Cryptographic Puzzle Research Articles

Symbology and Codes in Dan Brown’s Origin

This paper explores the intricate web of symbology and codes found within Dan Brown's gripping novel, Origin. As a renowned master of blending history, art, science and religion, Brown weaves a tale that captivates readers with a labyrinth of symbols and enigmatic ciphers. Through an analysis of key elements in the narrative, this study aims to shed light on the significance of symbolism and cryptographic puzzles as essential devices in the plot's development. Drawing upon Brown's signature writing style, the paper examines the role of religious symbology, ancient texts and iconic art and architecture, intertwining them with scientific theories to craft a compelling narrative. The central focus lies in the protagonist, Robert Langdon, a symbologist, whose expertise in languages and linguistics plays a pivotal role in deciphering messages and solving the mystery at hand. Jean Moréas' Symbolist Manifesto (1886) is a foundational text in the development of literary symbolism. In this manifesto, Moréas emphasized the importance of symbolism in art and literature, advocating for a departure from naturalism and realism. He proposed that artists should focus on conveying emotions and ideas through symbols, rather than direct representation. Applying Moréas' theory of symbolism, the researcher analyzes how Dan Brown employs symbols and codes as key elements in Origin. By analyzing the relationship between language and technological innovation, the study aims to unveil how these elements converge to heighten the intrigue and suspense in the novel. It delves into the significance of linguistic techniques and cryptic passages, as tools for building suspense and enriching the reading experience. Langdon reveals meanings and ideas inherent in symbols and codes and demystifies the concepts- "Where do we come from?" and "Where are we going?"

Optimizing pool mining performance: A VIKOR‐based model for identifying reputed miners in blockchain networks

AbstractBlockchain networks continue to gain attraction in cutting‐edge applications and mining within these networks has become increasingly popular. To get rewards, miners solve cryptographic puzzles and add new blocks to blockchain networks using the proof‐of‐work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Numerous miners opt to participate in mining pools due to the challenges of solo mining. However, selecting reputed miners for pool mining poses a significant challenge, given the decentralized nature of the blockchain system. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a new ranking model that evaluates miners' performance and reputation through trust scores. It provides a method for optimizing pool mining performance by identifying highly reputed miners within mining pools, enhancing overall pool profitability. This endeavor necessitates the development of ranking algorithms tailored to the unique dynamics of mining pools. The research offers a meticulously designed ranking model that identifies reputed miners. We extensively evaluate the proposed model using the hyperledger blockchain framework, guaranteeing strong performance across vital metrics like block authorization time, Processing time, block creation time, validation time, and confirmation time.

Antitrust Economics of Cryptocurrency Mining

Abstract The development of blockchain-based applications, to date mostly virtual currencies, touches many areas of law and economics. The most well-known applications of public blockchains rely on Proof of Work as a consensus mechanism in which miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle. We argue that economic tools for market definition may be adapted to delineate relevant cryptocurrency mining markets. Antitrust law can help to prevent network attacks and exclusion of transactions with lower fees by large miners. When multiple blockchains are part of the same market, the role of network effects in securing the leading position of more established cryptocurrencies can potentially lead to exclusionary behaviour.

Evolutionary dynamics of sustainable blockchains

The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset transactions. Mining is the process of solving a cryptographic puzzle, incentivized by the possibility of gaining a reward. The higher the number of users performing mining, i.e. miners, the higher the overall electricity consumption of a blockchain. For that reason, mining constitutes a negative environmental externality. Here, we study whether miners’ interests can meet the collective need to curb energy consumption. To this end, we introduce the Crypto-Asset Game, namely a model based on the framework of Evolutionary Game Theory devised for studying the dynamics of a population whose agents can play as crypto-asset users or as miners. The proposed model, studied via numerical simulations, reveals a rich spectrum of possible steady states. Interestingly, by setting the miners’ reward in the function of the population size, agents reach a strategy profile that optimizes global energy consumption. To conclude, can a Proof-of-Work-based blockchain become energetically sustainable? Our results suggest that blockchain protocol parameters could have a relevant role in the global energy consumption of this technology.

