating certain existing limitations, such as the complexities of federated fine- tuning and model fairness, it is clear that an architecture with exemplary performance in FL serves as a model for scalable, secure, and privacy cop.

Narendar Kumar, Surendar Kumar, Abdul Waqar, Clavincy Francis Yohanes Ngantung

This research article provides the design of an in-person and remote voting system, while at the same time ensuring the privacy of users that would guarantee openness, transparency, and at the same time fraud-free results. The aim is to solve various common problems associated with most conventional elections including fraud, vote manipulation, through adaptation of the usage of a safe, highly transparent decentralized logical Hyperledger Fabric-based system provided by blockchain implementation. The methodology in this article is to be implemented for the sheer reason of urgency needed in making a more secure and transparent system for voting, considering even the rising frauds in elections. The addition of Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) guarantees that votes are confident and correct, yet anonymous between a voter and their vote. Biometric identification makes the system resistant to double spending. This incorporation of technologies ensures there is privacy and immutability against the double transactions, which, in turn, would be put in place as foundation for the future to be provided wherein every process in an election becomes safe and transparent. Innovation via creating a voting system to be trusted to meet today's demands and set standards for future electoral processes.

Anupama Kaushik, Prabhjot Kaur, Sonika Malik, Abhinav Mahakul · 6 authors

The evolution of technology has sparked significant interest in transforming traditional voting into efficient, secure online systems.This study introduces a novel approach that enhances voter privacy and data security by utilizing a UniqueBlend ID algorithm to generate unique identifiers for voters, obscuring Aadhar numbers and preventing identity disclosure.Blockchain technology is integrated to enhance transparency, eliminate fraud, and create an immutable voting record.However, integrating decentralized applications (dApps) with legacy web2 systems presents challenges in data storage and retrieval.To address these issues, this research presents Optima, an interface that simplifies data segregation between web2 and web3 storage systems using a JSON-based structure.Optima optimizes storage efficiency, minimizes gas fees, and reduces development overhead, allowing developers to focus on application logic.This streamlined data segregation approach significantly improves the efficiency and security of online voting, ensuring voter anonymity and maintaining the integrity of the voting process.

Vivek Pandey, Sahil Ambekar, R.Sunil Varma, Kunal Nandiwadekar · 6 authors

India’s democracy allows citizens to make representatives accountable during elections, but no immediate mechanism enables them to remove representatives prior to a particular term ending if representatives are seriously underperforming or categorized as nonrepresentative. The Right to Recall (RTR) E-Voting System utilizing Blockchain Technology addresses this lack of an immediate mechanism, providing a safe, transparent, and performance-based recall mechanism that decades of political science literature have deemed necessary. Recalling representatives for statutory reasons is often a slow bureaucratic process that is influenced by political bias when it is allowed at all. Blockchain’s decentralized, immutable, and secure nature helps guarantee that votes are tamper-proof, verifiable, and transparent. The system employs smart contracts to automate much of the recall processes while reducing human intervention and our potential for manipulation. Existing cryptographic techniques such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) guarantee a high level of security and voter anonymity in our proposed system. This paper describes the design, architecture, implementation challenges, and the impact of a blockchain technology-enabled RTR voting platform in the context of India.

Manoj Patil, Adarsh Mote, Diksha Patil, Pratik Patil · 5 authors

Blockchain technology presents a transformative solution to the vulnerabilities inherent in traditional electoral processes by ensuring security, transparency, and scalability. By leveraging a decentralized and immutable ledger, blockchain provides vote integrity, voter anonymity, and end-to-end verifiability. This paper details the design, implementation, and evaluation of a blockchain-based online voting system using Ethereum smart contracts. The system integrates sophisticated cryptographic techniques, including zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption, alongside a distributed architecture to enhance election integrity. Our implementation demonstrates several key advantages: tamper-proof voting records, real-time verifiability of election progress, and scalability for large electorates. Performance analysis reveals an 85% reduction in vote counting time compared to traditional methods, with 99.99% accuracy and zero security breaches during testing. The system achieves cost efficiency through automated vote tallying while maintaining voter privacy. While challenges such as regulatory compliance and user adoption persist, this work demonstrates that blockchain technology holds the potential to revolutionize democratic processes by offering a secure, transparent, and accessible voting solution for the digital age.

