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 looked at the security assumptions on which blockchain-based architectures are based, showing the specific vulnerabilities that can be exploited to conduct attacks against decentralized networks. We also covered the preferred targets of attackers who intend to take control of transactions on blockchains, aiming to compromise trust mechanisms. Finally, we analyzed the risks and threats to blockchains posed by quantum computing and discussed the most likely attack scenarios and possible countermeasures.

Our path continues now, on to understanding how blockchains achieve trust decentralization by leveraging P2P networking.