Function Virtualization Can Play a Great Role in Blockchain Consensus

Bitcoin introduced a cryptocurrency as a form of public ledger consequently that turned into a most popular security technology, Blockchain. Its integrated mining technology lies the key security mechanism. The system allows forming a pool mining group to solve a particular job and share their revenues to their CPU usage while one of them successfully mines a block. To mine a block, a cryptographic puzzle should be solved, which requires significant compute resources that cause huge energy consumption. On the other hand, recent statistics show that low computational energy-restricted Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasing exponentially. Although it has low energy and limited computation power, it is large in quantity when it is integrated. So we focus on a stochastic geometry theory, which resolves the issue of block mining computation via utilizing multiple mobile IoT devices, given that these IoT devices are Computation Capable Nodes (CCNs). To further normalize this issue, we propose an efficient mathematical solution that uses smart coordination of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) for IoT devices to enable their CPU usage efficiently. At the same time, the work and credit point distribution policy is smartly handled through virtual pool mining. The proposal renders Network Function Virtualization technology to configure VNF, and Service Function Chain technology is utilized to enable the network flow of such VNFs. New algorithms are presented to solve multiple issues like node discovery, computation offloading, and work credit point distribution. Our goal is to minimize energy consumption within the given time constraint. Implementation results show that although virtual functions for block mining require extensive computations in IoT devices, dividing computation work into small fractions called tasks embedded with VNF, and offloading them to nearby CCNs, tend to minimize the cost and energy consumption of individual shared miners. The overall mining process is proved efficient and faster.

Cryptographic Puzzles and Complex Systems

A puzzle lies behind password authentication (PA) and blockchain proof of work (PoW). A cryptographic hash function is commonly used to implement them. The potential problem with secure hash functions is their complexity and rigidity. We explore the use of complex systems constructs such as a cellular automaton (CA) to provide puzzle functionality. The analysis shows that computational irreducibility and sensitivity to initial state phenomena are enough to create simple puzzle systems that can be used for PA and PoW. Moreover, we present puzzle schemata using CA and n-body problems.

Social-Chain

Pervasive Social Networking (PSN) supports online and instant social activities with the support of heterogeneous networks. Since reciprocal activities among both familiar/unfamiliar strangers and acquaintances are quite common in PSN, it is essential to offer trust information to PSN users. Past work normally evaluates trust based on a centralized party, which is not feasible due to the dynamic changes of PSN topology and its specific characteristics. The literature still lacks a decentralized trust evaluation scheme in PSN. In this article, we propose a novel blockchain-based decentralized system for trust evaluation in PSN, called Social-Chain. Considering mobile devices normally lack computing resources to process cryptographic puzzle calculation, we design a lightweight consensus mechanism based on Proof-of-Trust (PoT), which remarkably improves system effectivity compared with other blockchain systems. Serious security analysis and experimental results further illustrate the security and efficiency of Social-Chain for being feasibly applied into PSN.

Error-Correction Code Proof-of-Work on Ethereum

The error-correction code based proof-of-work (ECCPoW) algorithm is based on a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code. The ECCPoW is possible to impair ASIC with its time-varying capability of the parameters of LDPC code. Previous researches on the ECCPoW algorithm have presented its theory and implementation on Bitcoin. But they do not discuss how stable the block generation time is. A finite mean block generation time (BGT) and none heavy-tail BGT distribution are the ones of the focus in this study. In the ECCPoW algorithm, BGT may show a long-tailed distribution due to time-varying cryptographic puzzles. Thus, it is of interest to see if the BGT distribution is not heavy-tailed and if it shows a finite mean. If the distribution is heavy-tailed, then confirmation of a transaction cannot be guaranteed. We present implementation, simulation, and validation of ECCPoW Ethereum. In implementation, we explain how the ECCPoW algorithm is integrated into Ethereum 1.0 as a new consensus algorithm. In the simulation, we perform a multinode simulation to show that the ECCPoW Ethereum works well with automatic difficulty change. In the validation, we present the statistical results of the two-sample Anderson-Darling test to show that the distribution of BGT satisfies the necessary condition of the exponential distribution. Our implementation is downloadable at https://github.com/cryptoecc/ETH-ECC.

