Blockchain technology has become almost as famous for incidents involving security breaches as for its innovative potential. We shed light on the prevalence and nature of these incidents through a database structured using the STIX format. Apart from OPSEC-related incidents, we find that the nature of many incidents is specific to blockchain technology. Two categories stand out: smart contracts, and techno-economic protocol incentives. For smart contracts, we propose to use recent advances in software testing to find flaws before deployment. For protocols, we propose the PRESTO framework that allows us to compare different protocols within a five-dimensional framework.
@article{arxiv.1806.04358,
title = {Rethinking Blockchain Security: Position Paper},
author = {Vincent Chia and Pieter Hartel and Qingze Hum and Sebastian Ma and Georgios Piliouras and Daniel Reijsbergen and Mark van Staalduinen and Pawel Szalachowski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04358},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
8 pages, 1 figure, accepted for presentation as a regular paper at IEEE Blockchain 2018 (Halifax, Canada)