K. M. Giannoutakis, G. Spathoulas, C. Filelis-Papadopoulos, A. Collen, M. Anagnostopoulos, K. Votis, N. A. Nijdam
{"title":"A Blockchain Solution for Enhancing Cybersecurity Defence of IoT","authors":"K. M. Giannoutakis, G. Spathoulas, C. Filelis-Papadopoulos, A. Collen, M. Anagnostopoulos, K. Votis, N. A. Nijdam","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00071","url":null,"abstract":"The growth of IoT devices during the last decade has led to the development of smart ecosystems, such as smart homes, prone to cyberattacks. Traditional security methodologies support to some extend the requirement for preserving privacy and security of such deployments, but their centralized nature in conjunction with low computational capabilities of smart home gateways make such approaches not efficient. Last achievements on blockchain technologies allowed the use of such decentralized architectures to support cybersecurity defence mechanisms. In this work, a blockchain framework is presented to support the cybersecurity mechanisms of smart homes installations, focusing on the immutability of users and devices that constitute such environments. The proposed methodology provides also the appropriate smart contracts support for ensuring the integrity of the smart home gateway and IoT devices, as well as the dynamic and immutable management of blocked malicious IPs. The framework has been deployed on a real smart home environment demonstrating its applicability and efficiency.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126348160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Improving Bitcoin Transaction Propagation by Leveraging Unreachable Nodes","authors":"Federico Franzoni, Vanesa Daza","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00031","url":null,"abstract":"The Bitcoin P2P network is at the core of all communications between clients. The reachable part of this network has been explored and analyzed by numerous studies. Unreachable nodes, however, are, in most part, overlooked. Nonetheless, they are a relevant part of the network and play an essential role in the propagation of messages. In this paper, we focus on transaction propagation and show that increasing the participation of unreachable nodes can potentially improve the robustness and efficiency of the network. In order to do that, we propose a few changes to the network protocol. Additionally, we design a novel transaction propagation protocol that explicitly involves unreachable nodes to provide better protection against deanonymization attacks. Our solutions are simple to implement and can effectively bring immediate benefits to the Bitcoin network.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128981673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrew Kinai, Frederlck Otieno, Nelson Bore, Komminist Weldemariam
{"title":"Multi-factor authentication for users of non-internet based applications of blockchain-based platforms","authors":"Andrew Kinai, Frederlck Otieno, Nelson Bore, Komminist Weldemariam","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00076","url":null,"abstract":"Attacks targeting several millions of non-internet based application users are on the rise. These applications such as SMS and USSD typically do not benefit from existing multi-factor authentication methods due to the nature of their interaction interfaces and mode of operations. To address this problem, we propose an approach that augments blockchain with multi-factor authentication based on evidence from blockchain transactions combined with risk analysis. A profile of how a user performs transactions is built overtime and is used to analyse the risk level of each new transaction. If a transaction is flagged as high risk, we generate n-factor layers of authentication using past endorsed blockchain transactions. A demonstration of how we used the proposed approach to authenticate critical financial transactions in a blockchain-based asset financing platform is also discussed.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114289619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CoVer: Collaborative Light-Node-Only Verification and Data Availability for Blockchains","authors":"Steven Cao, S. Kadhe, K. Ramchandran","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00014","url":null,"abstract":"Validating a blockchain incurs heavy computation, communication, and storage costs. As a result, clients with limited resources, called light nodes, cannot verify transactions independently and must trust full nodes, making them vulnerable to security attacks. Motivated by this problem, we ask a fundamental question: can light nodes securely validate without any full nodes? We answer affirmatively by proposing CoVer, a decentralized protocol that allows a group of light nodes to collaboratively verify blocks even under a dishonest majority, achieving the same level of security for block validation as full nodes while only requiring a fraction of the work. In particular, work per node scales down proportionally with the number of participants (up to a log factor), resulting in computation, communication, and storage requirements that are sublinear in block size. Our main contributions are light-node-only protocols for fraud proofs and data availability.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"173 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124242414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prabal Banerjee, Chander Govindarajan, P. Jayachandran, S. Ruj
{"title":"Reliable, Fair and Decentralized Marketplace for Content Sharing Using Blockchain","authors":"Prabal Banerjee, Chander Govindarajan, P. Jayachandran, S. Ruj","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00053","url":null,"abstract":"Content sharing platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo have promoted pay per view models for artists to monetize their content. Yet, artists remain at the mercy of centralized platforms that control content listing and advertisement, with little transparency and fairness in terms of number of views or revenue. On the other hand, consumers are distanced from the publishers and cannot authenticate originality of the content. In this paper, we develop a reliable and fair platform for content sharing without a central facilitator. The platform is built as a decentralized data storage layer to store and share content in a fault-tolerant manner, where the peers also participate in a blockchain network. The blockchain is used to manage content listings and as an auditable and fair marketplace transaction processor that automatically pays out the content creators and the storage facilitators using smart contracts. We demonstrate the system with the blockchain layer built on Hyperledger Fabric and the data layer built on Tahoe-LAFS, and show that our design is practical and scalable with low overheads.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125376900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cost Fairness for Blockchain-Based Two-Party Exchange Protocols","authors":"Matthias Lohr, Benjamin Schlosser, Steffen Staab","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00062","url":null,"abstract":"Blockchains can guarantee fairness during the exchange of digital goods such that in a two-party exchange no one is defrauded by a malicious opponent. While several notions of fairness have been discussed in the literature, they all ignore that damage cannot only be incurred by the malicious failure of the exchange, but also by an unfair allocation of transaction costs. To address this issue we: 1. define the novel concept of cost fairness, which 2. builds on the notion of maximum cost matrices that formalize transaction costs in different combinations of benevolent and malicious behavior. 3. We show how limited notions of cost fairness can be achieved by modifying an existing exchange protocol or using a container protocol. In particular, we also provide 4. a tool that let us predict the maximum cost matrix for a specific protocol execution and, thus, gives trade exchange parties the possibility to weigh not only the value of transaction of exchanged goods but also the associated transaction costs.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126965154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Max DiGiacomo-Castillo, Yiyun Liang, Advay Pal, John C. Mitchell
