The application of blockchain technology to covert communication can improve the quality of communication due to its characteristics such as decentralization and anonymity. However, blockchain covert communication has problems such as uncontrollable security levels and low information transmission efficiency.
To solve the problems, a research team led by Lejun ZHANG published their new research on 15 Feb 2025 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature.
The team proposed a controlled security level covert communication scheme based on Bitcoin address confusion ciphertexts (CSLCCB). This scheme can not only flexibly set the security level of information in covert transmission, but also improve the efficiency of information transmission. The scheme confuses the ciphertext by sharing the PreKey off-chain and the address set generated up-chain. The sender controls the number of Output addresses in the transaction by setting the security level factor to control the degree of ciphertext confusion, which flexibly controls the security level of information transmission. The confused ciphertext and the corresponding index set are integrated and encrypted to fill the stored fields of the transaction for transmission, which improves the efficiency of information transmission. This paper shows that the scheme not only can effectively control the security level of covert communication, but also has high information transmission efficiency through experimental analysis and theoretical proof.
In the research, they propose a blockchain-oriented scheme of controlled security level covert communication based on Bitcoin address confusion ciphertext, which alleviates the problems of blockchain covert communication such as low information transmission efficiency and uncontrollable security level. The scheme confuses the ciphertext by off-chain sharing of the PreKey and up-chain generation of the address set. The sender controls the number of Output addresses in the transaction by setting the security level factor to control the degree of ciphertext confusion, which flexibly controls the security level of information transmission. The confused ciphertext and the corresponding index set are integrated and encrypted and populated onto the stored fields of the transaction for transmission, improving the efficiency of information transmission. The experimental results show that the information transmission efficiency of the scheme in this paper is effectively improved and the security level of information transmission can be flexibly controlled in comparison with several schemes that already exist.
DOI: 10.1007/s11704-024-2775-2