A Survey of Blockchain Security Issues and Challenges
TL;DR: Although the feature of blockchain technologies may bring us more reliable and convenient services, the security issues and challenges behind this innovative technique is also an important topic that the authors need to concern.
Abstract: Blockchain technologies is one of the most popular issue in recent years, it has already changed people's lifestyle in some area due to its great influence on many business or industry, and what it can do will still continue cause impact in many places Although the feature of blockchain technologies may bring us more reliable and convenient services, the security issues and challenges behind this innovative technique is also an important topic that we need to concern
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TL;DR: A comprehensive classification of blockchain-enabled applications across diverse sectors such as supply chain, business, healthcare, IoT, privacy, and data management is presented, and key themes, trends and emerging areas for research are established.
1,310 citations
Cites background from "A Survey of Blockchain Security Iss..."
...For instance, the distributed wireless sensor networks, which despite their drawbacks (Pietro et al., 2014; Lin et al., 2017) are one of the pillars of technological and human evolution, demonstrate that blockchain architecture may enhance IoT by minimising its deficiencies and maximising its potential (Kshetri, 2017; Liao et al....
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TL;DR: A comprehensive survey on the literature involving blockchain technology applied to smart cities, from the perspectives of smart citizen, smart healthcare, smart grid, smart transportation, supply chain management, and others is provided.
Abstract: In recent years, the rapid urbanization of world’s population causes many economic, social, and environmental problems, which affect people’s living conditions and quality of life significantly. The concept of “smart city” brings opportunities to solve these urban problems. The objectives of smart cities are to make the best use of public resources, provide high-quality services to the citizens, and improve the people’s quality of life. Information and communication technology plays an important role in the implementation of smart cities. Blockchain as an emerging technology has many good features, such as trust-free, transparency, pseudonymity, democracy, automation, decentralization, and security. These features of blockchain are helpful to improve smart city services and promote the development of smart cities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the literature involving blockchain technology applied to smart cities. First, the related works and background knowledge are introduced. Then, we review how blockchain technology is applied in the realm of smart cities, from the perspectives of smart citizen, smart healthcare, smart grid, smart transportation, supply chain management, and others. Finally, some challenges and broader perspectives are discussed.
472 citations
TL;DR: The review reveals that several opportunities are available for utilizing blockchain in various industrial sectors; however, there are still some challenges to be addressed to achieve better utilization of this technology.
Abstract: Blockchain technologies have recently come to the forefront of the research and industrial communities as they bring potential benefits for many industries. This is due to their practical capabilities in solving many issues currently inhibiting further advances in various industrial domains. Securely recording and sharing transactional data, establishing automated and efficient supply chain processes, and enhancing transparency across the whole value chain are some examples of these issues. Blockchain offers an effective way to tackle these issues using distributed, shared, secure, and permissioned transactional ledgers. The employment of blockchain technologies and the possibility of applying them in different situations enables many industrial applications through increased efficiency and security; enhanced traceability and transparency; and reduced costs. In this paper, different industrial application domains where the use of blockchain technologies has been proposed are reviewed. This paper explores the opportunities, benefits, and challenges of incorporating blockchain in different industrial applications. Furthermore, the paper attempts to identify the requirements that support the implementation of blockchain for different industrial applications. The review reveals that several opportunities are available for utilizing blockchain in various industrial sectors; however, there are still some challenges to be addressed to achieve better utilization of this technology.
363 citations
Cites background from "A Survey of Blockchain Security Iss..."
...such as security [79]–[83], consensus protocols and algorithms [84], [101], [108], scalability [89], [103], software engineering issues [92], [93], and current research in the field [88]....
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TL;DR: The findings suggest that blockchain technology together with advanced information and communication technology and internet of things have been adopted for the improvement of agri-food value chain management in four main aspects: traceability, information security, manufacturing and sustainable water management.
348 citations
TL;DR: A blockchain based multi-WSN authentication scheme for IoT is proposed and the analysis of security and performance shows that the scheme has comprehensive security and better performance.
Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) equipment is usually in a harsh environment, and its security has always been a widely concerned issue. Node identity authentication is an important means to ensure its security. Traditional IoT identity authentication protocols usually rely on trusted third parties. However, many IoT environments do not allow such conditions, and are prone to single point failure. Blockchain technology with decentralization features provides a new solution for distributed IoT system. In this paper, a blockchain based multi-WSN authentication scheme for IoT is proposed. The nodes of IoT are divided into base stations, cluster head nodes and ordinary nodes according to their capability differences, which are formed to a hierarchical network. A blockchain network is constructed among different types of nodes to form a hybrid blockchain model, including local chain and public chain. In this hybrid model, nodes identity mutual authentication in various communication scenarios is realized, ordinary node identity authentication operation is accomplished by local blockchain, and cluster head node identity authentication are realized in public blockchain. The analysis of security and performance shows that the scheme has comprehensive security and better performance.