Manas Patil, Soham Rane, Ansh Shah, Narendra Shekokar · 6 authors

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) enable users to prove knowledge of certain information without disclosing the information itself. Multi-ID ZKP systems extend this concept, allowing individuals to submit anonymous yet verifiable com plaints across various platforms while maintaining privacy and accountability. This paper explores the integration of ZKPs into complaint management systems, addressing the challenges of anonymity, verifiability, scalability, and computational efficiency. By reviewing existing literature on ZKP applications in authentication, identity management, and scalable systems, we identify key advancements and research gaps. This work aims to establish a foundation for implementing robust, privacy preserving, and efficient complaint systems leveraging multi-ID ZXP mechanisms.

Radjou, Amirreza

Blockchain consensus protocols must be thoroughly evaluated for security and resilience, but their large scale makes experimental testing in a lab setting challenging. While numerous simulators exist, there is a need for a more general framework that can translate simulation data into useful and comparable metrics. This thesis addresses this gap by adopting CNSim, a simulator developed at York University that introduces a finality-based approach to evaluating consensus networks. To study the Bitcoin protocol, CNSim was enhanced by designing and implementing a novel framework for modeling adversarial behaviors. Specifically, the Majority Attack was implemented to create a detailed simulation for double-spending scenarios. Using this extended simulator, a systematic evaluation was conducted to assess the attack's impact on transaction finality, quantifying how network resilience degrades as malicious hash power increases. The findings provide valuable insights into the practical security limitations of the Bitcoin protocol and successfully demonstrate the utility of a finality-based methodology for analyzing blockchain consensus mechanisms.

Mutahar Mujahid Mohammed, Hemasree Koganti, Abdul Hadi, Sai Krishna Akula · 6 authors

Traditional and digital voting systems both have their flaws, such as being vulnerable to fraud, having limited auditability, and being controlled by a central authority, which poses a growing threat to the honesty, openness, and safety of elections. This study seeks to solve the problem by exploring the potential of a voting system built on the blockchain that would guarantee voter anonymity, eliminate single points of failure, and offer end-to-end verifiability. A hybrid blockchain architecture is proposed, combining permissioned networks for high performance with public blockchain anchoring for transparency and fairness. A prototype implemented on Hyperledger Fabric was evaluated through simulated municipal elections with 10,000 virtual voters, achieving an average vote processing latency of 0.75 seconds, throughput of 4,000 votes per minute, 100% vote integrity, 99.97% system uptime, and full voter anonymity via zero-knowledge proofs. The results confirm that the proposed system can meet the performance, scalability, and privacy requirements for secure digital elections, while identifying key challenges—such as scalability, regulatory compliance, and digital inclusion—that must be addressed for real-world deployment.

L. K. Bang, P. H. T. Trung, N. Ð. P. Trong, K. T. N. Ngan

No abstract is available for this record.

Vijayakumar P, Nisanth G, Rajalakshmi Soundarapandian, Sarita Gahlot · 6 authors

Transparent and secure communication is crucial in the digital age. The use of blockchain algorithms to improve communication security and transparency is examined in this article. We solve flaws in conventional communication networks by utilizing decentralized ledger technology, which guarantees data integrity, secrecy, and authenticity. We assess different consensus algorithms and show how well they work to secure communication channels, such as Proof of Stake and Proof of Work. We demonstrate the benefits and possible drawbacks of utilizing blockchain technology for secure communication through empirical investigation. This study sheds light on potential uses of blockchain in the communication industry in the future.