{"title":"Model Checking Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols","authors":"Max DiGiacomo-Castillo, Yiyun Liang, Advay Pal, John C. Mitchell","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00051","url":null,"abstract":"The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol [4] is an abstraction of the bitcoin proof-of-work consensus protocol. We use a model-checking tool (UPPAAL-SMC) to examine the security of proof-of-work consensus by varying protocol parameters, using an adversary that leverages the selfish mining strategy introduced in [4]. We provide insights into modeling proof-of-work protocols and demonstrate trade-offs between operating parameters. Applying this methodology to protocol design, we show that the uniform tie-breaking rule from [11], an attempt to mitigate selfish mining, improves chain quality but decreases the common prefix probability. This trade-off illustrates how design decisions affect desirable protocol properties, within a range of concrete operating conditions, in a manner that is not evident from prior asymptotic analysis.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125103350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decentralized Lightweight Detection of Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin Clients","authors":"Bithin Alangot, Daniël Reijsbergen, Sarad Venugopalan, Pawel Szalachowski","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00049","url":null,"abstract":"Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be convinced to accept a maliciously forked view of the blockchain. In such an eclipse attack, the client is unable to reliably distinguish the canonical view of the blockchain from the view provided by the attacker. The consequences of this can be catastrophic if the client makes business decisions based on a distorted view of the blockchain transactions.In this paper, we investigate the design space and propose two approaches for Bitcoin clients to detect whether an eclipse attack against them is ongoing. Each approach chooses a different trade-off between average attack detection time and network load. The first scheme is based on the detection of suspicious block timestamps. The second scheme allows blockchain clients to utilize their natural connections to the Internet (i.e., standard web activity) to gossip about their blockchain views with other clients through contacted servers. Our proposals improve upon previously proposed eclipse attack countermeasures without introducing any dedicated infrastructure or changes to the Bitcoin protocol and network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the gossip-based schemes through real-world implementation. The results of our experiments indicate that the protocol incurs a negligible overhead, detects eclipse attacks rapidly with high probability, and is well-suited for practical deployment. 1.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121909473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yuichiro Chinen, Naoto Yanai, Jason Paul Cruz, Shingo Okamura
{"title":"RA: Hunting for Re-Entrancy Attacks in Ethereum Smart Contracts via Static Analysis","authors":"Yuichiro Chinen, Naoto Yanai, Jason Paul Cruz, Shingo Okamura","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00048","url":null,"abstract":"Ethereum smart contracts are programs that are deployed and executed in a consensus-based blockchain managed by a peer-to-peer network. Several re-entrancy attacks that aim to steal Ether, the cryptocurrency used in Ethereum, stored in deployed smart contracts were found in the recent years. A countermeasure to such attacks is based on dynamic analysis that executes the smart contracts themselves, but it requires the spending of Ether and knowledge of attack patterns for analysis in advance. In this paper, we present a static analysis tool named RA (Re-entrancy Analyzer), a combination of symbolic execution and equivalence checking by a satisfiability modulo theories solver to analyze smart contract vulnerabilities against re-entrancy attacks. In contrast to existing tools, RA supports analysis of inter-contract behaviors by using only the Ethereum Virtual Machine bytecodes of target smart contracts, i.e., even without prior knowledge of attack patterns and without spending Ether. Furthermore, RA can verify existence of vulnerabilities against re-entrancy attacks without execution of smart contracts and it does not provide false positives and false negatives. We also present an implementation of RA to evaluate its performance in analyzing the vulnerability of deployed smart contracts against re-entrancy attacks and show that RA can precisely determine which smart contracts are vulnerable.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123607218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Qingze Hum, Wei Jin Tan, Shi Ying Tey, Latasha Lenus, I. Homoliak, Yun Lin, Jun Sun
{"title":"CoinWatch: A Clone-Based Approach For Detecting Vulnerabilities in Cryptocurrencies","authors":"Qingze Hum, Wei Jin Tan, Shi Ying Tey, Latasha Lenus, I. Homoliak, Yun Lin, Jun Sun","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00011","url":null,"abstract":"Cryptocurrencies have become very popular in recent years. Thousands of new cryptocurrencies have emerged, proposing new and novel techniques that improve on Bitcoin’s core innovation of the blockchain data structure and consensus mechanism. However, cryptocurrencies are a major target for cyber-attacks, as they can be sold on exchanges anonymously and most cryptocurrencies have their codebases publicly available. One particular issue is the prevalence of code clones in cryptocurrencies, which may amplify security threats. If a vulnerability is found in one cryptocurrency, it might be propagated into other cloned cryptocurrencies. In this work, we propose a systematic remedy to this problem, called COINWATCH $left( {mathcal{C}mathcal{W}} right)$. Given a reported vulnerability at the input, $mathcal{C}mathcal{W}$ uses the code evolution analysis and a clone detection technique for the indication of cryptocurrencies that might be vulnerable. We applied $mathcal{C}mathcal{W}$ on 1094 cryptocurrencies using 4 CVEs and obtained 786 true vulnerabilities present in 384 projects, which were confirmed with developers and successfully reported as CVE extensions.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"79 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131771899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}