Biblio

Filters: Author is Ahmad, Ashar  [Clear All Filters]
2023-04-27
Ahmad, Ashar, Saad, Muhammad, Al Ghamdi, Mohammed, Nyang, DaeHun, Mohaisen, David.  2022.  BlockTrail: A Service for Secure and Transparent Blockchain-Driven Audit Trails. IEEE Systems Journal. 16:1367–1378.
Audit trails are critical components in enterprise business applications, typically used for storing, tracking, and auditing data. Entities in the audit trail applications have weak trust boundaries, which expose them to various security risks and attacks. To harden the security and develop secure by design applications, blockchain technology has been recently introduced in the audit trails. Blockchains take a consensus-driven clean slate approach to equip audit trails with secure and transparent data processing, without a trusted intermediary. On a downside, blockchains significantly increase the space-time complexity of the audit trails, leading to high storage costs and low transaction throughput. In this article, we introduce BlockTrail, a novel blockchain architecture that fragments the legacy blockchain systems into layers of codependent hierarchies, thereby reducing the space-time complexity and increasing the throughput. BlockTrail is prototyped on the “practical Byzantine fault tolerance” protocol with a custom-built blockchain. Experiments with BlockTrail show that compared to the conventional schemes, BlockTrail is secure and efficient, with low storage footprint.
Conference Name: IEEE Systems Journal
2020-02-26
Saad, Muhammad, Anwar, Afsah, Ahmad, Ashar, Alasmary, Hisham, Yuksel, Murat, Mohaisen, Aziz.  2019.  RouteChain: Towards Blockchain-Based Secure and Efficient BGP Routing. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC). :210–218.

Routing on the Internet is defined among autonomous systems (ASes) based on a weak trust model where it is assumed that ASes are honest. While this trust model strengthens the connectivity among ASes, it results in an attack surface which is exploited by malicious entities to hijacking routing paths. One such attack is known as the BGP prefix hijacking, in which a malicious AS broadcasts IP prefixes that belong to a target AS, thereby hijacking its traffic. In this paper, we proposeRouteChain: a blockchain-based secure BGP routing system that counters BGP hijacking and maintains a consistent view of the Internet routing paths. Towards that, we leverage provenance assurance and tamper-proof properties of blockchains to augment trust among ASes. We group ASes based on their geographical (network) proximity and construct a bihierarchical blockchain model that detects false prefixes prior to their spread over the Internet. We validate strengths of our design by simulations and show its effectiveness by drawing a case study with the Youtube hijacking of 2008. Our proposed scheme is a standalone service that can be incrementally deployed without the need of a central authority.