Purpose Blockchain technology (BCT) is one of the latest disruptive innovations, brought along with-it immense scope of diverse applications contributing towards sustainable development (SD). The consistent increase in the publications reveal that the application of BCT for SD has become popular among researchers and practitioners in past few years, in turn, urged for a systematic literature review (SLR) to get an insight into the research journey travelled so far and setting directions for future research in this area. Therefore, this study aims to identify, map and synthesize the available literature on application of BCT for SD. Design/methodology/approach The automatic and manual search resulted into 1,277 studies from Scopus and Web of Science database. Further applying inclusion and exclusion criterion resulted in bringing out total of 157 studies, which were termed as primary studies. Based on the results of descriptive analysis, conducted through Bibliometric and VOSviewer software, the characteristics of BCT and its key capabilities, contributing towards shaping the recent SD literature, were critically examined. Identified research themes for clustering primary studies were aligned with United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (UNSDG). A mind-map was also prepared on the basis of thematic classification of primary studies. Findings The research themes “business practice and economic sustainability”, “agriculture and food security” and “business practice and environment sustainability” were found to be the focal points of scholarly attention. Synthesis and analysis of primary studies resulted into classification of research gaps under four categories – theoretical foundation, methodological limitation, research themes and technology implementation challenges. The study was concluded by sensitizing and sanitizing the concrete research questions for future research. Research limitations/implications The research findings shall be a roadmap for research scholars, academicians and practitioners to comprehend the present state of knowledge in the domain of “BCT application for SD” and decide upon adopting the future course of action to attain the UNSDGs by the year 2030. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first attempt in its own sense to analyse and synthesize the available literature on “attaining SD through BCT” using SLR approach.

From the beginning of the different approaches for analyzing and assessing the information related risk affecting organization, the two factors deriving risk are the damages or losses incurred to the organization and the probability of occurring of those risk incidents. Many qualitative and quantitative models have been proposed to estimate the above two factors considering the asset centric and software centric approaches. This paper proposes an attack centric framework that considers approaches of an attacker and different characteristics of attack in computing the overall impact of attack which can then be used to effectively calculate the overall loss incurred to the organization in the event of successful attack. This framework cognate with the existing ones and steps forward with a new mathematical approach to estimate the cost of any type of loss incurred to the organization due to the information security breach. Also the framework considers the cost of implementing security as loss in the event of security measure failed in providing appropriate protection against the threats. General TermsRisk assessment framework.

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The concept of having to identify an entity before being allowed to perform any action is quite acceptable, and expected, and required in today's wired world. Password managers, graphical systems, pattern recognition, biometrics have always been found to be incapable of providing robust security in some or the other aspect, in critical authentication systems [24]. In our approach, the user at the time of profile creation is required to enter the password, minimum of 6 characters and a secret numeric PIN of minimum 4 digits. Now during subsequent login attempts, the user will be asked to enter the password as an answer to a random mathematical question displayed in front of him in the form of an image (readable only by human and not by a software entity) [15]. Example; Consider the password: KOREAN and secret pin: 1234, the question would be; your 2nd character of password varies by 1+3rd character of your secret pin. Now instead of the original password, the user will enter the new password as KSREAN. The password can contain any combination of the available 96 characters on the keyboard. Every time only the same character of the password will be changed. The secret pin must contain only digits (to increase security, length can be increased to 10 or more digits). If the user enters the correct password he is authenticated otherwise denied access. This concept has some assumptions that the site locks the account if number of attempts for a particular user name exceeds a predetermined threshold.