Antitrust Economics of Cryptocurrency Mining

The development of blockchain-based applications, to date mostly virtual currencies, touches many areas of law and economics. The most well-known applications of public blockchains rely on Proof of Work (PoW) as a consensus mechanism in which miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle. We argue that economic tools for market definition may be adapted to delineate relevant cryptocurrency mining markets. Antitrust law can help to prevent network attacks and exclusion of transactions with lower fees by large miners. When multiple blockchains are part of the same market, the role of network effects in securing the leading position of more established cryptocurrencies can potentially lead to exclusionary behavior.

Networks of Picture Processors with Filtering Based on Evaluation Sets as Solvers for Cryptographic Puzzles Based on Random Multivariate Quadratic Equations

Networks of picture processors is a massively distributed and parallel computational model inspired by the evolutionary cellular processes, which offers efficient solutions for NP-complete problems. This bio-inspired model computes two-dimensional strings (pictures) using simple rewriting rules (evolutionary operations). The functioning of this model mimics a community of cells (pictures) that are evolving according to these bio-operations via a selection process that filters valid surviving cells. In this paper, we propose an extension of this model that empowers it with a flexible method that selects the processed pictures based on a quantitative evaluation of its content. In order to show the versatility of this extension, we introduce a solver for a cryptographic proof-of-work based on the hardness of finding a solution to a set of random quadratic equations over the finite field F2. This problem is demonstrated to be NP-hard, even with quadratic polynomials over the field F2, when the number of equations and the number of variables are of roughly the same size. The proposed solution runs in O(n2) computational steps for any size (n,m) of the input pictures. In this context, this paper opens up a wide field of research that looks for theoretical and practical solutions of cryptographic problems via software/hardware implementations based on bio-inspired computational models.

Multi Path Routing Technique Based RRP for P2P Network

All articles must contain an abstract. Peer to Peer (P2P) network is useful for developing applications and downloading files from the internet. In the existing P2P networks, communication is initiated and supported by peers. Security issues constitute the main challenge in the design of reliable communication techniques for P2P networks. In the past, Rumor Riding Protocol was used in distributed systems for performing coordination and communication. However, the existing Rumor Riding Protocol is used flooding technique to forward the response to the initiator it may leads high network traffic to avid this I have Enhanced Multi path forwarding technique to Rumor Riding Protocol and also enhancement with security features to make them suitable for downloading applications in P2P networks. In this method, it enhances the Rumor Riding Protocol with security features by including a Cryptographic Puzzle, a Challenge Question scheme using trust modeling and an intelligent beta reputation model for secured communication in P2P networks. For this purpose, five new techniques are proposed in this research work, all of which aim at enhancing the security of communication using Rumor Riding Protocol in the P2P networks.

NONLINEAR PROOF-OF-WORK: IMPROVING THE ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF BITCOIN MINING

Bitcoin is probably the most well-known blockchain system in existence. It employs the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm to add transactions to the blockchain. This process is better known as Bitcoin mining. PoW requires miners to compete in solving a cryptographic puzzle before being allowed to add a block of transactions to the blockchain. This mining process is energy-intensive and results in high energy wastage. The underlying cause of this energy inefficiency is the result of the current implementation of the PoW algorithm. PoW assigns the same cryptographic puzzle to all miners, creating a linear probability of success between the miner’s computational power as a proportion of the total computational power of the network. To address this energy inefficiency of the PoW mining process, the researchers investigated whether a nonlinear probability of success, between the miner’s computation power and its probability of success, will result in better energy usage. A nonlinear proof-of-work (nlPoW) algorithm was constructed by using a design science approach to derive the requirements for and structure of the algorithm. The Bitcoin mining process was tested through statistical simulation, comparing the performance of nlPoW with PoW. Preliminary results, simulating a network of 1000 miners with identical computational power, indicate that nlPoW reduce the number of hash computations, and therefore the energy consumption, required by Bitcoin mining. The findings are significant because nlPoW does not reduce the degree of decentralised consensus, or trade energy usage for some other resource as is the case with many other attempts to address the energy consumption problem in PoW.

