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

Summary

In this chapter, we have analyzed some of the most common vulnerabilities affecting smart contracts. We have understood how the bugs present in the source code can have disastrous consequences on smart contracts, such as the ones experienced with the famous DAO and Parity wallet attacks. Preventing the onset of bugs within source code is, therefore, of fundamental importance. To this end, specialized libraries such as OpenZeppelin can be used in the development phase of smart contracts. Equally important is to conduct a vulnerability analysis using specialized tools such as Mythril and Securify, which help the developer in both the implementation and testing phases of smart contracts.

After having widely analyzed the vulnerabilities of DApps and smart contracts, in the next chapter, we will discover how it is possible to exploit the blockchain as an attack vector.

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