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

Understanding transaction security

Ensuring the security of online transactions has always been a problem for web applications. The traditional solutions adopted by e-commerce sites, as well as by remote banking sites, use the encryption of communications (for example, through the SSL/HTTPS protocol) established by users previously identified by personal authentication credentials. Encryption prevents the possibility of sensitive information (such as credit card numbers) relating to transactions being exposed to prying eyes but does not prevent the possibility of sensitive information leakage due to data breaches affecting the servers.

By leveraging these data breaches, it is possible for an attacker to exploit the user's sensitive data to conduct unauthorized transactions, in place of the unsuspecting user (identity theft). In the case of blockchain, by definition, transactions...