An Economic Incentive-Based Risk Transfer Approach for Defending Against DDoS Attacks

Volumetric DDoS attacks are continued to be an immense threat to e-commerce and other online businesses from the last decade as attackers have much resources to amplify scale and frequency day by day. Despite significant efforts by research community and security professionals, we are lacking a robust solution against DDoS attacks. Generally, the attacker's investment in sending large amount of traffic to paralyze a system is negligible as compared to the loss they caused to an organization. Therefore, in this article, a risk transfer approach, a combination of techno-economic aspects is proposed where the risk of being attacked is transferred to some cooperating ISPs in return for economic incentives. In the proposed approach, user's attention, cash, other network and computational resources are contemplated as valuable resources. User must have consent from server in the form of “Sending Rights” which can be obtained by solving cryptographic puzzle (computational work) or by purchasing through micropayment or combination of both according to traffic load level. Our proposed solution is implemented on PN2sim simulator and then verified on SPIN model checker. Implementation results show the supremacy of our proposed approach.

Coinhive’s Monero Drive-by Crypto-jacking

This paper provides study of behaviour on a drive-by crypto-jacking, specifically Coinhive’s Monero. Crypto-jacking is a form of cyber threat where a host machine’s processing power hijacked thru infected website to solve cryptographic puzzles as an unwitting participant. The sample study share host machine and network behaviours when host visited websites that have been embedded with Coinhive’s Monero related script. These data collection of behaviour can be utilize to identify and detect Coinhive’s Monero mining activities in networks.

Mining Process in Cryptocurrency Using Blockchain Technology: Bitcoin as a Case Study

A new digital currency in the form virtual cash, known as Bitcoin was acquainted with the world by Satoshi in 2009. Bitcoin is the most notable computerized money. It is based on peer-to-peer distributed system with no central authority controlling it. It is based on the technique known as Blockchain, a kind of peer-to-peer ledger system containing the record of all transactions. All set of transactions are logged in the blocks. The new transactions generated by the users are broadcasted using signed blocks to verify over the Bitcoin network. The transaction is verified by mining process and added to the Blockchain. In order to add the transaction into the block, the miner solves the cryptographic puzzle. The miners are rewarded for their work. This paper is focused on mining strategy and reward mechanism of the Bitcoin. The challenges in mining process are identified and probable solutions are presented.

Auction Mechanisms in Cloud/Fog Computing Resource Allocation for Public Blockchain Networks

As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as miners, in the network with incentives for confirming new block of transactions through a process of "block mining" by solving a cryptographic puzzle. Under the circumstance of limited local computing resources, e.g., mobile devices, it is natural for rational miners, i.e., consensus nodes, to offload computational tasks for proof of work to the cloud/fog computing servers. Therefore, we focus on the trading between the cloud/fog computing service provider and miners, and propose an auction-based market model for efficient computing resource allocation. In particular, we consider a proof-of-work based blockchain network. Due to the competition among miners in the blockchain network, the allocative externalities are particularly taken into account when designing the auction mechanisms. Specifically, we consider two bidding schemes: the constant-demand scheme where each miner bids for a fixed quantity of resources, and the multi-demand scheme where the miners can submit their preferable demands and bids. For the constant-demand bidding scheme, we propose an auction mechanism that achieves optimal social welfare. In the multi-demand bidding scheme, the social welfare maximization problem is NP-hard. Therefore, we design an approximate algorithm which guarantees the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Through extensive simulations, we show that our proposed auction mechanisms with the two bidding schemes can efficiently maximize the social welfare of the blockchain network and provide effective strategies for the cloud/fog computing service provider.

