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

Exploiting Blockchain as an Attack Vector

In this chapter, we will analyze possible misuses of blockchain that lead to potential attacks on data integrity, identity theft, and the spreading of malware by leveraging blockchain features. We will learn how attackers can leverage blockchain to store illicit data and whether or not illicit data may be erased from the blockchain. We'll also discuss controversial topics such as anonymity and identity theft within blockchain and cryptocurrencies. We will also show how blockchain can be leveraged to spread malicious software such as malware.

In particular, in this chapter, we will deal with the following topics:

  • Storing illicit data in the blockchain
  • Preserving anonymity in the blockchain
  • Dealing with identity theft
  • Spreading malware with Blockchain

Let's now begin with the following section, learning how illicit data can be...