Ethereum Client Research Articles

A Systematic Survey on E-VOTING SYSTEM USING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Abstract–An electronic voting system based on blockchain technology, addressing the challenges of traditional paper ballots and digital voting methods. The system aims to provide security, integrity, transparency, and privacy for voters. It evaluates various blockchain frameworks and proposes a novel e-voting system that can be particularly useful for small-scale elections within corporate environments. The implementation relies on Ethereum’s smart contracts, with development and testing facilitated by the Truffle framework and Ganache as the Ethereum client for testing. It also highlights the historical challenges in developing secure electronic voting systems that balance fairness and privacy with transparency and flexibility. The paper explores the application of blockchain technology in addressing these issues, emphasizing the potential of distributed ledger technology for hosting nationwide elections securely and cost-effectively. The paper also underscores the significance of blockchain technology in ensuring anonymity, privacy, verifiability, and fairness in the voting process. Keywords- Blockchain, Decentralized, Ethereum, E-Voting, Smart Contracts.

TSC-VEE: A TrustZone-Based Smart Contract Virtual Execution Environment

TrustZone as a trusted execution environment (TEE) has been proven to preserve the confidentiality of blockchain transactions supported by smart contracts. Despite some academic effort, TrustZone can only support limited languages for now. The lack of the corresponding execution environment for smart contracts seriously hinders blockchain applications from directly running on TrustZone. In this paper, we design the first virtual execution environment named TSC-VEE for performing Solidity smart contracts on TrustZone, to the best of our knowledge. TSC-VEE can be decomposed into fourfold: (1) an instruction set adapted to the isolation and world switching mechanism of TrustZone. (2) a runtime memory management mechanism that provides a pair of instructions with the corresponding processing mechanism to allocate and release the work memory. (3) a hybrid granularity resource analysis algorithm which computes and records the value of maximum stack height and static gas cost through bytecode pre-execution, avoiding runtime overflow and invalid computations. (4) a cross-isolation-environment prefetching approach that supports loading and storing the storage data from the normal world into the secure world on TrustZone before execution, thus avoiding switching the world state frequently at runtime. Extensive experimental results show that TSC-VEE can perform smart contracts correctly and efficiently on TrustZone. Compared with the most commonly used Ethereum client— <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Geth</i> , TSC-VEE achieves execution performance improvements by <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$9.29\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> . We also implement the Ethereum virtual machine— <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">evmone</i> on TrustZone. TSC-VEE can reduce the latency by 12.63% with our optimization techniques, and decrease the work memory footprint by 22.95% on average when executing various scale contracts.

E-voting System Based on Ethereum Blockchain Technology Using Ganache and Remix Environments

—In the second decade of the twenty-first century, blockchain is considered one of the most popular computer technologies. Blockchain is a zero-trust network, making it a potent tool for various services provided that people are ready to believe and invest in it. In the Ethereum world, the blockchain runs on smart contracts, self-executing applications that come at the cost of security. As technology is used increasingly, Election is facing new issues of trust and management. Therefore, E-voting systems are increasingly acceptable because they are more accurate, reliable, practical, and secure. This research purpose is to propose a decentralized elections application based on Ethereum; the application was developed using the Truffle development framework. The actions of the software were written into an Ethereum smart contract, which was then deployed on the Ethereum network. A web interface had been used to read the user's vote before it was broadcast to the Ethereum network through the web3.js API. The ganache was utilized as the Ethereum client. Metalmark was used as a wallet on a website, and the remix was used to deploy the smart contract on the main network, the results of implementing the proposed system show that the cost of each transaction is not stable, its increases with the increase the network load, and the throughput ends up at 14 transactions per second.

A Blockchain-Based Privacy Information Security Sharing Scheme in Industrial Internet of Things.

