Blockchain and Cryptography for Secure Communication System

Aman Mittal1 , Gehna Malik2 , Gopal Goel3

Computer Science and Engineering, Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology,

Meerut, India

ABSTRACT: Blockchain is one more advancement with strong repercussions

for the possible destiny of how we exchange information and cash as an
exhaustively coordinated society. It is new to the point that there is reasonably
insignificant academic work done on it, yet this is developing quickly.
Cryptography is the most common way of shielding data from interlopers and
allowing just the expected clients' to get to and get it. It is a strategy started in
2000 BC where basic techniques were utilized in previous times to keep the data
in a manner that isn't justifiable by everybody. Just the planned collector realizes
how to disentangle the data. Afterward, as innovation progressed, many refined
strategies were utilized to ensure the message with the goal that no interruption
can attack the data. Numerous numerically complicated calculations like AES,
RSA are utilized to encode and unscramble the information. Because of the
progressions in the software engineering field, as of late, cryptography is utilized
in the advancement of cryptographic monetary standards of digital forms of
money. Blockchain innovation, a conveyed record innovation recognized to be
the establishment of Bitcoin digital money, executes a significant level
cryptographic procedure like public-key cryptography, Hash Functions, Merkle
Trees, Digital marks like Elliptic bend advanced marks, and so forth These high
level cryptographic procedures are utilized to give security to blockchain
information and for the protected transmission of data, accordingly making
Blockchain more well known and demandable. Blockchain applied cryptography
in different stages, and a portion of the methods utilized in Blockchain are
progressed in cryptographic sciences. This paper means to give a short prologue
to cryptography and Blockchain Technology and talks about how the two
advancements can be coordinated to give the best of the security to the
correspondence. The difficulties of blockchain security are additionally broken
down and introduced momentarily in this paper. Blockchain security is also
analyzed and presented briefly in this paper.

Key Words: Blockchain; Cryptography.

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INTRODUCTION
Blockchain innovation is very new. Wikipedia characterizes it as "a constantly
developing rundown of records, called squares which are connected and anchored
utilizing cryptography" (Wikipedia and Contributors, 2018b). In this paper, we
will distinguish a delegate review of flow topics in blockchain, look into and
examine future ramifications and our proposals. While blockchain isn't surely
known, it is developing quickly as a medium, and it is an extremely hotly debated
issue in current media. Be that as it may, drifts in media frequently don't line up
with patterns in research, so this is likewise a great exercise in perceiving how
slants in scholarly, peer-evaluated explore distributions covers an inclining
subject. In the not so distant past there were not really any scholastic articles
whatsoever on blockchain, anyway this is evolving rapidly. In this paper we will
give a diagram of current subjects in scholarly productions and consider three
primary inquiries with respect to blockchain. We start with the subject of what
blockchain is. We at that point portray the strategy that we used to gather our
information and proceed onward to investigate the topics that we have found.
This is trailed by exchange of the inquiries of why blockchain is essential and
how it is as of now utilized, alongside our suggestions. We finish up with an
outline and our musings about the potential and requirement for future research
on blockchain.

Blockchain is a distributed database with decentralized, traceable, non-

tamperable, secure and reliable features. It integrates P2P (Peer-to-Peer) protocol,
digital encryption technology, consensus mechanism, smart contract and other
technologies together. Abandoning the maintenance mode of the traditional
central node and adopting the method of mutual maintenance by multiple users
to realize the information supervision among multiple parties, thereby ensuring
the credibility and integrity of the data. The blockchain platform can be divided
into public chain, private chain and alliance chain. All nodes in the public chain
can join or withdraw freely; the private chain strictly limits the qualification of
participating nodes; the alliance chain is jointly managed by several participating
institutions. Bitcoin was proposed by Nakamoto in 2008, which is the most
successful case of digital currency, and is also the most typical application of
blockchain. In addition, the blockchain has expanded its unique application value
in many aspects and has shown its potential to reshape society.

