A survey on blockchain technology and its security

Abstract

Blockchain is a technology that has desirable features of decentralization, autonomy, integrity, immutability, verification, fault-tolerance, anonymity, auditability, and transparency. In this paper, we first carry out a deeper survey about blockchain technology, especially its history, consensus algorithms' quantitative comparisons, details of cryptography in terms of public key cryptography, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and hash functions used in the blockchain, and the comprehensive list of blockchain applications. Further, the security of blockchain itself is a focus in this paper. In particular, we assess the blockchain security from risk analysis to derive comprehensive blockchain security risk categories, analyze the real attacks and bugs against blockchain, and summarize the recently developed security measures on blockchain. Finally, the challenges and research trends are presented to achieve more scalable and securer blockchain systems for the massive deployments.