This study builds on our previous systematic literature review (SLR) that assessed the applications and performance of zk-SNARK, zk-STARK, and Bulletproof non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZKP) protocols. To address the identified research gaps, we designed and implemented a benchmark comparing these three protocols using a dynamic minimized multiplicative complexity (MiMC) hash application. We evaluated performance across four general-purpose programming libraries and two programming languages. Our results show that zk-SNARK produced the smallest proofs, while zk-STARK generated the largest. In terms of proof generation and verification times, zk-STARK was the fastest, and Bulletproof was the slowest. Interestingly, zk-SNARK proofs verified marginally faster than zk-STARK, contrary to other findings. These insights enhance our understanding of the functionality, security, and performance of NIZKP protocols, providing valuable guidance for selecting the most suitable protocol for specific applications.
Abstract Background The intersection of cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin, with public health issues, particularly synthetic opioid-related deaths, presents an emerging field of study. This research explores the statistical relationship between Bitcoin market fluctuations and synthetic opioid mortalities, against the backdrop of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) enforcement actions. Methods Utilizing data from 2009 to 2022, this study employs Pearson correlation and linear regression models to investigate the relationship between annual Bitcoin price fluctuations and synthetic opioid-related death rates, alongside DEA domestic arrest trends. Results A pronounced positive correlation (r = 0.92) was found between Bitcoin price changes and synthetic opioid mortality rates, with the Bitcoin price accounting for approximately 84.78% of the variance in opioid-related deaths (R² = 0.8478). The analysis also notes a disparity between increasing synthetic opioid fatalities and decreasing DEA domestic arrests. Conclusions The findings reveal significant correlations between Bitcoin price fluctuations and synthetic opioid-related fatalities, highlighting potential gaps in current drug enforcement strategies. This study underscores the need for an interdisciplinary approach to address the complexities introduced by cryptocurrency in the opioid crisis and suggests the necessity of integrating financial and public health strategies to combat emerging drug abuse trends.
Intelligent Transport System (ITS) offers inter-vehicle communication, safe driving, road condition updates, and intelligent traffic management. This research intends to propose a novel decentralized "BlockAuth" architecture for vehicles, authentication, and authorization, traveling across the border. It is required because the existing architects rely on a single Trusted Authority (TA) for issuing certifications, which can jeopardize privacy and system integrity. Similarly, the centralized TA, if failed, can cause the whole system to collapse. Furthermore, a unique "Proof of Authenticity and Integrity" process is proposed, redirecting drivers/vehicles to their home country for authentication, ensuring the security of their credentials. Implemented with Hyperledger Fabric, BlockAuth ensures secure vehicle authentication and authorization with minimal computational overhead, under 2%. Furthermore, it opens up global access, enforces the principles of separation of duty and least privilege, and reinforces resilience via decentralization and automation.
Abstract The Internet of vehicles (IoV) has appeared as an effective method of obtaining an intelligent transportation system able to deliver various innovative solutions and enable several applications as a replacement for vehicular ad‐hoc networks (VANETs). To help IoV contexts, enormous quantities of information are created and transmitted between various communication components wirelessly across multiple channels, which may entice attackers and put the network at risk. Security is one of the vital concerns and critical issues in VANETs and IoV networks. Blockchain is employed to create a distributed and secure IoV to overcome some centralized concerns and enhance the network architecture. This article presents a systematic and detailed review by selecting 28 review articles from 2018 to 2022 on blockchain‐based IoV (BIoV). We investigate the latest review and survey articles regarding their aspects, contributions, findings, limitations, and strong points to address unsolved problems of BIoV. In this article, the review/survey articles are systematically reviewed to resolve taxonomy aspects intended for BIoV. We provide a new taxonomy and discuss security concerns, open issues, and future directions so that researchers in this field can quickly and easily access recent content and do not need to read numerous review articles.
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) aim to provide a comfortable driving experience. Sharing messages in VANETs can help with traffic management, congestion mitigation, and driving safety. However, forged or false messages may undermine the efficiency of VANETs. In this paper, we propose a security scheme based on blockchain technology, where two types of blockchain are constructed based on roadside units (RSUs) and Certificate Authorities (CAs), respectively. The proposed security scheme has multifold goals to identify malicious nodes and detect forged messages based on multiple factors, such as reputation of sender nodes, and time and distance effectiveness of messages. In addition, an incentive mechanism is introduced on the RSU blockchain to encourage RSUs to adopt active behaviors. Extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme exhibits superior performances to existing methods in detecting forged messages and identifying malicious nodes. Meanwhile, it provides privacy protection and improves the efficiency of vehicular networks.
