A Survey of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Applied Domains, Platforms, and Security Threats

Abstract

Blockchain technology is at the peak of hype and contemporary research area across the world. It is a distributed ledger that keeps records of transactions with verifiable and immutable structures and continuously grows with the new block of transactions. Blockchain provides better transparency, enhanced security and privacy, and true traceability over the traditional approaches. Due to its advanced and secure features, it is being used in various fields such as trade finance, digital transactions, the Internet of Things (IoT), the healthcare industry, and energy sector. Blockchain technology has a great impact in all its applied fields with the prominent features of privacy and reliability of data and transactions. This survey intends to present the architecture of blockchain, its potential applications, and practices in different domains other than cryptocurrency along with the platform of blockchain. This paper will explore some potential benefits of blockchain and some future directions and open challenges that are expected to come in future research.

Blockchain-based privacy and security model for transactional data in large private networks

“…Recent blockchain-based approaches that protect privacy include 4 , 22 , 23 . Blockchain, a peer-to-peer crypto link, can be used to safeguard data transfers or network nodes 10 . Peers from distant networks serve as nodes and can help in solving a hash-based puzzle challenge to assure transaction integrity.…”

“…Since all blocks are updated simultaneously, every peer has a copy of the same ledger 36 , 37 . Proof of work (PoW) and proof of stake (PoS) are used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively, to verify transactions and produce new blocks 10 . PoW depends on processing power to solve the puzzle challenge, whereas PoS employs a deterministic method that sometimes loses blocks 38 .…”

“…Given the novel proof of authority (PoA) consensus algorithm introduced by Ethereum to handle 51% attack vulnerabilities, several alternatives were proposed to combine blockchain technology with one or more of the previously mentioned privacy-preserving strategies to address data privacy issues on large private networks 10 , 38 , 39 . For example, the authors in Ref.…”

“…To sum up, current IoT systems are susceptible to issues related to data integrity and privacy, manipulation, node impersonation, and unauthorized data access during interactions, among others 8 , 9 . In this context, blockchain technology, in conjunction with digital certificates and integer factorization-based public key infrastructure (PKI) such as the RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) algorithm, could facilitate the development of IoT communications that protect user data privacy and mitigate other identified security concerns 10 , 11 .…”

“…Scalability and single point of failure Timestamping, anonymity, trust, and dependability are a few of the IoT security concerns that the use of digital certificates and PKI in an Ethereum blockchain network could help resolve 8 – 10 , 12 . In addition, it can offer IoT nodes a simple framework for transmitting data in a reliable, consistent, and contractually guaranteed way.…”