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

Hyperledger strong identities

Of central importance in the permissioned blockchain model adopted by Hyperledger Fabric is the management of the digital identities of the members of the network. This ensures not only security but trust in transactions between trusted counterparties. In Hyperledger Fabric, the creation, maintenance, and revocation of digital identities is entrusted to a specific component, known as the Membership Service Provider (MSP). The MSP component manages digital identities in the form of cryptographically signed certificates. In Hyperledger Fabric, there is a default MSP, known as Fabric CA, which has the task of issuing certificates in X.509 format to be associated with members authorized to participate in the network.

But before we find out about the details of identity management, we need to focus on how to carefully design our network of trusted counterparts...