Blockchain technology has evolved through many changes and modifications, such as smart-contracts since its inception in 2008. The popularity of a blockchain system is due to the fact that it offers a significant security advantage over other traditional systems. However, there have been many attacks in various blockchain systems, exploiting different vulnerabilities and bugs, which caused a significant financial loss. Therefore, it is essential to understand how these attacks in blockchain occur, which vulnerabilities they exploit, and what threats they expose. Another concerning issue in this domain is the recent advancement in the quantum computing field, which imposes a significant threat to the security aspects of many existing secure systems, including blockchain, as they would invalidate many widely-used cryptographic algorithms. Thus, it is important to examine how quantum computing will affect these or other new attacks in the future. In this paper, we explore different vulnerabilities in current blockchain systems and analyse the threats that various theoretical and practical attacks in the blockchain expose. We then model those attacks using Petri nets concerning current systems and future quantum computers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.