Archaeological artifacts are important evidence to history. Hence, it becomes critical to store the data safely to prevent their tampering and destruction. The paper proposes a system that safely stores necessary archaeological data, such as the analysis and findings of these artifacts using Blockchain. This technology makes the data immutable and transparent. With the help of this system, tracing their details and tracking any changes made in their possession or data will become effortless. This functionality is achieved using the smart contracts of the Ethereum blockchain, which can authenticate, track, and hence secure the data about these artifacts at each step. Unlike other majority blockchain-based applications, the proposed approach is lightweight and faster. It considerably reduces computational power by integrating a distributed file storage system with blockchain.
Incentive mechanism is the key to the success of the Bitcoin system as a permissionless blockchain. It encourages participants to contribute their computing resources to ensure the correctness and consistency of user transaction records. Selfish mining attacks, however, prove that Bitcoin’s incentive mechanism is not incentive-compatible, which is contrary to traditional views. Selfish mining attacks may cause the loss of mining power, especially those of honest participants, which brings great security challenges to the Bitcoin system. Although there are a series of studies against selfish mining behaviors, these works have certain limitations: either the existing protocol needs to be modified or the detection effect for attacks is not satisfactory. We propose the ForkDec, a high-accuracy system for selfish mining detection based on the fully connected neural network, for the purpose of effectively deterring selfish attackers. The neural network contains a total of 100 neurons (10 hidden layers and 10 neurons per layer), learned on a training set containing about 200,000 fork samples. The data set, used to train the model, is generated by a Bitcoin mining simulator that we preconstructed. We also applied ForkDec to the test set to evaluate the attack detection and achieved a detection accuracy of 99.03%. The evaluation experiment demonstrates that ForkDec has certain application value and excellent research prospects.
Modern vehicles have evolved to support connected and self-driving capabilities. The concepts such as connected driving, cooperative driving, and intelligent transportation systems have resulted in an increase in the connectivity of vehicles and subsequently created new information security risks. The original vehicular ad-hoc network term is now emerged to a new term, Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which is a typical application of symmetry of Internet of Things (IoT). Vehicle manufacturers address some critical issues such as software bugs or security issues through remote updates, and this gives rise to concerns regarding the security of updated components. Moreover, aftermarket units such as those imposed by transportation authorities or insurance companies expose vehicles to high risk. Software testing aims to ensure that software products are reliable and behave as expected. Many commercial and open-source software products undergo formal certifications to increase users’ confidence in their accuracy, reliability, and security. There are different techniques for software certification, including test-based certification. Testcase repositories are available to support software testing and certification, such as the Linux Test Project for Linux kernel testing. Previous studies performed various testing and experimental evaluation of different parts of modern vehicles to assess the security risks. Due to the lack of trusted testcase repositories and a common approach for testing, testing efforts are performed individually. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach for a testcase repository to support test-based software and security testing and overcome the lack of trusted testcase repositories. The novel concept Proof-of-Validation to manage global state is proposed to manage updates to the repository. The initial work in this study considers the LTP test suite as a use case for the testcase repository. This research work is expected to contribute to the further development in including evidence generation for testing verification.
Modern vehicles are no longer simply mechanical devices. Connectivity between the vehicular network and the outside world has widened the security holes that hackers can use to exploit a vehicular network. Controller Area Network (CAN), FlexRay, and automotive Ethernet are popular protocols for in-vehicle networks (IVNs) and will stay in the industry for many more years. However, these protocols were not designed with security in mind. They have several vulnerabilities, such as lack of message authentication, lack of message encryption, and an ID-based arbitration mechanism for contention resolution. Adversaries can use these vulnerabilities to launch sophisticated attacks that may lead to loss of life and damage to property. Thus, the security of the vehicles should be handled carefully. In this paper, we investigate the security vulnerabilities with in-vehicle network protocols such as CAN, automotive Ethernet, and FlexRay. A comprehensive survey on security attacks launched against in-vehicle networks is presented along with countermeasures adopted by various researchers. Various algorithms have been proposed in the past for intrusion detection in IVNs. However, those approaches have several limitations that need special attention from the research community. Blockchain is a good approach to solving the existing security issues in IVNs, and we suggest a way to improve IVN security based on a hybrid blockchain.
