BITS Faculty Publications
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Item Layered blockchain-based mobile crowdsensing architecture: exploring privacy and scalability challenges across layers(Springer, 2025-04) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshBlockchain technology has emerged as a transformative solution for addressing the limitations of traditional Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) systems, which rely on centralized architectures. Despite its promise, the integration of blockchain into MCS introduces challenges related to privacy, scalability, and system efficiency. This paper presents a comprehensive layered architecture for enhancing blockchain-based MCS systems (BMCS), focusing on two critical dimensions: privacy and scalability. By categorizing challenges and proposed mitigation strategies, the study explores privacy risks arising from blockchain transparency and evaluates privacy-preserving mechanisms, including zero-knowledge proofs, multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption, to protect sensitive data in decentralized environments. Scalability constraints, such as limited transaction throughput and resource intensity, are presented with targeted solutions that reduce on-chain loads and improve performance. The findings contribute actionable insights to advance BMCS systems, charting a path for resilient and scalable decentralized ecosystems.Item Trustless Two-Factor Authentication Using Smart Contracts in Blockchains(IEEE, 2019) Bhatia, AshutoshTwo-factor authentication (2FA) is widely prevalent in banking, emails and virtual private networks (VPN) connections or in accessing any secure web service. In 2FA, to get authenticated the users are expected to provide additional secret information along with the password. Typically, this secret information (tokens) is generated by a centralized trusted third party upon receiving an authentication request from users. Thus, this additional layer of security comes at the cost of inherently trusting the third party for their services. The security of such authentication systems is always under the threat of the trusted party is being compromised. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to make server authentication even more secure by building 2FA over the blockchain platform which is distributed in nature. The proposed solution does not require any trusted third party between claimant (user) and the verifier (server) for the authentication purpose. To demonstrate the idea of using blockchain technology for 2FA, we have added an extra layer of security component to the OpenSSH server a widely used application for Secure Shell (SSH) protocol.Item A Blockchain based Solution to Know Your Customer (KYC) Dilemma(IEEE, 2019) Bhatia, AshutoshKnow Your Customer (KYC) is done as a mandatory entry step into any financial institution. However, even today the amount of manual intervention involved in the process is staggering. Often the data is centrally stored, and the computer programs acting are also centrally governed thus are not tamperproof making them susceptible to vulnerabilities and attacks. Different organizations do not have a unified application where the KYC information can be seamlessly shared between them without any risk of repudiation from any of the participating organizations. Our application, that is based on blockchain technology, aims to provide this platform as a service to financial institutions as an electronic-KYC solution, in the process of making the life of the end consumer easierItem A Fast, Secure and Distributed Consensus Mechanism for Energy Trading Among Vehicles using Hashgraph(IEEE, 2020) Bhatia, AshutoshEnergy trading among inter vehicles (V2V) offers an efficient response to most of the problems presented by future electricity supply. V2V is often envisioned as a peer-to-peer (P2P) model of electric mercantilism for electric vehicle (EV) merchandising. With security vulnerability increasing, confidence in secured third parties is declining. Blockchain is becoming increasingly common as it provides a system for privacy conservation and efficient agreement without the need for trusted third parties. However, all operations in such a scheme are restricted by memory, time, computing capital, energy etc. and it is quite obvious that the mechanism for blockchain agreement is not sufficient to address all of them. In this paper, we present an alternative to the blockchain using Hashgraph which is scalable, fast, fault-tolerant and fair. It is efficient, inexpensive, and DoS resistant fulfilling the requirement of V2V energy tradingItem Securing IoT Applications using Blockchain: A Survey(2020-06) Bhatia, AshutoshThe Internet of Things (IoT) has become a guiding technology behind automation and smart computing. One of the major concerns with the IoT systems is the lack of privacy and security preserving schemes for controlling access and ensuring the security of the data. A majority of security issues arise because of the centralized architecture of IoT systems. Another concern is the lack of proper authentication and access control schemes to moderate access to information generated by the IoT devices. So the question that arises is how to ensure the identity of the equipment or the communicating node. The answer to secure operations in a trustless environment brings us to the decentralized solution of Blockchain. A lot of research has been going on in the area of convergence of IoT and Blockchain, and it has resulted in some remarkable progress in addressing some of the significant issues in the IoT arena. This work reviews the challenges and threats in the IoT environment and how integration with Blockchain can resolve some of them.Item E-Governance: A Tendering Framework Using Blockchain With Active Participation of Citizens(IEEE, 