Blockchain Applications in Cybersecurity Solutions

A blockchain is a linked set of records maintained in a decentralized environment. The records in blockchain are publicly available but cryptographically secured. The interesting property exhibited by blockchain is that once some information is recorded, it is infeasible to modify the information. Blockchain is generated as a chain of blocks that contains time-stamped digital documents so that it is infeasible to back date them or tamper the documents. These time-stamped digital documents are stored as a collection of records and grouped as a set of blocks, chronologically linked in order of time. A new block is created and appended to the existing blockchain, whenever there is a need for updating the blockchain. Every block in the blockchain comprises of a hash of the preceding block, collections of records of its own, and the hashed value records known as merkle tree. The information inside the blocks varies depending on the nature of blockchain. For example, when the nature of blockchain is bitcoin, they are supposed to store the details about a transaction viz., sender, receiver and amount of coins where as blockchain used for medical records stores the complete health history of a patient over time. Since blockchain is stored in a distributed way, efficient hashing techniques are used to ensure the integrity and robustness of blockchain. This chapter describes the nuances of blockchain technology along with the protocol stack and the most common consensus mechanisms. Furthermore, recent advances, challenges and future trends of blockchain are discussed.

Blockchain technology provides unprecedented security to sensitive data to both businesses and individuals; it has become one of the most famous methods for securing data through a decentralized system. Cybercrime is a serious threat to enterprises as hackers are devising new techniques and implementing them to execute cybercrime. Blockchain technology has the potential to give higher security, which has no limit to keeping important and sensitive information and records. Blockchain is the technology that could go a long way in fighting this and keeping digital information safe and secured. Blockchain technology strengthens cyber security for different areas of industries and plays a vital role in making data more secure with its decentralized technology. Through this chapter, the authors will get to know how blockchain technology helps in providing cyber security to the different sectors of industries with its advantages and disadvantages of blockchain. The author also explores the role of blockchain in cybersecurity and the future benefits of blockchain technology to strengthen cybersecurity.

A blockchain is a decentralized record that is used to securely transfer digital currencies, make agreements, and trade. Everyone in the system goes to the most recent duplicate of the encoded record in order to authorize another transaction. A blockchain record is a collection of all prior bitcoin exchanges. Fundamentally, it is a suitable database that keeps up with a continually developing, highly organized information structure of blocks that hold a large number of individual transactions. Blockchain innovation has seen adoption in a variety of organizations, most notably in the use of digital currency. Regardless, innovation is useful in cyberspace. This chapter examined a few application cases of Blockchain in the cybersecurity industry. A majority of specialists are working on the acceptance of blockchain to safeguard IoT (Internet of Things) devices, systems, and information. The chapter has examined the methods proposed by previous analysts through which blockchain can carry the expense of security. Finally, the chapter has proposed the future of a single blockchain for building cyber security applications for coordination and consistency among security arrangements.

In blockchain technology, cybercriminals exploit new attack surfaces for non-legitimate persons who wish a dissemination of fake information, encourage cyber attacks, unethical behavior, etc. Attacks are believed to be attributed to the blockchain cryptographic architecture, the bottom-line architecture, and the substance in which they are applied. The main threat is focused on the progressive defense research activity. It is currently believed that other attacks on the blockchain can be launched without being able to withstand traditional defenses, a few of which may be used to deliver any other attack. By delineating these attacks and examining their countermeasures, it highlights the direction of new research that should be persisted for safer and more competent use of blockchain. In spite of vulnerabilities and attacks, this technology offers key features like hashing, immutability and digital signature, which enrich the blockchain. Researchers also contributed to developing a security shield for blockchain by using an intelligent combination of these features. Basically, these features are required to achieve CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Authentication). The contribution of this chapter would be systematically investigating the attack surface of Blockchain technology. The attack surface is the sum of all conceivable security risk exposures. It is also the total of all known and undiscovered threats, possible vulnerabilities, and controls, including all resources. To do this, we set attack vitality on the attack surface to a variety of attacks. 