Due to the competitive relationship among different smart factories, equipment manufacturers cannot integrate the private information of all smart factories to train the intelligent manufacturing equipment fault prediction model and improve the accuracy of intelligent manufacturing equipment fault detection. The use of a low fault recognition rate model for smart factories will cause additional losses for them. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based privacy information security sharing scheme in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to solve the sharing problem of private information in smart factories. Firstly, we abstract smart factories as edge nodes and build decentralized, distributed trusted blockchain networks based on Ethereum clients on simulated edge devices and propose an Intelligent Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (IECDSA) to guarantee the ownership of shared information by edge nodes. Secondly, we propose the Reputation-based Delegated Proof of Stake (RDPoS) consensus algorithm to improve the security and reliability of the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm. Furthermore, we design and implement an incentive mechanism based on information attributes to increase the motivation of edge nodes to share information. Finally, the proposed solution is simulated. Through theoretical and simulation experiments, it is proved that the blockchain-based privacy information security sharing scheme in IIoT can improve the enthusiasm of edge nodes to share information on the premise of ensuring the security of information sharing.

ISmart: Protecting Smart Contract Against Integer Bugs

Blockchain technology is known as a decentralized, distributed ledger that records digital asset. It has been applied in numbers of aspects of society, including finance, judiciary and commerce. Ethereum is referred to as the next generation decentralized application platform. It is one of the most popular blockchain platforms that supports smart contracts. Smart contract is a set of codes that sored on blockchain and can be called and created as turing-complete programs running on the blockchain. Developers use smart contracts to build decentralized applications (Dapp) which has widely used cryptocurrency related project. As smart contracts become more popular and more valuable, they are faced with more risk of being hacked. As a result that smart contracts cannot be modified once deployed on the blockchain, it is a great challenge to fix and update deployed vulnerable contract which can lead to a huge loss of cryptocurrency and financial disorder. In this paper, we focus on Integer Bugs in Ethereum Smart Contracts and present ISmart, which protects deployed smart contracts against attacks caused by Integer Bugs. We implemented ISmart based on go-ethereum, a Ethereum client written in Go, by adding a simplified taint analysis component. In our preliminary, ISmart can prevent attacks accurately with little runtime overhead.

Visualization of Ethereum P2P network topology and peer properties

SummaryEthereum is arguably the second most popular cryptocurrency‐based network after Bitcoin. Both use the distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain, which is considered secure. However, the provided security level is proportional to the number of connected nodes, the number of influential nodes, and the supported amount of hash power. Thus, the knowledge of the network properties and nodes' behavior is helpful to protect the network from possible attacks such as double‐spending attacks, DDoS attacks, 51% attacks, and Sybil attacks. This paper proposes a node discovery mechanism, which performs a P2P link discovery on the Ethereum main network. For that, we develop Search‐node, a modified version of Ethereum client that searches for all participating nodes in the blockchain network, stores the node information in the Bucket, and then processes the peer discovery method. Based on the collected data, we first visualize the Ethereum network topology and analyze the attributes of the network such as node degree, path length, diameter, and clustering coefficient. We then analyze the node properties and provide analytical results regarding the relationship between nodes, heavily connected nodes, node geo‐distribution, security issues, and possible attacks over the influential nodes. As a result, we have identified 68,406 nodes with a total of 642,034 edges. By analyzing the collected data, we have found that the diameter in the Ethereum network is equal to 8. The node degree is over 19, which is two times higher than the default configuration.

Accurate and decentralized timestamping using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain

Timestamps allow us to identify a date and time when a piece of data existed or an event took place. For example, we use timestamps to establish the date when we grant a patent. Services that offer trusted timestamps on the blockchain exist, where one creates a timestamp on a value by sending the blockchain a transaction containing the value, which is eventually confirmed in a block a miner creates and timestamps. Our work focuses on the accuracy of such timestamps created on the Ethereum blockchain. We estimate that their mean accuracy is half of the average time between consecutive blocks. However, Ethereum clients geth and parity allow accuracy to vary in up to a few tens of seconds. Surprisingly, we found out empirically that miners can backdate data using the timestamp on a block, which is a serious flaw in timestamping services. To address this problem, we propose a new decentralized timestamping service that combines smart contracts and distinct time providers. The service offers timestamps with higher accuracy of milliseconds. We conduct a cost analysis of our service, which shows that Ethereum transaction fees drive our timestamps costs when the service scales up. Finally, we discuss alternatives to cut costs.