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WHAT IS BLOCKCHAIN ? We intend to answer the accompanying inquiries
top to bottom: What is the square chain? What are a few classifications and
patterns of square chain? What are the social and mechanical ramifications of the
innovation? What is the eventual fate of the square chain? We are then prompted
by the inquiry, what makes these inquiries so vital? What is their significance?
To begin, we can return to the start. The square chain was at first uncovered in a
paper called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" by an obscure
creator utilizing the nom de plume Satoshi Nakamoto. It was never distributed in
a companion explored diary (Nakamoto, 2008). As to Bitcoin, Pierro portrays
each Bitcoin as a number, and that these numbers are the answer for a condition.
Each new answer for the condition creates another bitcoin and the demonstration
of producing an answer is designated "mining." Once mined, a bitcoin can be
exchanged or traded, and each exchange produces a section into the blockchain's
action log. This is frequently alluded to as a "record." What makes the blockchain
champion is that the record isn't claimed or put away by one organization, yet
rather every exchange has a duplicate of the points of interest of that exchange
put away on each PC that was a piece of the exchange. (Pierro, 2017) goes on
help depict the blockchain as "a table with three segments, where each line speaks
to a particular exchange, the primary segment stores the exchange's timestamp,
the second section stores the exchange's points of interest, and the third segment
stores a hash of the present exchange in addition to its subtle elements in addition
to the hash of the past exchange. By giving a period stamp and the past exchange,
parties wishing to confirm this information can gaze it toward any point, and since
it says the past exchange, it winds up conceivable to track the history without
breaking a sweat. There is some security set up to keep the individuals who were
not a piece of the exchange from survey insights about it. The hash said before as
section three that gets populated amid the exchange is a scrambled series of letters
and numbers that is created to conceal information about the exchange. Since
each exchange's hash would then be able to be utilized to distinguish the past
exchange's hash, it makes it exceedingly impossible for misrepresentation to
happen. With every exchange containing a receipt of the past exchange, sums can
without much of a stretch be followed back to the simple start. An attribute that
would make each bookkeeper's activity less demanding as there would not be any
more lost receipts or miscounted sums. Every exchange is a screen capture in time
that all with the correct authorizations can see while stowing away on display.
(Pierro, 2017) Blockchain innovation isn't constrained to cash however; since

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every exchange in the record is only a string esteem, exchanges can simply be
followed. Cook County in Chicago has been utilizing blockchain innovation to
track land titles as they change proprietorship. Essentially, the blockchain is a
connected chain of squares of information (Pierro, 2017).

Hashing Mechanism

Hashing is a cryptographic method in which any kind of data is converted to

character strings. Hashing not only provides security, but it also provides efficient
storage of data as the size of hashing output is fixed. Any hash algorithm, only if
it confirms specific properties, can be used for providing security services. These
properties are not inherently provided by any general-purpose hash functions.
This is the reason why algorithms like SHA-2 are considered as cryptographic
hash functions. Some of the critical features of hashing are the one-way or pre-
image resistance nature, which is why it always produces the same output for the
same input. Also, by using hashing output, it is impossible to deduce the input.
The second pre-image resistance property ensures that no two different messages
can have the same hash value. Any minor change in the input also creates an
entirely different hashing output, and no two inputs can ever produce the same
hash output. This is due to the collision resistance property of the hashing
function. The only concern of hashing is that generating hash values should be
fast and should not use much computing power. The hashing algorithm used in
bitcoin blockchain is SHA-256. SHA-256 is a part of the SHA-2 cluster and
generates a 256 bits or 64 hexadecimal characters output. Blockchain
architecture, which shows how the blocks are connected using the hash of the
previous blocks.

SHA-256 algorithm follows a two-phased approach: pre- processing of the

message and main loop. In the first phase, i.e., the message pre-processing phase,
the process of filling the message length and binary bit on any message length is
performed. Later, the messages are split into many 512 bit message blocks. In the
second phase, a compression function processes the entire message blocks of
phase-I. In other words, the input of a new compression function is the output of
the previous compression function, and the output of the final compression
function is the hash of the final message.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY SERVICES OF BLOCKCHAIN

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Every node in the blockchain network maintains a copy of the Blockchain, and a
miner is the one who creates and validates the block. A Blockchain network is a
peer-to-peer network that verifies itself and eliminates the third party for
verification. It offers rewards to the network nodes that do the validation process
honestly. This process of validating the transactional data is called mining. The
Blockchain uses concepts like Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS),
Proof-of-Space (PoSpace), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), etc.
based on a hashing scheme to validate the data. A cryptographic puzzle has to be
solved by a network and then broadcasts the results to the network for verification
to include a timestamp to the network. This proof-of-work concept keeps the
network authentic. The SHA-256 algorithm is used in PoW as it is comparatively
complex to solve but can be verified easily. The variety of security and privacy
services offered by Blockchain are listed below

APPLICATIONS OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Decentralized nature, immutability and the security services feature of blockchain

makes the technology to dive in various domains. Many industries are currently
focusing to identify an appropriate use case for Blockchain to fit in. Some of the
major areas where Blockchain is applied other than Financial services are
Education, Healthcare , Supply Chain, IoT , Data Management and security
services , Energy sector and so on.

