Book Image

Securing Blockchain Networks like Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric

By : Alessandro Parisi
Book Image

Securing Blockchain Networks like Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric

By: Alessandro Parisi

Overview of this book

Blockchain adoption has extended from niche research to everyday usage. However, despite the blockchain revolution, one of the key challenges faced in blockchain development is maintaining security, and this book will demonstrate the techniques for doing this. You’ll start with blockchain basics and explore various blockchain attacks on user wallets, and denial of service and pool mining attacks. Next, you’ll learn cryptography concepts, consensus algorithms in blockchain security, and design principles while understanding and deploying security implementation guidelines. You’ll not only cover architectural considerations, but also work on system and network security and operational configurations for your Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric network. You’ll later implement security at each level of blockchain app development, understanding how to secure various phases of a blockchain app using an example-based approach. You’ll gradually learn to securely implement and develop decentralized apps, and follow deployment best practices. Finally, you’ll explore the architectural components of Hyperledger Fabric, and how they can be configured to build secure private blockchain networks. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned blockchain security concepts and techniques that you can implement in real blockchain production environments.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Blockchain Security Core Concepts
5
Section 2: Architecting Blockchain Security
8
Section 3: Securing Decentralized Apps and Smart Contracts
11
Section 4: Preserving Data Integrity and Privacy

Smart contract attack examples

We will now analyze two of the main smart contract attacks performed on the Ethereum platform: the DAO attack and the Parity attack. Due to the DAO attack, carried out in June 2016, attackers were able to illegally subtract an amount of funds estimated at between 70 and 150 million USD, while with the Parity attack carried out in July 2017, they subtracted an amount of 30 million USD from Parity's multi-signature wallet.

So, let's start our analysis with the DAO attack, which is examined in the following section.

Analyzing the DAO attack

To carry out the DAO attack, the attacker exploited some bugs present in the original version of the splitDAO function, whose Solidity code is shown...