2020) Bhatia, AshutoshE-governance, i.e., the use of information technology for government activities to provide services, exchange information, etc. are becoming increasingly popular. One such area of e-governance is e-tendering. While e-tendering makes the tendering process more efficient, a trust deficit remains between the citizens and the government, due to the centralized management of the whole tendering process. Several research works provide a decentralized solution to make the process of e-tendering more secure, transparent, and fair. However, in the present time, the government posts the problems/issues currently they are dealing with; and seems interested in taking the suggestions from the citizens to make the better solution for the problem. Thus, in this paper, a permissioned blockchain-based approach to provide a transparent and fair tendering system with citizens' active participation and tracking of funds is presented. In the proposed scheme, the citizens can see the tendering activities transparently and give ideas and suggestions to solve the government's posted problems and receive a due credit of that contribution is a fair manner.Item Decentralized Online Voting using Blockchain and Secret Contracts(IEEE, 2021) Bhatia, AshutoshVoting is a complex process with a lot depending on it. Building an e-voting system that can guarantee anonymity, verifiability, and transparency together is a challenging task. Continuous efforts are being made to improve the voting system to achieve these properties. Recently, blockchain has hit the technology space with many promises, especially to make verifiable and transparent decentralized systems. However, a major challenge faced with blockchain-based e-voting systems is to achieve the users' anonymity while ensuring only authorized voters should be able to vote, and that too only once. To address these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based e-voting system with secret contracts. We have used Enigma (a secure multiparty computation platform) to design secret contracts. The proposed system meets most of the features required to conduct free and fair voting electronically.Item Multi-vendor IoT-based Resource Sharing using OAuth and Blockchain(IEEE, 2022) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshScarcity of resources is a major problem associated with growing urbanization across the globe. A natural way to address the issue is to share the resources. This solution is not only cost-effective but also sometimes environment friendly. However, sharing resources among people in a trustless environment (in big cities, people do not know each other) and preserving the participant’s privacy are important issues to be addressed. Internet-of-Things and Blockchain together are being considered by the researchers to develop solutions for different smart city applications. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving blockchain-based framework for multi-vendor IoT-based resource sharing for smart cities. OAuth is integrated with the proposed framework to authorize the blockchain to make the payment from the requester to the service provider. The proposed solution is implemented on the EOS blockchain instead of Ethereum because EOS does not require a fee for executing the smart contract and can conduct millions of transactions per second.Item DD-Locker: Blockchain-based Decentralized Personal Document Locker(IEEE, 2022) Bhatia, AshutoshDocument verification is the first step whenever we enter any organization or institute. In any organization, it is essential to track, verify, and check the person’s background who will become a part of the organization. This process is very time-consuming and hectic for both parties involved. Various governments provide cloud-based digital locker services for the citizens storing the public document on a centralized server. But due to its centralized nature, this type of service is weak against information breaches and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Also, there are some privacy concerns with such centralized digital locker services as the stored documents may contain users’ crucial personal information. This paper proposes a blockchain-based digital locker in a decentralized application using Ethereum Blockchain to securely store personal documents with high availability. The proposed solution also verifies documents with ease, confidentiality, access control, data privacy, authenticity, and maintaining the integrity of documents.Item Bitcoin’s Blockchain Data Analytics: A Graph Theoretic Perspective(Springer, 2022-03) Bhatia, Ashutosh; Tiwari, KamleshBitcoin is the first and most widely used cryptocurrency in the world. It provides a pseudonym identity to its users that is established using the user’s public key, which leads to preserving the user’s privacy. Each transfer of bitcoin cryptocurrency among the users makes a transaction. The pseudonym identities are considered as transaction end-points. These transactions are recorded on an immutable public ledger called Blockchain which is an append-only data structure. The popularity of Bitcoin has increased unreasonably. The general trend shows a positive response from the common masses indicating an increase in trust and privacy concerns which makes an interesting use case from the analysis point of view. Moreover, since the blockchain is publicly available and up-to-date, any analysis would provide a live insight into the usage patterns which ultimately would be useful for making a number of inferences by law-enforcement agencies, economists, tech-enthusiasts, etc. In this paper, we study various applications and techniques of performing data analytics over Bitcoin blockchain from a graph theoretic perspective. We also propose a framework for performing such data analytics and explored a couple of use cases using the proposed framework.