328 citations
References
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22 May 2016
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present Hawk, a decentralized smart contract system that does not store financial transactions in the clear on the blockchain, thus retaining transactional privacy from the public's view.
Abstract: Emerging smart contract systems over decentralized cryptocurrencies allow mutually distrustful parties to transact safely without trusted third parties. In the event of contractual breaches or aborts, the decentralized blockchain ensures that honest parties obtain commensurate compensation. Existing systems, however, lack transactional privacy. All transactions, including flow of money between pseudonyms and amount transacted, are exposed on the blockchain. We present Hawk, a decentralized smart contract system that does not store financial transactions in the clear on the blockchain, thus retaining transactional privacy from the public's view. A Hawk programmer can write a private smart contract in an intuitive manner without having to implement cryptography, and our compiler automatically generates an efficient cryptographic protocol where contractual parties interact with the blockchain, using cryptographic primitives such as zero-knowledge proofs. To formally define and reason about the security of our protocols, we are the first to formalize the blockchain model of cryptography. The formal modeling is of independent interest. We advocate the community to adopt such a formal model when designing applications atop decentralized blockchains.
1,523 citations
24 Oct 2016
TL;DR: This paper introduces a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains and devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints.
Abstract: Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. This opens the question whether existing security analysis of Bitcoin's PoW applies to other implementations which have been instantiated with different consensus and/or network parameters. In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.
1,258 citations
"A Survey of Blockchain Security Iss..." refers background in this paper
...Due to the very low probability of successful generation, this makes it unpredictable which worker computer in the network will be able to generate the next block [1, 7]....
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26 Apr 2015
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors extract and analyze the core of the Bitcoin protocol and prove two fundamental properties which they call common prefix and chain quality in the static setting where the number of players remains fixed.
Abstract: Bitcoin is the first and most popular decentralized cryptocurrency to date. In this work, we extract and analyze the core of the Bitcoin protocol, which we term the Bitcoin backbone, and prove two of its fundamental properties which we call common prefix and chain quality in the static setting where the number of players remains fixed. Our proofs hinge on appropriate and novel assumptions on the “hashing power” of the adversary relative to network synchronicity; we show our results to be tight under high synchronization.
1,128 citations
24 Oct 2016
TL;DR: ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries, and scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO's theoretical scaling properties.
Abstract: Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and 250 similar alt-coins, embody at their core a blockchain protocol --- a mechanism for a distributed network of computational nodes to periodically agree on a set of new transactions. Designing a secure blockchain protocol relies on an open challenge in security, that of designing a highly-scalable agreement protocol open to manipulation by byzantine or arbitrarily malicious nodes. Bitcoin's blockchain agreement protocol exhibits security, but does not scale: it processes 3--7 transactions per second at present, irrespective of the available computation capacity at hand. In this paper, we propose a new distributed agreement protocol for permission-less blockchains called ELASTICO. ELASTICO scales transaction rates almost linearly with available computation for mining: the more the computation power in the network, the higher the number of transaction blocks selected per unit time. ELASTICO is efficient in its network messages and tolerates byzantine adversaries of up to one-fourth of the total computational power. Technically, ELASTICO uniformly partitions or parallelizes the mining network (securely) into smaller committees, each of which processes a disjoint set of transactions (or "shards"). While sharding is common in non-byzantine settings, ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries. Our scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO's theoretical scaling properties.
1,036 citations
"A Survey of Blockchain Security Iss..." refers background in this paper
...There still have many use case of blockchain technologies, like protection of Intellectual property, traceability in supply chain, identity certification, insurance, international payments, IOT, patient’s privacy in medical treatment or prediction market [14, 20]....
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01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: Under this hybrid design proof-of-work mainly provides initial minting and is largely non-essential in the long run thus providing an energyefficient and more cost-competitive peer-to-peer crypto-currency.
Abstract: A peer-to-peer crypto-currency design derived from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin. Proof-of-stake replaces proof-of-work to provide most of the network security. Under this hybrid design proof-of-work mainly provides initial minting and is largely non-essential in the long run. Security level of the network is not dependent on energy consumption in the long term thus providing an energyefficient and more cost-competitive peer-to-peer crypto-currency. Proof-of-stake is based on coin age and generated by each node via a hashing scheme bearing similarity to Bitcoin’s but over limited search space. Block chain history and transaction settlement are further protected by a centrally broadcasted checkpoint mechanism.
1,029 citations
"A Survey of Blockchain Security Iss..." refers background in this paper
...With Proof of Stake, the resource that’s compared is the amount of Bitcoin a miner holds - someone holding 1% of the Bitcoin can mine 1% of the “Proof of Stake blocks” [12]....
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