Security Services Using Blockchains: A State of the Art Survey

By Tara Salman, Maede Zolanvari, Aiman Erbad, Raj Jain, Mohammed Samaka. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2018

414 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper surveys blockchain-based approaches for several security services. These services include authentication, confidentiality, privacy and access control list, data and resource provenance, and integrity assurance. All these services are critical for the current distributed applications, especially due to the large amount of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. Authentication ensures that the user is who he/she claims to be. Confidentiality guarantees that data cannot be read by unauthorized users. Privacy provides the users the ability to control who can access their data. Provenance allows an efficient tracking of the data and resources along with their ownership and utilization over the network. Integrity helps in verifying that the data has not been modified or altered. These services are currently managed by centralized controllers, for example, a certificate authority. Therefore, the services are prone to attacks on the centralized controller. On the other hand, blockchain is a secured and distributed ledger that can help resolve many of the problems with centralization. The objectives of this paper are to give insights on the use of security services for current applications, to highlight the state of the art techniques that are currently used to provide these services, to describe their challenges, and to discuss how the blockchain technology can resolve these challenges. Further, several blockchain-based approaches providing such security services are compared thoroughly. Challenges associated with using blockchain-based security services are also discussed to spur further research in this area.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cfc8779d875ee8e5574c4aac1f845bf5fb19f444

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security (2021, methodology): “3) ZCASH, zk-SNARK Miers et al. proposed Zerocoin to offer the anonymity of Bitcoin through breaking coins traces [141].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “ledgers can enable distributed massive communication with high security and trustworthiness [20].”
A Survey on Blockchain for Big Data: Approaches, Opportunities, and Future Directions (2020, background): “Blockchain assures better scalability than centralized architectures [113].”
From Industry 4.0 to Agriculture 4.0: Current Status, Enabling Technologies, and Research Challenges (2020, background): “[98] presented a systematic review of blockchain-based security services solutions, including authentication, confidentiality, privacy, and integrity assurance.”
A systematic literature review of blockchain cyber security (2020, positive): “The unique properties of the blockchain technology make its application an attractive idea for many business areas, such as banking [17], logistics [18], the pharmaceutical industry [19], smart contracts [20,21], andmost importantly, in the context of this paper, cyber security [22,23].”
Blockchain Meets Cloud Computing: A Survey (2020, methodology): “System administrator was responsible for access controls instead of objects, such that the approach focused on the conﬁdently rather than integrity [24].”
A Hybrid BlockChain-Based Identity Authentication Scheme for Multi-WSN (2020, background): “Blockchains are divided into three categories: public blockchain, private blockchain, and consortium blockchain [32], [33].”