Sarenche, Roozbeh

In recent years, permissionless blockchains have emerged as the foundation for a wide range of decentralized applications, including cryptocurrency management, decentralized finance, auctions, voting systems, digital ownership, and more. The reliability of these applications depends on the security guarantees offered by the underlying blockchain protocols. Although prominent permissionless blockchains often base their security on formal analyses and claims, these assessments typically rely on simplifying assumptions, such as the existence of an honest majority, or overlook critical factors, like the influence of reward distribution on system security. Permissionless blockchains incentivize their participants, referred to as miners or validators, by rewarding them with cryptocurrency to encourage active participation in the protocol. The incentive mechanism plays a crucial role in maintaining the security of the blockchain by motivating participants to follow the desired, or honest, behavior. Since validators and miners are typically rational actors seeking to maximize profit, any flaw in the incentive design may motivate them to deviate from honest behavior in pursuit of an unfair advantage. Such exploitation of the incentive mechanism can lead to a destabilizing situation in which disadvantaged participants may choose either to deviate from honest behavior or to eventually abandon the network, with both possibilities threatening the blockchain's continued progress and stability. In this thesis, we analyze the incentive mechanisms behind several prominent permissionless blockchains, including Bitcoin, Cardano, and Ethereum. Our focus is primarily on potential fairness attacks that allow adversarial miners or validators to increase their profits by capturing an unfair share of blocks. As a first step, we analyze the incentive structure in Bitcoin, the pioneering Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain. Specifically, we examine the temporal aspects of profitability associated with one of the most well-known fairness attacks, namely selfish mining, which aims to exclude honest blocks from the longest chain. Building on this, we assess the role of Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment mechanism in mitigating such attacks. We then explore the implications of mining pool rationality for Bitcoin's security and propose novel attack vectors that could further increase an adversary's profit in a rational setting. Additionally, we investigate how upcoming Bitcoin reward halvings and the transition toward a transaction-fee era can impact Bitcoin's security by lowering the security threshold and increasing the potential for immediate profitability. As a next step, we analyze the incentive mechanisms of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols. We examine longest-chain PoS protocols, such as Cardano, and show that due to the block proposer predictability inherent in PoS systems, the selfish mining attack can be even more destructive in this context. We also analyze Ethereum as a voting-based PoS protocol. These protocols are susceptible to block reorganization attacks, in which an adversarial validator attempts to exclude blocks with weak voting support from the canonical chain. We identify a vulnerability in Ethereum's reward mechanism that results from the centralized distribution of vote rewards. If exploited, this vulnerability can lead to both short- and long-range reorganization attacks. To address this issue, we propose a fairer and more decentralized reward mechanism for Ethereum. We hope the insights learned from this thesis will help identify potential incentive-based vulnerabilities in permissionless blockchains and contribute to the design of fairer blockchain protocols.

Tianyu Zhaolu, Huaqun Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Samuel Breckenridge, Dani Vilardell, Andrés Fábrega, Amy Zhao · 7 authors

In traditional, one-vote-per-person voting systems, privacy equates with ballot secrecy: voting tallies are published, but individual voters' choices are concealed. Voting systems that weight votes in proportion to token holdings, though, are now prevalent in cryptocurrency and web3 systems. We show that these weighted-voting systems overturn existing notions of voter privacy. Our experiments demonstrate that even with secret ballots, publishing raw tallies often reveals voters' choices. Weighted voting thus requires a new framework for privacy. We introduce a notion called B-privacy whose basis is bribery, a key problem in voting systems today. B-privacy captures the economic cost to an adversary of bribing voters based on revealed voting tallies. We propose a mechanism to boost B-privacy by noising voting tallies. We prove bounds on its tradeoff between B-privacy and transparency, meaning reported-tally accuracy. Analyzing 3,582 proposals across 30 Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), we find that the prevalence of large voters ("whales") limits the effectiveness of any B-Privacy-enhancing technique. However, our mechanism proves to be effective in cases without extreme voting weight concentration: among proposals requiring coalitions of $\geq5$ voters to flip outcomes, our mechanism raises B-privacy by a geometric mean factor of $4.1\times$. Our work offers the first principled guidance on transparency-privacy tradeoffs in weighted-voting systems, complementing existing approaches that focus on ballot secrecy and revealing fundamental constraints that voting weight concentration imposes on privacy mechanisms.