A. Scalability

Many of the blockchain implementations have scalability issues due to the block
size and the approximate time taken to publish the blocks. Few types of research
suggest enhancing the scalability by increasing block size. More transactions can
be accommodated if the block size is increased. However, increasing block size
delays the propagation speed. However, as per the discussion in, the current
propagation techniques are not optimized and increase the risk of several attacks.
So if the block size increment decreases the block propagation speed, it may
increase the possibility of more attacks. Another countermeasure for this
scalability problem is SegWit. SegWit, otherwise called Segregated Witness,
creates a certain amount of space in a block by separating the data used for
verifying the transactions. i.e., signature data and transaction data. However, this
approach alone cannot suffice to handle Blockchain's scalability issue.

B. Privacy

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As discussed before, bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies, though
considered to be anonymous, they genuinely are not. It may not be easy but not
impossible to find the real identity of the user using their transaction history.
Thus, they can be termed as pseudonymous. There is some software available to
de-anonymize cryptocurrencies. The possible approach to solve this privacy issue
has CoinJoin services. CoinJoin combines several accounts and then transfers the
coin in a pseudo-random manner and makes the transaction anonymous.
Ethereum blockchain, where smart contracts and DApps are used, are highly
susceptible to privacy issues. To keep the smart contracts secure and anonymous
many methods.

C. Computations and Time Consumption

Majority of the applications that are currently used are simple and does not
require high computational resources, whereas a blockchain client needs very
high computational abilities to handle the mining activity. Providing any security
service needs quick processing capabilities, but in Blockchain, the consensus
mechanism and mining process is time-consuming. However, this issue has been
addressed in Ethereum and Hyperledger platforms but still needs many
improvements to handle this issue.

Cryptography is a method of developing techniques and protocols to prevent a

third party from accessing and gaining knowledge of the data from the private
messages during a communication process. Cryptography is also made up of two
ancient Greek terms, Kryptos and Graphein, the former meaning “hidden” and
latter being “to write”. There are several terms related to cryptography, which are
stated as follows: Encryption: It is a process of plaintext (normal text) to a
ciphertext (random sequence of bits). Decryption: The inverse process of
encryption, conversion of ciphertext to plaintext.

Use of Cryptography in Blockchain

Blockchains make use of two types of cryptographic algorithms, asymmetric-key

algorithms, and hash functions. Hash functions are used to provide the
functionality of a single view of blockchain to every participant. Blockchains
generally use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm as their hash function.

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The blockchain serves as a representative of distributed databases by storing all
the transaction information of users on the blockchain. Therefore, it is reasonable
to identify a profoundly higher demand for security performance in the
blockchain.

Since blockchain operates with a decentralized, peer-to-peer network model,

there is no single node, and nodes don’t have to trust one another. So, blockchain
must also ensure appropriate safeguards for transaction information on unsecured
channels while maintaining transaction integrity. Therefore, cryptography
becomes an essential requirement for blockchain to safeguard user transaction
information and privacy alongside ensuring data consistency.

IMPLEMENTATION

We will combine cryptography and blockchain for the process. This will be the
new way for the system to go through the double process domain for
communication. This will increase the security to the next level, especially since
it can’t be easily cracked or trapped by different types of attackers such as active
and passive attacks. First we will make a blockchain and then we will get a hash
key for that and then cryptography encryption of the message from the sender
will give a cipher message. Then the output of blockchain as Hash key and output
of cryptography as cipher message will be appended together which will increase
the key length and then the cryptography process for decryption will be done by
the receiver as a system for understanding the message. This whole process will
act as a new way for encryption and decryption of messages as a communication
system with the help of blockchain.

CONCLUSION

Blockchain Technology is the interesting invention of cryptography and

information & communications. This study and system Implementation
introduces the main applications of cryptography in the blockchain and analyzes
existing problems. Firstly, starting from the blockchain infrastructure, the
blockchain technology is simplified. Secondly, cryptography technology is
introduced to elaborate the blockchain. Finally, the existing security problems in
the blockchain are analyzed. Then output of both blockchain and cryptography is
combined to make the communication security at a high level. This paper says
that the research of cryptography plays a decisive role in the development of

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blockchain, and prospects for the future research direction of blockchain
technology especially communication as message transfer..

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