An Effective Randomization Framework to POW Consensus Algorithm of Blockchain (RPoW)

Blockchain technology has become a buzzword due to its intuitive applications and its decentralized network architecture. Blockchain is a decentralized system that uses peer -to - peer networking and appropriate consensus algorithm for secure and reliable transactions and records them all in an immutable ledger as chain of blocks. The world got introduced to the blockchain technology, when Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin in 2009[2]. Though this technology is famous for being the backbone of cryptocurrencies, it has got into various industry domains and many applications have been developed using blockchain [11]. The consensus algorithm used in Blockchain architecture influences how agreement is made to add a new block among all the nodes in the network. PoW (Proof of work) is the consensus algorithm applied in the Bitcoin network architecture and many other blockchain applications. PoW requires each node to solve a cryptographic puzzle with adjusted difficulty, to get the privilege to add a new block to the current chain. The first node that solves the puzzle will have this privilege and some reward. Proof-of-Work (PoW) uses extensive amounts of electric power and steep computing hardware as an effect of their consensus procedure [1]. This proposed work presents an effective randomization framework that reduces the execution time required to calculate the hash value. The number of instruction-set required to compute the PoW consensus is also reduced. This approach helps in maintaining a fair decentralized network to construct blockchain applications.

A novel SPN-based video steganographic scheme using Sudoku puzzle for secured data hiding

Video steganography is the method of hiding the presence of data within the cover video. In this paper, a novel video steganography technique is revealed, where with the help of Sudoku puzzle of order 9 × 9, extracted image frames of a cover video are utilized to hide encrypted data. The novelties of the work imply that as the input information is first encrypted into cipher text using a new modified substitution and permutation network (SPN)-type block cipher, then, that cipher text is embedded in the video using Sudoku puzzle as a key. This new and robust encryption model is like a block cipher in comparison with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that provides enhanced resistance in case of fault attack. This new SPN-type architecture differs with AES architecture in the step of round key mixing function. Its computation complexity is much higher compared to original AES to find 128 bits of tenth round key. Therefore, our proposed work combines both cryptographic and steganographic technique and Sudoku puzzle to enhance the security in maximum level with optimal computational complexity and good embedding capacity rate.

Swarm-based defense technique for tampering and cheating attack in WSN using CPHS

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been seen as one of the most essential technologies which play a vital role in several important areas, such as healthcare, military, critical infrastructure monitoring, environment monitoring, and manufacturing. The desirable nature of WSN introduces many security challenges which have necessitated the introduction of several classical security methodologies over the last few years for various security attacks. A defense technique using Swarm Based Trusted Node for Tampering and Cheating Attack (SBTN-TC) model has been proposed to identify the physical layer attacks in a WSN. This model, first selects a trusted node (TN) within the network for identifying the tampered or cheating nodes using swarm intelligence. The trusted node monitors and processes the nodes session receipts involved in the transmission session to extract the contextual information such as broken links, frequent packet droppers, and fair and cheating sessions. Based on the session receipts, the trusted node renews the nodes certificate and ignores the tampered node or cheating node. In order to maintain a secure communication of contextual information between node and trusted node, a Cryptographic Puzzle Hiding Scheme (CPHS) is used for submitting the session receipts to trusted node. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been proved from the simulation results based on packet delivery ratio, packet drop, residual energy, and overhead.

Applications of Blockchain Technology beyond Cryptocurrency

Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin crypto-currency system, is considered to be both alluring and critical for ensuring enhanced security and (in some implementations, non-traceable) privacy for diverse applications in many other domains - including in the Internet of Things (IoT) eco-system. Intensive research is currently being conducted in both academia and industry applying the Blockchain technology in multifarious applications. Proof-of-Work (PoW), a cryptographic puzzle, plays a vital rôle in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which is considered to be incorruptible. Furthermore, BC uses a changeable Public Key (PK) to record the users’ identity, which provides an extra layer of privacy. Not only in cryptocurrency has the successful adoption of BC been implemented but also in multifaceted non-monetary systems such as in: distributed storage systems, proof-of-location, healthcare, decentralized voting and so forth. Recent research articles and projects/applications were surveyed to assess the implementation of BC for enhanced security, to identify associated challenges and to propose solutions for BC enabled enhanced security systems.