Blockchain technology offers a data format that has built-in security. It is built on cryptography, decentralization, and consensus concepts to ensure transaction confidence. Decentralization is enabled by blockchain technology, which allows members to participate in a dispersed network. No single user can alter the transaction, as all transactions are transparent and visible to all other users on the network. However, there are some significant security differences between blockchain and other systems. Nowadays, there are so many potential attacks found on the blockchain. The contribution of this chapter would be to match the effective defence taken by blockchain technology or a patch for related vulnerabilities offered by researchers to reduce the impact of these attacks. To keep the network secure and resilient, an overview of these security solutions for various vulnerabilities and attacks helps to reduce the attack surface in the blockchain

Personal healthcare has become the most important part of present human life due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The awareness of one’s health is made easily available by adopting IoT wearable devices like Fitbit, smart watches, oximeters, etc. All these devices store sensitive information like a heartbeat, BP, distance traveled, calories burnt, stress levels, location details, etc., and are stored in third-party data servers. These servers are vulnerable to illegitimate users and also have a single point of failure. The personal data of the individuals should be protected along with its integrity. At the same time, the data stored in the servers should be decentralized to overcome the problem of a single point of attack. The objective of this article is to provide a framework that uses SHA-56 for generating the hash code and Blockchain technology to store the data. Thus, providing privacy, security, and integrity for the data.

While accessing data through the Internet of Things (IoT), privacy and safety are the most important features. IoT developers have a challenging job of securing and protecting the data of the users during the development process due to the complicated nature of decentralisation and heterogeneity of the environment present in IoT. There are several access control models for the IoT available in the literature which rely on centralized architecture and raises security concerns because IoT devices can spontaneously and dynamically interact with one another. The need for secure and distributed access control architecture to overcome the single point of failure problem of a centralized entity becomes a big challenge when coupled with scalability and lightweight features. It is possible to achieve this through the use of Blockchain technology, which has recently been used to provide access control services. IoT device management would be used to manage distribution, heterogeneity, scalability, the ability to tolerate failure, security and privacy aspects of IoT devices at scale in the near future as it is useful.

A blockchain is a data structure in which each block is linked to the next in a time-stamped chronological manner. Each block is cryptographically linked to the others. This is a global distributed ledger that contains an immutable public record of financial transactions. Every new record will be reviewed across the distributed network before being saved in a block. All information is verifiable and auditable once it is deposited on the ledger, but it cannot be edited. It will be an underestimation to say that Blockchain Technology is one of the most inventions of this 21st century. More people are considering that the decentralization and translucence that comes along with blockchain technology have the prospective to jiggle multiple industries to its very staple. This article reconnoiters different blockchain applications and their deployment approaches. In other facets, Multichain is a platform for the creation and distribution of private blockchains, either within or between organizations. Likewise, there are many more blockchain applications than just cryptocurrency, and they can unsettle way more sectors than just the finance sector. We intentionally avoided showing the Blockchain’s impact on the banking sector to keep the list as non-fintech as possible. Smart contracts are well customary as the greatest enabling technology for blockchains. With them, a blockchain ecosystem becomes self-governing, open, consent, and credible. It is through a compilation of smart contracts that blockchains can operate without human intervention. The smart contracts are established to deploy at the predefined blockchain nodes. They can be entreated by the call-backs either from the blockchain system, the other smart contracts, or the participants’ information systems. Usually, blockchain operations and application-related rules can be predetermined as smart contracts. The use cases and their real-world functions differ, but the benefits derived from using the technology remain unchanged: immutability, transparency, redundancy, and security. 

While cloud computing is gaining widespread adoption these days, some challenges are emerging around the security, performance, and reliability of centralized cloud resources. Decentralized services are introduced as an effective way to overcome the limitations of cloud services. Blockchain technology, with its associated decentralization, is used to develop decentralized application platforms. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is built on top of a distributed system consisting of a group of nodes that shares the data and takes advantage of blockchain to permanently store the data. The IPFS is very useful in transferring remote data. This work focuses on applying blockchain technology to the IPFS to improve its security and performance. It illustrates different types of blockchain and their advantages and challenges; it also describes the proposed design and its detailed implementation. For performance evaluation, we show the performance gains, analyze security enhancements, and discuss the tradeoffs between security and performance. The presented work is significant towards more secure, efficient web applications utilizing emerging blockchain technologies.