Leila Benarous, Benamar Kadri, Ahmed Bouridane, Elhadj Benkhelifa
Abstract Vehicle registration system is an essential process for recording the transfer of vehicles' ownership. Most of existing systems are administratively centralized, semi‐automated, and rely on a formal proof provision. While these systems were initially proposed to preserve the owner's rights, prove their ownerships and legally record used motor‐land transportation means. Unfortunately, these systems also allow the registration of illegally smuggled and stolen vehicles. This is mainly due to inefficient verification methods, long heterogeneous administrative procedures or to corrupt individuals at the motor registration departments. Regardless of the reasons, the fact that the system allows such cases hints on a faulty design. Current systems are centralized and do not perform a double checking until a report is made, which means that this occurs after the fact of registering the forged vehicle. Noting that these reports are not always fruitful, if the vehicle's proofs were properly injected in the system. This paper proposes a system that is transparent where every vehicle registration is done under everyone's watchful eyes. No denying, no alteration, and no unauthorized injection may occur. The proposed system saves the owner's information and the vehicle's descriptions in transactions saved in a public blockchain where all the history of purchases regarding the subject vehicle may be tracked. The use of blockchain technology is motivated by its security, transparency, and traceability as well as its immutability and scalability in terms of users. We have evaluated our proposed solution in terms of its security and resiliency to the injection of forged transactions by the elaboration of the attack tree. The results show our solution's superiority when compared against current registration system.
Connected vehicles are set to define the future of transportation; however, this upcoming technology continues to be plagued with serious security risks. If these risks are not addressed in a timely fashion, then they could threaten the adoption and success of this promising technology. This article deals with a specific class of attacks in connected vehicles, namely tampering attacks caused due to compromise of on-board sensors. Current centralized solutions that employ trusted infrastructure to protect against adversarial manipulation of information cannot validate the correctness of the shared data and do not scale well. To overcome these issues, decentralized protection mechanisms by means of blockchain technology have emerged as a promising research direction. However, current permission-less, linear blockchain-based solutions have low transaction performance and high computational cost, thereby making it difficult to adopt them for security in connected vehicles. In this article, we present TangleCV, a directed acyclic graph–based distributed ledger technique for connected vehicles to address data tampering threats in connected vehicular networks. We describe new validation steps, tip selection strategies, and cumulative weight definition for TangleCV that not only meets the timing constraints of the connected vehicular networks but also secures the network against threats due to tampering attacks. We describe how the reputation of the network is established in TangleCV using trust factors calculated on the basis of ability, integrity, and benevolence of the nodes in the network. We present numerical results that demonstrate that the average value of the time to first approval decreases by more than 70% as the network evolves from a low load to a high load in the case of the nearest neighbor strategy. We observe that more than 60% of the nodes are approved in a low-load network and this number increases to 80% in a high-load network for the nearest neighbor strategy. The standard deviation of error measurements for nodes experiencing tampering attack is around 60% higher as compared to nodes that do not experience such an attack.
In mass disasters with multinational victims, it is critical to identify the deceased for judicial, ethical, religious and human rights reasons, as well as to allow the next of kin to complete the grieving process. Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) process is a complex procedure where Post-mortem (PM) identifying data, essentially fingerprints, DNA and dental, is collected in order to be compared with equivalent Antemortem (AM) data related to the missing persons list. Although there are solutions used in the field of human identification, they all fall short of equipping them with the tools needed for achieving human identification in a timely manner. Initially, it is significantly challenging to manage missing person lists containing years, and sometimes decades, of family AM data resources’ updates. Furthermore, there is currently no record of any holistic technical solutions for managing both AM and PM for human identification to support collaborative multinational and interjurisdictional processes. Blockchain technology provides the tools to facilitate building trustworthy, secure and holistic ecosystems, and it can disseminate siloed AM and PM data across systems, protecting data breaches, redundancies, inconsistencies, and errors. As such, blockchain technology can revolutionize the human identification process worldwide in terms of managing missing person lists, AM data repositories for living people, PM data repositories of recovered unidentified victims, and contribute to the comparison of compatible biological profiles for definitive identification. Using real-world scenarios, the authors propose a number of promising use cases to attain a holistic understanding of the challenges, and present how blockchain technology meets such challenges and facilitates multi-jurisdictional data information-sharing in conjunction with the forthcoming circulation of patients’ electronic medical and dental records.
