A Survey on the Security of Blockchain Systems

By Xiaoqi Li, Peng Jiang, Ting Chen, Xiapu Luo, Qiaoyan Wen. Future generations computer systems, 2017

1,606 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since its inception, the blockchain technology has shown promising application prospects. From the initial cryptocurrency to the current smart contract, blockchain has been applied to many fields. Although there are some studies on the security and privacy issues of blockchain, there lacks a systematic examination on the security of blockchain systems. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on the security threats to blockchain and survey the corresponding real attacks by examining popular blockchain systems. We also review the security enhancement solutions for blockchain, which could be used in the development of various blockchain systems, and suggest some future directions to stir research efforts into this area.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca4c0ab7304ebbbb052887332d80dbe673ed4b7c

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security (2021, background): “Li et al. [15] proposed a Blockchain-based data sharing system, called MeDShare, for cloud service providers consisting of user layer, data query layer, data structuring provenance layer, and existing database infrastructure layer.”
Blockchain Meets Cloud Computing: A Survey (2020, result): “…has rarely addressed by prior survey studies, even though some recent studies surveyed blockchain techniques in different perspectives, e.g., digital currencies [20]–[22], security [23], [24], privacy [21], [25], edge-integration [26], IoT-integration [27], [28], and smart city-integration [29].”
IoT security: Review, blockchain solutions, and open challenges (2017, background): “Despite providing robust approaches for securing IoT, the blockchain systems are also vulnerable [136].”
The state of play of blockchain technology in the financial services sector: A systematic literature review (2020, background): “Other reviews focus on security issues of the blockchain (Khan & Salah, 2017; Li et al., 2017; Meng et al., 2018) and on its potential to enable trust and decentralization in service systems (Seebacher et al.”
Applying blockchain technology to improve agri-food traceability: A review of development methods, benefits and challenges (2020, background): “The solution to address the food safety and quality concerns is to improve traceability transparency, security, durability, and integrity (Feng et al., 2019; Tsang et al., 2018; Helo& Hao, 2019; Banerjee et al., 2018; Li et al., 2017).”
Blockchain Adoption for Combating Deceptive Counterfeits (2018, background): “Another recent study has indicated that hackers can infer the actual transaction inputs with 80% accuracy because the sampling method in blockchain is not truly random (Li et al. 2017).”
Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, background): “Meanwhile, blockchain systems also have their own security vulnerabilities such as program defects of smart contracts [20].”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [7]), scalability and response times [8], security threats [9], or privacy”
Everything You Wanted to Know About the Blockchain: Its Promise, Components, Processes, and Problems (2018, background): “The main blockchain characteristics are depicted in Figure 1 [6], [7].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “Seriously, adversaries can exploit this vulnerability to perform attacks, for example, they can modify the ordering of transactions, hamper normal mining operations or initiate double-spending attack, all of which can degrade the blockchain network [296].”
Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends (2019, background): “As we have already discussed, an adversary can manipulate the timestamp for profit [44].”
A Survey on Ethereum Systems Security (2019, background): “, controlling 51% hashrate for PoW) can formulate a new main chain at will [133, 164].”
Blockchain Practices, Potentials, and Perspectives in Greening Supply Chains (2018, background): “There are current concerns with the use of blockchain crowdsourcing-related malicious agents in all areas of blockchain processing and activities (see [31]).”