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

Blockchain network topology

Now, let's look at the networking features of the blockchain.

The following diagram is a typical example of the centralized network topology, in which there is a central node that acts as a hub for sharing information with the other nodes:

You can check out the image in the following link, https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NetworkCentral.svg. The advantages of the centralized network can be summarized by the fact that there is only one central authority (server) that acts as an arbitrator. This manages the requests coming from the remaining nodes of the network (clients).

However, the fundamental limit of centralized networks is the fact that the central node represents a single point of failure for the entire network (which can, therefore, be the target of Denial of Service attacks, for example). If the central node is compromised, all...