@aliraqia.edu.iq
Computer Engineering Department, College of Engineering
Aliraqia University
M.Sc. Computer Science
B.Sc. Computer Science and Information Technology
Scopus Publications
Shams Abdali, Mohd Najwadi Y, and Hasan Falah Hasan
College of Education - Aliraqia University
Blockchain technology has presented a promising decentralized paradigm to preclude trusted thirdparties' dominancy. It is a transparent and distributed ledger initially designed for digital cryptocurrencies whilecurrently extended to serve various industries. However, Blockchain immutability presents challenges, as it can bemisused for storing illicit content, violating privacy regulations, and limiting data management flexibility. PolicyBased Chameleon Hash Function (PBCH) has transformed blockchain rewriting contents concept via permittingmodifiers to amend certain transaction since they possessed fundamental privileges satisfying certain access policy.However, PBCHF suffers from efficiency issues due to its reliance on Chameleon Hash ephemeral Trapdoor (CHET)and Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), significantly impacting overall efficiency. We propose the Efficient PolicyBased Chameleon (EPBCHF) construction by replacing CHET with Chameleon-Hashes by Dual Long-TermTrapdoors (CHDLTT) to address these challenges. Additionally, we introduce an enhanced encryption schemeresilient against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) without compromising overall efficiency. Modelling EPBCHFproves practical instantiation accompanied by rigorous security proofs. Our construction provides a fine-grainedredactable blockchain in comparison to the currently proposed solutions. The evaluated results confirm that theproposed EPBCHF is scalable and efficient due to having the ability to handle unlimited transaction volumesadditionally, data is efficiently processed without further overhead meanwhile data size consistency reflects a robustmemory management due to predicted memory size, network bandwidth and storage requirement for future growththereby, EPBCHF is proven to be reliable and scalable.
Hasan Falah hasan, Mohd Najwadi Bin Yusoff, and Shams Mhmood Abd Ali
College of Education - Aliraqia University
Blockchain technology era is triggered due to current advancement in the decentralized paradigms via facilitating secure collaboration among untrusted entities consequently superseding the necessity for the trusted third parties’ existence. Notwithstanding its potential, blockchain scalability faces severe limitations such as low throughput, high fees, and confirmation time latency. Several scaling solutions have been proposed, including layer one solutions that substantially require fundamentally amending blockchain underlying infrastructure resulted in further scalability complications. Layer two solutions, specifically Lightning Network, is a successful cryptographic layer built atop of the Bitcoin blockchain that aims to alleviate these implications by deporting transaction processing outside blockchain while ensuring security and consensus inherited from blockchain without compromising its infrastructure. Payment channels form the core of the lightning network, facilitating fast and secure transactions between participants. However, the network encounters substantial obstacles associated with transaction amounts that exceed the current channel capacity, leading to payment failures and limiting its effectiveness. Payment Channel Networks (PCN) have been risen as an evolved replacement that solves payment channel’s issues, seeking to enhance transaction throughput and reduce confirmation delays by solving limited capacities shortages. This paper thoroughly examines PCN efficiency impacting factors that hinder its current adoption growth and avoiding its widespread employment. Additionally, existing solutions are reviewed and categorized based on the PCN building architecture. The research concludes by outlining potential research avenues and future directions to improve the efficiency and practicality of the Lightning Network PCN. This research contribution aids the advent of blockchain layer two technology and participates in its integration into real-world applications.
Shams Mhmood Abd Ali, Mohd Najwadi Yusoff, and Hasan Falah Hasan
MDPI AG
The continuous advancements of blockchain applications impose constant improvements on their technical features. Particularly immutability, a highly secure blockchain attribute forbidding unauthorized or illicit data editing or deletion, which functions as crucial blockchain security. Nonetheless, the security function is currently being challenged due to improper data stored, such as child pornography, copyright violation, and lately the enaction of the “Right to be Forgotten (RtbF)” principle disseminated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), where it requires blockchain data to be redacted to suit current applications’ urgent demands, and even compliance with the regulation is a challenge and an unfeasible practice for various blockchain technology providers owing to the immutability characteristic. To overcome this challenge, mutable blockchain is highly demanded to solve previously mentioned issues, where controlled and supervised amendments to certain content within constrained privileges granted are suggested by several researchers through numerous blockchain redaction mechanisms using chameleon and non-chameleon hashing function approaches, and methods were proposed to achieve reasonable policies while ensuring high blockchain security levels. Accordingly, the current study seeks to thoroughly define redaction implementation challenges and security properties criteria. The analysis performed has mapped these criteria with chameleon-based research methodologies, technical approaches, and the latest cryptographic techniques implemented to resolve the challenge posed by the policy in which comparisons paved current open issues, leading to shaping future research directions in the scoped field.