The OpBench Ethereum opcode benchmark framework: Design, implementation, validation and experiments

Ethereum is a public, permissionless blockchain, with Ether as cryptocurrency, and with Turing-complete smart contracts to implement arbitrarily complex distributed applications. Correct operation of Ethereum relies on appropriately rewarding participating nodes (called miners) for the resources used to run the blockchain. In Ethereum the Used Gas determines the reward miners receive for executing a smart contract. If the Used Gas is proportional to the cost of executing a smart contract, irrespective of the platform used, then all miners are incentivized identically. In this paper we propose OpBench, a platform-independent benchmark framework for Ethereum, as a lightweight approach to determine if for operational code (opcodes) the rewarded Used Gas is proportional to the invested CPU time. We implement OpBench for PyEthApp (in Python), Go-Ethereum (in GoLang) and Parity (in Rust). From the experiments we conclude that Used Gas is not always proportional to the required CPU, with up to an order of magnitude difference between opcodes. We also conclude that for most opcodes Parity performs the best of the three clients and that preference for Linux or Windows depends on the chosen Ethereum client software.

BSV-PAGS: Blockchain-based special vehicles priority access guarantee scheme

Traffic jams often occur, with the increasing number of private cars. Special vehicles (e.g. police cars, ambulances and fire trucks) often encounter traffic jams when carrying out emergency tasks, which may lead to unexpected consequences (e.g. causing serious damage to our routine and property). In order to ensure that special vehicles can quickly pass through crowded road and arrive at the accident scene in time, this paper proposes a blockchain-based special vehicles priority access guarantee scheme (BSV-PAGS). In BSV-PAGS, we introduce blockchain into the Internet of Things (IoT), and construct a decentralized distributed edge node network based on blockchian, which guarantees the information sharing among the edge nodes as well as processing the data efficiently. The intelligent terminal device will upload the special vehicle information to the edge node in the blockchain, and then the uploaded information will sync to each edge node through the information sharing smart contract, realizing the information sharing among the edge nodes. In addition, we use machine learning method (e.g. Bag of Visual Words and Support Vector Machine) to design and train special vehicle detectors to improve the recognition accuracy of special vehicles. We design a special vehicle priority access smart contract to achieve real-time scheduling of vehicles and ultimately ensure the priority of special vehicles. Then, we carried out a security analysis of BSV-PAGS. Finally, we test a large number of simulation experiments based on Ethereum clients. The experimental results show that our scheme is feasible and effective.

Studying gas exceptions in blockchain-based cloud applications

Blockchain-based cloud application (BCP) is an emerging cloud application architecture. By moving trust-critical functions onto blockchain, BCP offers unprecedented function transparency and data integrity. Ethereum is by far the most popular blockchain platform chosen for BCP. In Ethereum, special programs named smart contracts are often used to implement key components for BCP. By design, users can send transactions to smart contracts, which will automatically lead to code execution and state modification. However, unlike regular programs, smart contracts are restricted in execution by gas limit, i.e., a form of runtime resource. If a transaction uses up all available gas, an out of gas exception (OG) will trigger, reverting state until right before that transaction.In this work, we study the out of gas exceptions (or gas exceptions in short) on Ethereum empirically for the very first time. In particular, we collect exception transactions using an instrumented Ethereum client. By investigation, we found gas exceptions stand out in terms of both occurrences and losses. Moreover, we focused on individual contracts and transactions, aiming at discovering and identifying common causing factors triggering these exceptions. At last, we also investigate existing tools in preventing gas exceptions. Our results suggest further research and study in this direction.

