LedgerGuard: Improving Blockchain Ledger Dependability

Abstract

The rise of crypto-currencies has spawned great interest in their underlying technology, namely, Blockchain. The central component in a Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger. A ledger comprises series of blocks, which in turns contains a series of transactions. An identical copy of the ledger is stored on all nodes in a blockchain network. Maintaining ledger integrity and security is one of the crucial design aspects of any blockchain platform. Thus, there are typically built-in validation mechanisms leveraging cryptography to ensure the validity of incoming blocks before committing them into the ledger. However, a blockchain node may run over an extended period of time, during which the blocks on the disk can may become corrupted due to software or hardware failures, or due to malicious activity. This paper proposes LedgerGuard, a tool to maintain ledger integrity by detecting corrupted blocks and recovering these blocks by synchronizing with rest of the network. The experimental implementation of LedgerGuard is based on Hyperledger Fabric, which is a popular open source permissioned blockchain platform.

Detecting Blockchain Security Threats

“…BAD [9] is designed to detect anomalous Bitcoin transactions to prevent transactions with malicious payloads from spreading in the network. LedgerGuard [10] monitors a Hyperledger Fabric peer's ledger and restores corrupted blocks from connected peers if needed. Garcia et al propose Lazarus [11], a solution for diversity management of consensus nodes.…”

A Variable Bulk Arrival and Static Bulk Service Queueing Model for Blockchain

“…An isolated testing has been conducted for demonstration of the purpose on the proposed checkpoint and rollback algorithm on Ethereum open source. ; the real-time chain [13,20,25] has been proposed in order to investigate on an approach how to design and realize a crypto computing (Ethereum blockchain-based [16]) under stringent real-time requirement. In order to evaluate the efficacy of the approach, a new analytical metric has been defined and developed to estimate the dependability, referred to as the blockdependability.…”

“…Blockchain technology [1,2,4,5,7,10,18] is undergoing a tremendous growth choking itself up to its capacity and performance limits and thereby resulting in cost spike [20]. It is exigently sought to address and respond to these issues, being mostly concerned about the scalability [11,12,14,15,16,17,25], dependability of the blockchain system, and privacy issues in systems such as smart grid and IoT [19,26,27,28].…”

Slim Chain and Dependability

“…Blockchain technology is undergoing a breath-taking growth, choking itself up to its capacity and performance limits [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,15,17,18,19,22,24,28], mandating the departure of potentially significant volume of code and data off the chain [33], in order to relieve the blockchain spatially as well as temporally, thereby ultimately addressing and resolving the exigently sought scalability [21,22]. However, as demonstrated in [33], the attempts to relieve the supposed-to-be on-chain volume of data and code to off-chain space are risky potentially affecting on the dependability [8,9,11,12,16,23,25,26,27,28,30,32,33] of the computation in a negative manner unless otherwise countered, even if expectedly offering performance benefits either spatially or temporally, which triggers the proposed research on the slim chain.…”