The development of vehicular networks has greatly improved the efficiency and safety of intelligent traffic systems. However, it also introduces additional security threats into the system. The special characteristics of vehicular networks, such as dynamic topology, huge network scale and so on, make it difficult to adopt the traditional security solutions directly into this scenario. In addition, the single point failure problem of the centralized security mechanisms is also a big challenge. Recently, blockchain technology, which is a distributed database, is a potential approach to address these security issues. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the existing blockchain-based cybersecurity mechanisms is presented with the corresponding performance analysis. The purpose of this work is to provide a guideline for the further study in the application of blockchain in the vehicular network security area.
Sananda Mitra, Sumanta Bose, Sourav Sen Gupta, Anupam Chattopadhyay
The phases those turn the wheels of an autonomous vehicle, are perception, decision and actuation. Among these, the major highlight of recent research has been perception through diverse sensors, and decision through an ever-aggressive cloud/fog/mist computing setup. In this paper, we take a closer look into the flow of data, both internal and external to the autonomous vehicle. We argue that confidentiality, integrity and availability of these data are critical to the eventual adoption of higher-level security and privacy mechanisms in autonomous vehicles. To that effect, we propose a secure and tamper-resilient distributed ledger as an underlying enabler for intra-vehicular data aggregation, and study its security and privacy issues under appropriate adversarial models, where the distributed ledger is instantiated as a standard consortium blockchain.
Internet and digital technologies have been discussed recently by Addiction contributors in relation to the delivery of efficient computer-delivered brief interventions [1,2], online methodologies for recruiting and surveying illicit drug users [3] and the internet's role in facilitating the spread of information and sale of emerging drugs such as mephedrone [4] and synthetic cannabinoids [5]. Here, I introduce readers to a novel use of the internet in the drugs field. The anonymous online drug market-place Silk Road was first revealed in June 2011 [6]. Silk Road is accessible only to people who are using Tor anonymizing software [7]. Tor uses encryption to make it impossible for anyone to trace IP addresses (the electronic code assigned to each computer on the internet). The front page of Silk Road looks a great deal like the front page of eBay. Goods and services for sale are categorized and all manner of drugs are available under the following categories: ecstasy, cannabis, dissociatives, psychedelics, opioids, stimulants, benzodiazepines and other. Sellers receive ratings from buyers and comments about the quality of their products, how fast they ship and the level of professionalism and discretion of the transaction. Trust in sellers is built on reputation. Silk Road traders use the anonymous currency Bitcoin [8]. This decentralized international currency operates through peer-to-peer technologies. At the time of writing (October 2011), Silk Road is still online and continuing to expand. Facilitated by a combination of the internet and encryption technologies, buying and selling illegal products is now possible and may increase dramatically in the future. What may stop an exponential increase in the use of anonymous online drug market-places is the hurdle of delivery. At the end of the transaction, the physical product still needs to be sent to the buyer. Sending products between countries allows law enforcement the opportunity to intercept packages and potentially attempt to arrest the would-be importer. Sending products within the same country may make arrest less likely. There are also numerous barriers to entry for people who might want to use Silk Road. Installing and using Tor, buying and using Bitcoins in a secure way and taking the risk of fraud or arrest upon delivery may deter the majority of would-be users. Nevertheless, for the minority who master these concerns and are willing to take the risk, Silk Road has revolutionized how the internet can be used to source drugs. After all, buying drugs in the real world also involves considerable risk. For some, the online equivalent may prove more convenient and secure than arranging a standard deal. There are many unanswered questions about Silk Road. The extent to which law enforcement can stop and disband a site such as this is yet to be seen. The extent to which drug users will use this new technology is also unknown. Needless to say, if anonymous online drug markets do end up expanding into mainstream drug markets, they will pose a real challenge to existing drug laws and policies. We should definitely watch this space. None.