Ethereum Blockchain based Secure E voting S ystem

The security and accountability issues are a challenge to the traditional structure from still widespread elections. General e-voting system use a centralized system, where one organization manages overall system. These organisations have full control over the database and system, allowing manipulation of the database. There should be no e-voting system to secure data and potential attacks should be able to withstand. Blockchain technology should solve certain voting problems. In this paper we are implementing an ethereum blockchain based electronic voting system. Ethereum blockchain networks are used to transfer money and store data. Networks are organized by one or more machines. Every node is a machine that running an ethereum client. The eligible one can run the node. By adopting blockchain in e-voting system database distribution, one of the cheating sources of database manipulation and data loss can be reduced. This can be a better solution for the currently existing issues over rigging the electronic voting machines to win elections by the political parties in our government.

Blockchain Ethereum Clients Performance Analysis Considering E-Voting Application

Blockchain technology is evolving and revolutionizing the IT industry with better security, efficiency, and resilience. Blockchain technology is being used in many applications majorly in cryptocurrencies and bitcoin applications. Verified transactions which make a block and group of such transactions or blocks are immutable making the blockchain more secured and reliable. Blockchain achieves decentralization of power, trust, and secured of being hacked, which solves major problems or issues with the current systems. Ethereum, the most widely used blockchain platform because of its unlimited block size. Many complex problems with smart contracts can be implemented with Ethereum and the eradication of third party organizations interfering in transactions helps solving the issues of financial crisis and it is easy to implement compared to other blockchain technologies. There are certain limitations/issues in processing large number of transactions due to lack of speed in processing the transactions. Ethereum Blockchain code will be executed by different clients with varying speed and the performance level will be different. The goal of this paper is to understand Ethereum transactions and perform the comparative analysis of Geth and Parity ethereum clients on the private blockchain. In this paper, a private blockchain network is setup where the nodes will share the data among peer nodes or blocks within the network. Using this network setup a democracy voting application is developed which makes use of the blockchain to store and process the data, smart contracts are deployed to execute the transactions. Performance analysis of the two most popular ethereum clients Geth and Parity is carried out considering time, consistency and scalability parameters. Results interpret that the overall transactions are 91% on average faster in parity client as compared to Geth client.

Function-Level Bottleneck Analysis of Private Proof-of-Authority Ethereum Blockchain

Private Ethereum blockchain-based systems are demanded in many industry sectors. However, the throughput performance of these systems does not meet their expectations. Many researchers have analyzed the performance of private blockchains, but their studies have failed to analyze root causes. In this paper, we perform a deep function-level bottleneck analysis for the private Ethereum blockchain. As the Ethereum client application is developed with golang, we leverage pprof , which is a resource-profiling tool for golang, and custom golang functions to measure the time taken by functions. To easily configure parameters and conduct our test, we code a shell script that automates the building process of a private Ethereum blockchain with docker containers. We conducted a series of experiments and identified the bottleneck function that is called every time a transaction arrives at an Ethereum node. In addition, we also found that the multi-threading is not well utilized, meaning that there is much room for improvement.

Approaches to Front-End IoT Application Development for the Ethereum Blockchain

There are several distributed ledger protocols potentially suitable for the Internet of things (IoT), including the Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and IOTA. This paper briefly presents and compares them from the IoT application development perspective. The IoT applications based on blockchain (BC) can incorporate the on-chain logic –the smart contracts– and Web, mobile or embedded client front-end application parts. We present three possible architectures for the IoT front-end BC applications. They differ in positioning of Ethereum blockchain clients (local device, remote server) and in positioning of key store needed for the management of outgoing transactions. The practical constraints of these architectures, which utilize the Ethereum network for trusted transaction exchange, are the data volumes, the location and synchronization of the full blockchain node and the location and the access to the Ethereum key store. Results of these experiments indicate that a full Ethereum node is not likely to reliably run on a constrained IoT devices. Therefore the architecture with remote Ethereum clients seems to be a viable approach, where two sub-options exist and differ in key store location/management. In addition, we proposed the use of architectures with a proprietary communication between the IoT device and remote blockchain client to further reduce the network traffic and enhance security. We expect it to be able to operate over low-power, low-bitrate mobile technologies, too. Our research clarifies differences in architectural approaches, but final decision for a particular ledger protocol and front-end application architecture is at strongly based on the particular intended use case.