[Paper Review] Consortium Blockchain for Security and Privacy-Preserving in E-government Systems

Noe Elisa, Longzhi Yang+3 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jun 25, 2020

Blockchain Technology Applications and Security17 references13 citations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a consortium blockchain-based e-government system to enhance security and privacy in centralized e-government platforms. By leveraging a semi-public, permissioned blockchain with pre-selected nodes for consensus and validation, the system ensures decentralized trust, resists single points of failure, and achieves practical performance with low latency and high throughput, demonstrating feasibility for real-world e-government applications.

ABSTRACT

Since its inception as a solution for secure cryptocurrencies sharing in 2008, the blockchain technology has now become one of the core technologies for secure data sharing and storage over trustless and decentralised peer-to-peer systems. E-government is amongst the systems that stores sensitive information about citizens, businesses and other affiliates, and therefore becomes the target of cyber attackers. The existing e-government systems are centralised and thus subject to single point of failure. This paper proposes a secure and decentralised e-government system based on the consortium blockchain technology, which is a semi-public and decentralised blockchain system consisting of a group of pre-selected entities or organisations in charge of consensus and decisions making for the benefit of the whole network of peers. In addition, a number of e-government nodes are pre-selected to perform the tasks of user and transaction validation before being added to the blockchain network. Accordingly, e-government users of the consortium blockchain network are given the rights to create, submit, access, and review transactions. Performance evaluation on single transaction time and transactions processed per second demonstrate the practicability of the proposed consortium blockchain-based e-government system for secure information sharing amongst all stakeholders.

Motivation & Objective

• To address the security and privacy vulnerabilities of centralized e-government systems that are prone to single points of failure and cyberattacks.
• To design a decentralized, trustless e-government architecture using consortium blockchain technology.
• To ensure secure user authentication, transaction validation, and access control through pre-selected trusted nodes.
• To evaluate the system's performance in terms of transaction processing speed and latency for real-world deployment.
• To enable stakeholders to create, submit, access, and audit transactions in a transparent yet privacy-preserving manner.

Proposed method

• The system employs a consortium blockchain architecture with a predefined set of trusted organizations as validators and consensus participants.
• Pre-selected e-government nodes are responsible for validating users and transactions before they are added to the blockchain.
• The permissioned nature of the blockchain ensures that only authorized entities can participate in consensus and data management.
• Cryptographic techniques are used to secure data integrity and user privacy during transactions.
• The system supports read and write operations for users, enabling creation, submission, access, and review of transactions.
• Performance evaluation is conducted on single transaction time and transactions per second to assess scalability and efficiency.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How can a consortium blockchain architecture improve the security and privacy of centralized e-government systems?
• RQ2 What is the performance impact of using a permissioned blockchain for e-government transaction processing in terms of latency and throughput?
• RQ3 Can a semi-public blockchain model with trusted nodes effectively prevent single points of failure while maintaining decentralization?
• RQ4 How does the proposed system ensure user authentication and transaction integrity in a trustless environment?
• RQ5 To what extent can the system support real-time, scalable information sharing among e-government stakeholders?

Key findings

• The proposed consortium blockchain system effectively mitigates the risk of single points of failure inherent in traditional centralized e-government systems.
• Performance evaluation shows low single transaction time, indicating responsiveness suitable for real-time applications.
• The system achieves a high throughput in transactions per second, demonstrating practical scalability for e-government workloads.
• The use of pre-selected, trusted nodes for consensus and validation enhances system security and efficiency.
• The architecture supports full lifecycle management of transactions, including creation, submission, access, and review by authorized stakeholders.
• The results confirm the feasibility of deploying the proposed system in real-world e-government environments.